COLUMN ONE : New Set of Marching Orders : Women in combat. Gay service personnel. An end to the rootlessness. These are some profound shifts America’s armed forces may undergo in the post-Cold War world.

Carly Faye McMullen isn’t even a year old, but the “Persian Gulf baby” already is being groomed to follow her father and her grandfather--both Air Force fighter pilots--into the family business.

Capt. Jack McMullen, Carly’s father, flies F-15 fighters. Her grandfather, retired Lt. Gen. Thomas McMullen, flew F-104s. Jack McMullen says he’d like to see Carly, who has his blue eyes, fly the Air Force’s next-generation fighter plane, the stealthy F-22. Assuming, of course, that those blue eyes have perfect vision.

The presence of women in Air Force cockpits--and in other combat slots--may be among the more visible changes in the future armed forces. But if Carly joins the U.S. military early in the next century, she will likely see many others.

Experts say that in the coming decades, the cyclonic changes that reshaped the world over the past three years will bring about subtle but profound shifts in the U.S. military and its relationship to the rest of American society. To a large extent, the changes are expected to chip away at the wall that traditionally has separated military people and the civilian populace they serve.

The possibilities for change are numerous: Women may receive combat assignments. The Pentagon may abandon its prohibition against gays in the services. Military personnel would face fewer transfers. They and their families can hope to be better integrated into their surrounding communities. The needs of working spouses are likely to be better accommodated. And in many other ways, experts say, military life will look less distinct from civilian life.

Some of these potential changes face stiff resistance from many of the military’s senior leaders. They say that Cold War or not, the unique demands on service members--most notably, that they should fight and die if called upon--can never be relaxed. And maintaining those standards, they add, will always dictate that military life looks different from the work and play of civilians.

But more than a few military leaders see the shifts as inevitable, and welcome them as a way to “build bridges” between civilians and military personnel. Those new relations, in turn, will shore up support for the military in communities across the nation.

“I think, actually, we’ve seen a military that’s been changing in many ways,” said Gen. John Galvin, who retired in June after a 30-year Army career, half spent outside the United States. “Perhaps we’ve been too isolated in our military lives; I don’t think that isolation is good for us. The more we understand and participate in the daily experience of fellow Americans, the better.”

Already, the nation’s military organizations are feeling the rumble as the wall between them and the civilian world starts coming down: With the urgency of the Cold War threat gone, lawmakers on Capitol Hill believe they can begin to reclaim some control over military institutions, which have long been granted leeway in making their own rules.

As a result, lawmakers are moving with new boldness to bring several military policies--including a prohibition against homosexuals and a ban on women in combat--into line with their view of the values of American civilian society.

Erosion of Tradition

Those moves are expected to erode a long tradition of independence for the armed services. As the military faced down a formidable Soviet adversary during the Cold War, the nation’s courts and political bodies granted the armed services the right to establish policies that would foster “good order and discipline” within their ranks.

In many cases, those policies curtailed the constitutional rights of service members and diverged from prevailing trends in the civilian sector--trends, for instance, like greater tolerance of alternative lifestyles. But when service members challenged the military’s policies as being out of step with civilian society, leaders in Congress and the civil courts repeatedly refused to intervene. The military’s paramount mission of war-readiness, they argued, made it essential to give the armed services leeway in making their own rules.

Today, that tolerance has begun to wither, and many experts believe this is only the beginning of a long-term assault on the military’s entrenched separateness and independence. Rep. Dave McCurdy (D-Okla.), one of the House Armed Services Committee’s most influential and moderate members, says a new mood in Congress will bring many of the military’s oldest customs--and many of its most revered notions of “good order and discipline”--under fresh scrutiny.

With the the Cold War gone, McCurdy said, “I think they’re going to have to define what ‘good order and discipline’ mean now.” Congress may be willing to accept some departures from prevailing civilian norms, said McCurdy, “but we’re going to need to examine and justify them” as never before.

Areas of Skepticism

Examples of the civilians’ new skepticism abound.

* The Navy’s Tailhook scandal, which has exposed a gnawing problem of sexual harassment in the military, has prompted a heated response from Congress and the military’s civilian leaders, who insisted the Navy devise an aggressive plan to banish some of the most anachronistic aspects of its culture, including heavy drinking and sexism.

* In one of his first responses to an independent investigation of Tailhook, Navy Secretary Sean O’Keefe recently dismissed the admiral in charge of the Naval Investigative Service--which had bungled an earlier probe--put a civilian in the post and made the position directly responsible to the civilian service secretary. The move is widely seen as a subtle but significant erosion of a longstanding tradition that has kept Navy investigations inside the family of uniformed officers. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney has directed the Pentagon’s civilian inspector general to consider whether the Army and Air Force should make similar changes.

* Pressed by Congress and public opinion in the wake of the Persian Gulf War, the military services have been forced to reassess their prohibition--based both in law and in policy--of women in combat. A presidential commission is studying how far such roles should be open to women and is set to forward its recommendations to the President this month.

* In potentially one of the most sweeping challenges to the military’s notion of “good order and discipline,” a provision moving through Congress would allow service members to sue the government--in this case, for medical malpractice while under the military’s care. The Pentagon considers the provision a fundamental challenge to the integrity of the military’s command structure, since it could open the way to service members suing their commanding officers.

* Even some of the military’s most time-honored standards are being called into question by civilians. The Institute of Medicine--part of a private organization chartered by Congress to advise the federal government--recently called on the Army to reassess its weight limits on soldiers. The institute noted that the Army’s standards--frequently used as the basis for a soldier’s dismissal--appear designed to ensure that soldiers look good in their uniforms, not perform well at their jobs. So the panel of civilian experts argued the weight limits should be scrapped in favor of physical performance tests.

