Many in Military Angry Over Clinton’s Policies : Armed forces: Senior officers see a lack of clear U.S. goals in Somalia, Haiti--and a tendency to cut and run.

Much of the nation’s military is fuming at the Clinton Administration once again, this time over the performance of the President and his top national security advisers in setting policy on U.S. intervention in Somalia and Haiti.

Senior military officers, particularly in the Army, believe that the Administration has failed to set clear objectives for military operations in those countries and has abandoned its policies too quickly at the first sign of trouble, those familiar with their views say.

“The people I talk to are simply disgusted,” says Robert W. Gaskin, a former Pentagon strategist who keeps in frequent touch with leading military officers. “The sense among many is that (Defense Secretary Les Aspin’s) team is not quite sure of where it’s going or what it’s doing.”

Raoul Alcala, a retired Army colonel with similar contacts, agrees. “The mood in the Pentagon ranges from disappointment to deep dismay,” Alcala says. “People . . . feel there are some significant gaps in experience” in the civilian policy-making team.

The issue is important because a President who does not have the full confidence of top generals and admirals can have more difficulty conducting foreign policy, particularly when it involves the use of military power, which is occurring frequently in the post-Cold War world.

The views of the military leaders also are important because morale is an important factor in how well the armed forces do their job.

Strains between Clinton and the military have existed since he took office, involving everything from suspicion over his Vietnam War-era efforts to avoid the draft to his calls for cutting the military budget more sharply and his push to end a ban on homosexuals.

Although both sides have worked hard to reconcile their differences, the tensions resurfaced after the Oct. 3 firefight in the Somali capital of Mogadishu in which 18 elite U.S. Rangers were killed and 77 wounded. Recriminations have been flying ever since.

So far, senior military leaders have refrained from public comment on the issue. The military culture calls for professionals to swallow whatever orders they receive, carry them out and not grumble openly about their commander in chief.

But top military officials have not been shy about making their discontent known to lawmakers and to groups of retired senior officers, who often serve as channels for such complaints.

Congressional sources say that Marine Corps Gen. Joseph P. Hoar told lawmakers in a secret briefing last week that Pentagon civilian officials dismissed his warnings last summer against pursuing Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid, and later denied his bid for extra weapons.

“They really feel that they’ve been whipsawed,” said another military expert with close Pentagon ties. “There’s a general sense that the political policy-making people don’t have their act together. And that scares the military people more than anything else.”

The military’s criticism turns on two fundamental factors:

First, a complaint that the Administration has not followed the tenet of recent years that it limit itself to determining when military force should be used, then allow the military to decide how to mount the operation.

Second, a perception that Administration policy-makers have effectively “turned around and walked away” whenever their policies backfired, leaving the military embarrassed and holding the bag.

“There’s a lot of talk comparing the current situation to Vietnam,” one officer said.

Part of the latest flare-up centers on the Administration’s recent insistence that it was the United Nations--not the United States--that ordered the manhunt against Aidid and got U.S. forces embroiled in the kinds of search-and-seizure operations that led to the Oct. 3 debacle.

Actually, the Administration itself was instrumental both in crafting the U.N. policy and in approving the involvement of American troops beyond their limited use as a reserve force, which was supposed to have been their mission after the United Nations took over the operation in May.

“First they tell the military to go and do something, and then they tell the public that they never ordered it in the first place” and go seek a truce with Aidid, one well-placed officer said.

Although military leaders cautioned against such operations, he said, they wanted to amass enough troops and equipment in Somalia to accomplish the job. “There’s dismay over the naivete of political leaders thinking these operations have no cost,” he said.

Military officials have also been frustrated over the State Department’s insistence on using U.S. troops to help enforce the July 3 accord on Haiti. Many of them believed from the start that the pact was unenforceable--and they bluntly told the Administration so.

Former Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger, in a recent interview with The Times, said that the military today is “looking very ridiculous” in its recent roles in regional conflicts.

As an example, he said, “if capturing Aidid is not the U.S. mission, then we should come home.” Instead, the Administration “has no real understanding of the military . . . and doesn’t seem to like it.”

The frustrations can be felt at the troop level too.

One Marine said that if military contingents lack clear objectives when they are deployed, morale will wane as the troops begin to question their assignment. “Everything we do should have the right results,” he said.

Not everyone in the military is critical of the Administration.

Navy officials, in particular, appear to be satisfied. Clinton has approved the Navy’s requests to maintain 12 aircraft carriers. And he backed Adm. Frank B. Kelso, the chief of naval operations, in a recent spat with the new secretary of the Navy.

Administration officials from Clinton on down insist that the new team has done relatively well in setting policies on issues that arose during its watch. “It’s only on problems they inherited, such as Somalia, that there has been difficulty,” one official said.

Moreover, many key military leaders appear willing to accept Aspin’s decision to overrule Hoar--both on the hunt for Aidid and on the request for extra armored equipment--as reasonable calls, given the context and the tactical situation at the time.

“They really aren’t annoyed about those things--they know that these issues get raised and revisited all the time,” one well-connected former military officer said. “On this one, he was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t,” another added.

Clinton himself is unapologetic, insisting to reporters that “I’ve had people who were involved in the two previous administrations say that our national security decision-making process was at least as good (as in the two) previous ones, perhaps better.”

Ironically, the President’s apparent change of mind about peacekeeping missions last week may be taking some of the edge off the bitterness in military ranks.

“There’s almost a feeling (among military officers) that maybe we’ve learned a lesson, at a (relatively) small price,” from the Somalia incident, said Harry G. Summers, a retired Army colonel now working as a private military analyst.

But some military officers believe that, no matter how much easier the military is resting now, the Administration still will have an uphill battle in regaining the confidence of the men and women in the armed forces.

“By any standards,” one former officer said, “this ought to serve as a real wake-up call for the President and his top policy-makers.”