Analysts See Aspin as Clinton’s Sword and Shield : Military: The defense nominee will be charged with both carrying out the President-elect’s changes and defending against Pentagon backlash.

Those looking in the film archives of political campaigns will never find footage of a helmeted Bill Clinton riding, Michael S. Dukakis-style, in a tank. There is none because Clinton’s advisers assiduously shielded him from images that would draw attention to his political vulnerabilities: He’s a Democratic governor with no military experience and a record of having avoided the draft.

Clinton’s political weakness on military affairs and the wariness with which U.S. military leaders contemplate his presidency say much about why he chose Rep. Les Aspin (D-Wis.), the respected chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, as defense secretary-designate last week, analysts said.

Knowledgeable Clinton advisers say that the President-elect recognized that even being commander in chief of the U.S. armed forces does not mean that he will automatically command the cooperation and respect of American military leaders.

That made Clinton’s choice for defense secretary critical: The Pentagon chief would have to be an effective buffer between Clinton and a military that is fearful and suspicious of the new President’s policy prescriptions and his moral leadership. Aspin, an expert on military matters and a figure well-known to the military’s senior leaders, appeared to fit the bill perfectly.

Like Clinton, Aspin too has a passion for policy. He knows U.S. military programs inside and out and has a commitment to detail that has won him the grudging respect of military leaders, who long had seen the Wisconsin Democrat as a headline-grabbing gadfly.

Clinton saw in Aspin a kindred spirit, committed to change but well-grounded in the nuts-and-bolts of current policy. Clinton aides reasoned that Aspin’s relationship with both would make him an effective envoy from Clinton to the military bureaucracy that the President-elect will soon command.

“The military’s leaders have these misgivings about Clinton, especially when it comes to the decision to use force,” said one knowledgeable transition aide. “But they figure: ‘Hell, if you’ve got to have a Democrat as defense secretary, at least it’s Aspin.’ He should reassure the military bureaucracies and serve notice that if they’re going to have to do things they don’t want to do, at least it’s going to be done in a way that’s mindful of their concerns.”

And the question of how the Clinton Administration gets along with the military will be critical because in a post-Cold War era of declining defense budgets and rising pressure for domestic spending, the new President will seek to do many things that the armed forces will not like.

As Clinton moves to reshape defense priorities, cut the military’s personnel rolls and engineer social changes in the armed forces, such as lifting the prohibition on homosexuals, experts say the President-elect is virtually certain to encounter resistance from military leaders and their friends on Capitol Hill.

And those leaders are powerful. They command almost 2 million military personnel, and their organizations still account for 20% of all federal spending. Moreover, their influence and autonomy have grown markedly in recent years because of organizational changes, successes on the battlefield and the Ronald Reagan and Bush administrations’ practice of granting the military broad latitude in conducting its affairs.

The opposition of respected military leaders can have a corrosive effect on a President’s political fortunes and potentially on the success of U.S. military ventures abroad.

That is where Aspin will come in. His role, experts said, will be to take Clinton’s prescriptions and carry them out in such a way that he buffers Clinton from the anguish and controversy they create, while laying any successes or savings at the President-elect’s feet.

Aspin began quickly. On the day he was named defense secretary-designate, he moved to grasp the reins of one of Clinton’s first and most politically explosive military issues--lifting the ban on homosexuals in the military.

“We need to work it out among ourselves,” Aspin said. “But I think that the word from the top here is to deal with this thing very, very carefully, but to deal with it very, very deliberately. I agree with that policy, and that’s what we’re going to do.”

Dov Zakheim, vice president of BDM Corp. and a former Pentagon official, said: “Aspin reassures the military. That’s why Clinton chose him--as a way of reassuring constituencies. This is a man who knows the Pentagon from the bottom up. The military feels they’ve got someone who understands them.”

In the case of gays in the service, Zakheim said, Aspin “is going to help (military leaders) to come to terms with the changes. They feel now it would be a terrible mistake to spend much time on that, and they need to worry about other things, like how they’re going to finance the military.”

Before Aspin was nominated, transition officials had debated whether a business executive, modeled after President John F. Kennedy’s selection of Robert S. McNamara, should be named defense secretary. Although such a defense chief would have little working knowledge of the Pentagon and the military services, he or she would have a proven management track record, a critical eye for waste and a sharp-eyed focus on results.

