No Room for On-the-Job Training : Defense: A post-Cold War Pentagon needs someone who can truly manage and reform the way it works.

At least one thing that Bobby Ray Inman, President Clinton’s former nominee for the Pentagon, said in his rather bizarre press conference Tuesday is both true and important: Clinton does need a secretary of defense capable of reforming the way the Pentagon does its business--not strategy mind you, or military policy necessarily, but business-business, i.e. the buying of equipment, supplies and all else.

Inman wrongly implied that there was something new about the gap between the money allowed by planned budgets and the costs of the planned forces. (We have had gaps like that every year since 1950.) But he was quite right in stressing that only cost-cutting can save us from even more drastic force-cutting than we have already seen. And there is certainly much room for savings if the 5,000-odd regulations that add a mountain of costly paperwork to every purchase can be replaced by a more businesslike system that allows buyers to buy at the best price. As of now, $300 or more can easily be spent on a $3 hammer, not because of fraud but because of the need to comply with too many laws.

What that means in turn is quite simply that Clinton’s next secretary of defense must be competent enough to manage and even change his department, instead of merely presiding over its customary bureaucratic routines. That sounds like a pretty tame requirement, except that the Clinton Administration is well on its way to proving that the United States can survive without a President or a secretary of state or a national security adviser willing and able to think through and truly supervise foreign policy.

True, one result is that the United States can no longer conduct “crisis-management” for the Bosnias, Somalias and Haitis of the world. Also true, nobody is supervising Clinton’s mid-level appointees in the State Department, so that they do pretty much what they want in less-publicized areas that Congress does not watch closely. Thus, at least in one case (India), our relations are being damaged by a “diversity” appointee of rather eccentric views. Still, no disasters have ensued (touch wood on Korea), if only because in these post-Soviet days, the world is more disordered than dangerous for Americans, at least.

But the Pentagon is different. Haiti and Somalia can drop out of the news all the more easily for being neglected. But the hard reality of the budget gap will not just go away, and neither can it be dismissed as a mere public-relations problem, as the foreign-policy gap was described when a journalist was recently nominated deputy secretary of state for his “media skills.” On the contrary, each day’s delay adds to the excessive bills that are piling up and that must be paid out in declining budgets.

In practice, Clinton needs to find someone for the Pentagon who can actually do the job, i.e. who already knows the Pentagon universe of military forces, industries, strategies and Joint Commands, which are badly in need of tighter civilian control. To nominate a newcomer who would have to learn on the job would leave the Pentagon virtually unmanaged until well into the third year of the Clinton Administration, going by past experience.

The standard complaint is that after 12 years out of office, the Democrats have no suitable nominees with experience. That is not true at all for the Pentagon slot. Harold Brown, perhaps Jimmy Carter’s most successful appointee, may again be willing to serve as secretary of defense. William Perry, the current, much-respected deputy, is a brilliant technologist whose competence is much broader that that. James Woolsey, now the CIA director, has vast experience in defense across the board, as well as proved executive skills. And if bipartisanship is wanted, there is James R. Schlesinger, both strategist and budget expert, who really did cut costs in that job once before (by tough bargaining, not by issuing yet more regulations).

The one thing that Clinton should avoid is another “imaginative” choice suggested, as Inman was, by his foreign-policy advisers. Goodness knows, there is plenty for them to do in their own neglected department.