Nomadic Families

Civilian challenges like these may not only open combat cockpits to young Carly McMullen; before her father has finished his career, some experts predict, Capt. McMullen may serve alongside openly homosexual servicemen and women. Indeed, if Bill Clinton wins his bid for the presidency, that move could come as early as next year, since the Democratic candidate has pledged to end the services’ ban on homosexuals.

Other profound changes are expected to come about not through legislation, but as a result of the military services’ response to technological advances, budget cuts and a surge of nationalism worldwide that already has thinned the network of U.S. bases overseas by 38%.

Taken together, these factors may affect the nature of military life more profoundly than all others by reducing one of its most distinctive qualities: the nomadic existence of service personnel and their families. As defense budgets grow smaller, as overseas military bases become fewer and as the striking range of American weapons reaches farther, military personnel and their families are expected to remain in the United States for longer periods and to serve at bases of their own choosing.

That will allow many service personnel for the first time to put down roots and build bridges to the civilian communities in which they live, observed Lt. Gen. William H. Reno, who retired recently as the Army’s deputy chief of staff for personnel. Reno noted that soldiers, who now move virtually every three years, could in the future “literally pull a full career in one base with one excursion out” to a foreign country.

Real Neighbors

Already there is an expression for the new phenomenon: homesteading. The term is used derisively by some military leaders, who put great stock in the rotation system that has moved most senior officers 10 times or more during their careers. But many military families welcome the prospect of homesteading as a reprieve from the moves that have isolated them from their communities.

“It’s hard to think of anything that would change military life more than this. So many aspects of the quality of family life are wrapped up in all the moving that military families do,” said Mary Edwards Wertsch, author of a book titled “Military Brats: Legacies of Childhood Inside the Fortress.”

“Military families just moving in and out of communities are, from a civilian point of view, like shadows on a screen. These people never really come into focus for their civilian neighbors because they’re not a worthwhile investment--they move on too quickly,” she said. “If all that changes, military families are finally going to have to be visible to the people around them, and I think that’s going to be healthier” for both the civilian community and the military families so long isolated from them.

Working Spouses

Many of the military’s leaders also are beginning to recognize that such frequent moves--in which families, furniture and pets crisscross the globe--are a costly extravagance in an era of tighter budgets.

They exact a heavy emotional cost on families, too, and military leaders have begun to see that that toll will translate into higher costs for the Pentagon.

Defense Department surveys indicate that spouses and children have gained a greater voice in a service member’s decision to stay in the armed forces: If families are unhappy with their rootless lives, fewer and fewer service members will stay in, and the cost of training replacements is high.

The military is also likely to succumb to the gradual invasion of other trends that have taken hold in the civilian world, including the growing prevalence of working spouses and of single mothers. And as civilian wives and husbands build firmer bridges to the communities that surround their military posts, experts say they will help close the gap between many Americans and the armed men and women who serve them.

The military’s top brass is bracing for these changes with a mixture of dread and resignation. On the one hand, senior officers are reluctant to part with the customs and standards that have marked their own careers and which continue to serve as beacons of continuity in a storm of change. And many of them remain adamantly opposed to what they consider meddling from the outside.

On the other hand, most military leaders acknowledge that military society can stray only so far from the norms of civilian life before recruits will stay away, service members will leave and lawmakers and the American public will withhold support.

“The military is going to recognize increasingly in the future that it has to remain a part of society in order to continue to keep people and attract new enlistees,” said Mark Eitelberg, a specialist in military manpower issues at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. “The military knows it has to reflect society to stay socially relevant, and in all those respects, it’s going to become more and more like civilian society.”

Gen. Reno, speaking at a conference earlier this year on manpower and recruiting issues for the future, conceded that the tendency of military leaders is to turn inward, to preserve their separateness and focus on their uniqueness. “And I think that,” he added, “would be a tragic mistake.”

But while military professionals admit they must stay apace with some dimensions of the civilian world--for instance, in matters of race relations and job opportunity--there are many others they hope to avoid.

One of those involves ethics and workplace attitudes. Some of the Army’s leaders openly worry that as the armed forces shrink, increased competition for promotions and recognition will corrode the sense of teamwork that they believe separates the military workplace from the civilian one. They fear the armed forces could become a legion of sycophants who would rather do things by the book than use their imaginations and problem-solving skills to engineer better ways to work with less.

“We’re looking to see if there’s going to be a zero-defects mentality as (involuntary dismissal decisions) get tighter,” said one senior Army officer. “Those could result in the kinds of ethical lapses that we saw after Vietnam--lying, covering your ass--as well as an unwillingness to deal creatively with problems or take risks.”

Some service members said the new emphasis on up-or-out movement already has had a chilling effect on initiative and imagination.

“The promotion boards already have begun to weed out out anyone who makes honest mistakes,” said the Army officer. “And if an officer isn’t making honest mistakes, he’s not doing anything.”

But for all of the new intersections between military personnel and their civilian brethren, experts warn that at no time soon will the lives of military and civilian workers become indistinguishable. First, the Pentagon will resist it mightily--and for all of its shrinkage, the armed forces remain a powerful institution with entrenched interests and far-reaching political powers. Second, the central quality of military life--service, and ultimately, self-sacrifice to the nation’s interests--will not change, even with the Cold War’s end.

“The basic, core values of the service remain--duty, honor, country--though the social architecture surrounding it may change,” said Gen. John Michael Loh, commander of the Air Force’s Air Combat Command and one of the military’s most thoughtful leaders. “I still believe in this new environment, the basic reason a person will remain in the Air Force who would be competitive outside will be one based on sacrifice. That has to be, because we’re going to impose demands on our people beyond anything the commercial sector would ever ask.”