Indeed, that is an approach to defense management that Aspin knows well. As a young economist, Aspin served in the McNamara Pentagon in the Office of Systems Analysis--a group of so-called “whiz kids” that McNamara established to ensure that military programs were subject to rigorous civilian scrutiny.

But while Aspin brings that analytical background to the job, he also brings something that none of the business executives under consideration had--a deep understanding of the military services’ often-contentious interests and the arcane logic and technologies of military operations.

As Clinton’s envoy to the military, however, even Aspin will have to do more than just issue orders if the military resists Clinton initiatives. Aspin’s success in coaxing or cajoling military leaders may well determine whether Clinton ever feels the sting of their public rebukes, as many past presidents have.

“The military as an organization is like any other--only more powerful,” said Prof. Barry Posen, an expert in military organization at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “They’re going to protect their interests. They’ve got their codes, their traditions. They don’t like being pushed around.

“None of this is to say that the military won’t salute and march off to war if ordered,” Posen added. “But Clinton may find that the tendency to resist you on everything just goes up. So every time he wants to do something, it just requires more energy and the probabilities of failure, or of half-successes, may go up. This is guerrilla warfare: It’s bureaucratic resistance.”

That resistance can have lasting political consequences for a President, as well. Jimmy Carter learned that when an obscure Army major general, John K. Singlaub--chief of staff of U.S. forces in Korea in 1987--publicly criticized Carter’s proposal to withdraw U.S. troops from the Korean Peninsula, resigning in 1978 to protest other Carter defense policies.

Just a year later, in June, 1979, Gen. Edward L. Rowny, the Joint Chiefs of Staff representative to Carter’s strategic arms talks, resigned because he opposed the second Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty.

Those public disputes, and a grumbling campaign carried on by many other military leaders, helped seal Carter’s image as an anti-defense Democrat and contributed to his vulnerability later when then-GOP opponent Reagan attacked Carter as a candidate who was soft on defense.

Clinton also suffers from widespread fear and suspicion among senior military officers. In private conversation with these men, many concede that they distrust a commander in chief who worked so hard to avoid service in a war in which many of them cut their teeth in the profession of military command.

“If a guy like George Bush wants to order someone into combat,” and Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, doesn’t concur, “it’s a disagreement between gentlemen,” Posen said.

Given that legacy, Larry Lynn, a professor at the University of Chicago, said both President and defense secretary must establish “that the military is dealing with responsible and respectful leadership, and that’s not inconsistent with seeking change.”

“If it’s too adversarial,” added Lynn, an expert on the management of national security issues, “it sets off opposition, and that feeds all around the town. There’s always that potential for the military to seek those allies elsewhere, like on Capitol Hill.”

The military’s powerful Capitol Hill allies have always been a critical court of appeals for disgruntled generals and admirals. In recent years, however, the military has developed another powerful constituency in the American public, which in a Gallup Poll has crowned the U.S. military America’s “most trusted institution” for five of the last six years--above churches, the Supreme Court, public schools and Congress.

Also, under 12 years of Republican administrations, a vast amount of Pentagon power has been given to the military services. The Reagan Administration made it a priority not only to expand levels of funding for the military, but to give the armed forces a measure of autonomy and latitude in conducting their affairs that has been unequaled in modern history.

Citing the “lessons of Vietnam,” Bush and Dick Cheney, his defense secretary, allowed the military’s leaders virtually untrammeled freedom in the planning and the conduct of the Gulf War. After issuing broad guidelines on the war’s objectives, many believe that the Administration’s civilian leaders largely stood aside and allowed military considerations to shape the political landscape of the post-war Persian Gulf.

At the same time, the power and influence of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have been greatly expanded since the passage in 1986 of a historic military reorganization bill. Since October, 1989, the presence in that position of Gen. Colin L. Powell--one of the most visible, popular and respected generals since World War II--has given the military’s voice even greater weight and resonance.

With the end of the Cold War, analysts caution that the military’s influence probably is not as great as it once was.

“But if I were Bill Clinton, I wouldn’t want to test that hypothesis in one big experiment,” Posen said. “We’ve had 45 years of Cold War respect for the American military. If the military stands up and says the combat effectiveness of units has been hurt by Clinton’s policies, who is the American public going to believe? Bill Clinton or Colin Powell, war hero?”