Ever-Maligned Bureaucracy Earns a Bunch of War Medals : Civil Service: The Pentagon’s efficiency in bringing off Desert Storm should give a psychic boost to government service.

One of the main heroes in America’s smashing triumph in the Persian Gulf is the bureaucracy--that’s right, the federal government’s most ridiculed and despised component.

What do Desert Shield and Storm have to do with the bureaucracy? Most Americans, after all, associate the bureaucracy with officious, green-eyeshaded clerks who lose government checks or won’t give straight answers over the telephone. But the biggest government bureaucracy of all is the defense Establishment, run by career civil servants who have given their most productive years to public service--exemplified by Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, whose family has a history of government service, and Gen. Colin L. Powell.

The military bureaucracy also includes 1 million civilian employees of the Defense Department. They and their military counterparts transported vast quantities of machinery, weapons, food and troops tens of thousands of miles with barely a hitch, built an air-traffic control system the equivalent of the American civil-aviation system in a handful of months and managed a huge and complex war with efficiency, competence and technical expertise unprecedented in the annals of history. Private enterprise should do so well.

Of course, there are many reasons for the awesome competence and sterling performance of our people in the Gulf. One, with its requisite lessons to be learned, is that we allowed our forces, civilian and military, to do their jobs without daily or hourly interference by political or bureaucratic overseers. We gave them well-defined missions and the means and leeway to carry them out. We didn’t stymie them through micromanagement.

We also were helped by the ethos of the Pentagon, its espirit and sense of mission, despite the beating it has taken from the press and many politicians over the past several years. Desert Storm ought to remind us how important it is to have and maintain such quality in government. However, it is becoming harder and harder, given public cynicism and the diminishment of other rewards, to do so.

If we are fortunate, though, the Desert Storm triumph of the bureaucracy will give a boost to the psychic benefit of public service in general--and get and retain enough solid and dedicated public servants to make possible not only future Desert Storms, but also solid economic growth, safe food, drugs and skies, strong scientific research and development and progress in the wars on drugs, AIDS, cancer and crime.