COLUMN ONE : Military Combat in Job Market : With defense cutbacks, many officers will be forced into retirement. They face the prospect of lower status and less responsibility in the civilian workplace.

Most nights, when many corporate executives his age are home relaxing and having a drink, Air Force Col. Bill Saxe is directing the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Alert Center, culling emergency messages, creating crisis task forces and exercising the judgment that 26 years as a military intelligence officer have honed.

Saxe, who served as America’s air attache to Moscow during the tumultuous years of 1990 and 1991, speaks Russian, Chinese, Korean and German fluently, and knows his way around a risk analysis.

But if the Air Force fails to make him a general by September, a promotion he considers unlikely because of the limited number of available slots, the 51-year-old Saxe will be forced to leave the service. If that happens, he will join nearly 9 million other Americans--10% of them white-collar professionals--who have lost their jobs during the recession that began in mid-1990.

And when he finally finds employment in the private sector, experts say, civilian Saxe almost certainly will have to accept a pay cut and a significant demotion in terms of responsibility.

“Military people have to realize that in today’s job market they may not get a middle-management or upper-management job,” said Doug Carter, director of job placement for the Retired Officers Assn. in Alexandria, Va., a privately funded group.

“They may have to reorient their thinking completely, to accept a job as one of a team, to go into sales, or become a teacher,” Carter adds. “After all their accomplishments, they’ve still got to prove themselves in the private sector. And sometimes they’ve got to start two or three rungs down the ladder.”

In their bid to shrink the armed forces’ personnel rolls by 25% by 1995, to an active-duty force of 1,644,000, the military services expect to force 7,717 officers into early retirement this year alone in a tightened “up-or-out” drive. In addition, 9,060 other officers are expected to be nudged out this year by narrowing promotion prospects and a corporate-style buyout package.

These officers--college-trained, button-down but gung-ho--are facing a grim transition to the civilian economy.

For one thing, they are looking for work in a private sector that is smaller than it used to be, particularly in the areas that officers might look at first. The arms industry, for example, traditionally has been a lucrative haven of second careers for officers. But as Pentagon procurement falls off dramatically, arms makers will suffer more than most.

During the rapid military buildup of the 1980s, defense contractors accounted for more than 40% of the prospective opportunities listed in a nationwide job bank maintained by the Reserve Officers Assn. Now, Carter says, that number is closer to 25%. And as the contraction accelerates, the number of jobs offered by arms manufacturers will decline even further.

Saxe has heard Carter’s warnings about the private-sector economy that awaits him. And unlike many officers, the Air Force intelligence specialist has begun to tailor his expectations accordingly. He says he would like to help manage the effort to provide aid to the Commonwealth of Independent States, but he is not above loading a little cargo along the way.

“You do what needs to be done,” Saxe said with a shrug. “I’ve taken (Secretary of State James A.) Baker’s baggage off an airplane before. I wouldn’t consider it below my pay grade to help out.”

Unfortunately, Carter says, many other officers often have unrealistic expectations about how quickly they will be offered jobs, what kind of salaries they can command and how much responsibility they will be given in their first jobs outside the military.

Well into their 40s, most of these men (the vast majority of today’s retiring senior officers are men) have never read what is considered the bible of career choice--”What Color Is Your Parachute?”--or looked beyond the confines of the somewhat cloistered world of the military services to consider what is available outside.

“They don’t look at the civilian economy,” Carter said. “The average military person is very dedicated and doesn’t think he’ll ever retire. He’ll work until the last day and come in here and ask me: ‘What’s the next step?’ And I say: ‘You’re two to five years too late.’ ”

For many retired military officers, the result of their failure to prepare is disillusionment with the civilian world and several painful years of bumping from job to job. A typical retiring officer, usually 44 to 49 years old, will have three to four jobs in the first dozen years after his departure from the military, Carter said.

Even in the best of economic times, an officer’s transition to civilian life is compounded by a deflating loss of status and responsibility.

That is partly because of the unique nature of military command, which often thrusts young officers into positions of extraordinary responsibility. Maj. Clifton F. White Jr., who retired from the Army last month, remembers that as a newly promoted lieutenant in 1972, his first assignment was as a tank platoon commander. This made him responsible for tens of millions of dollars worth of hardware and the lives of about 25 recruits.

As a 42-year-old major, White ended his military career overseeing supplies for about 100,000 Army reservists, a management job with a yearly operating budget of $23 million and facilities that stretched across half of the nation. Today, he is looking at middle-management jobs in which he would work as one member of a team--not the undisputed leader of a small army of logistics experts.

“For some guys, that’s hard to take,” said White, a student at Carter’s school of hard knocks. “But getting in is what’s important. Once you get in, you’re going to have so much more experience and maturity than people at your level. The sky’s the limit once you’re in.”

Air Force Col. Tom Hughes is bracing for the same kind of job deflation, but hoping for the same quick rise once he gets into a company. As deputy commander of the logistics group at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, Hughes helps manage 2,600 people, oversee the supplies for 38 C-5 transport planes and 600 vehicles and administer an annual supply budget of $15 million.

“My friends say they’re doing captain- and major-level action, officer’s work,” said Hughes, who like Saxe also may be forced into early retirement by the Air Force’s up-or-out policy. “I don’t expect someone to hire me in top management right away. I’m willing to enter wherever I can get in. I’ve always been a survivor, and I’m pretty flexible.”

Because the recession has driven down management salaries and the military buildup of the 1980s has driven up military pay, experts say that officers are unlikely to match their military salary--and its perquisites--in the civilian world. Including housing and food allowances given to service members, a colonel with 22 years in the military--at age 43, for example--makes $80,000 a year. In their early 30s, Army and Air Force captains or Navy lieutenants with 10 years of service already are making $48,000 a year.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 1991, the median annual salaries for managers nationally ranged from $32,000 for public administrators to $41,000 for purchasing managers and those in marketing and public relations. Employment counselors say that while many private firms are eager to hire military officers, they are seldom willing to give them credit for all of their years of experience. And their salary offers reflect that assessment.

“The perception of military officers in the U.S. commercial and private sector is that what these people have done doesn’t count, because they haven’t dealt in prepackaged widgets--that what they’ve done isn’t profit-oriented, manufacturing-oriented, product-oriented,” said Bob McCarthy, president of McCarthy Resource Associates, a management placement firm in Century City, Calif.

For officers with more than 20 years of service, military retirement pay has helped cushion the blow of accepting disappointing salaries in the civilian sector. Following the 20-year mark, a retired officer may collect, depending on his or her rank and time in the service, from $22,000 to $80,000 annually in retirement pay. And the officer will continue to have access to military health services, low-cost commissaries and other perks--such as access to golf courses--that active-duty service members enjoy.

In the last year, hoping to trim the military’s rolls without resorting to layoffs, the Pentagon has extended the idea of retirement pay, at a lower level, to younger officers and enlisted service members. By mid-April, the military services hope that 9,060 officers, virtually all from the Army and Air Force, will have applied to leave the service in exchange for a lump sum or a yearly payment that is determined by rank and years of service.

Traditionally, military retirees are fiercely protective of their retirement benefits, arguing that they are the reward for years of service and not a way for prospective employers to hire them on the cheap.

In recent weeks, however, lawmakers have suggested that military retirees--and younger officers leaving the service with less than 20 years of service--might be a source of labor to fill critical but low-paying jobs in the civilian sector.

Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, early this month unveiled an initiative designed to draw the military’s now-unneeded talent into “critical jobs” in the civilian work force. By offering officers with less than 20 years of service beefed-up buyouts and new training opportunities, Nunn’s plan would aim to draw younger officers into education, health care and law enforcement.

But some champions of the beleaguered officers have another idea--retrain the employers, not the prospective employees. Rather than spend money exclusively to provide service members with transition counseling, McCarthy says, the military should set aside funds to teach companies what military officers can do for them.