Pentagon Is Scaling Back Its Drug-Fighting Activities : Military: The move is the result of sharp budget cuts, as well as the Administration’s new focus on discouraging domestic narcotics use.

The Pentagon, which entered the war on drugs with fanfare in 1989, is cutting spending and changing its role in fighting narcotics.

The move comes partly because of recent sharp cuts in the military budget and partly because of a high-level Clinton Administration review that has changed the emphasis of federal drug enforcement efforts.

Under the new Clinton plan, the government will be devoting more of its time and resources to discouraging drug use at home rather than attempting to stop drug trafficking from the Caribbean and Latin America.

Lee P. Brown, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, said in a speech earlier this year that relying largely on intercepting drug traffic from foreign sources had proved expensive and not very effective.

Brown said that while some interdiction efforts would continue, including most of those that have been carried on or aided by U.S. military units, “our national goal must be the reduction of the overall demand for drugs in America.”

The Administration has begun aiming more of its drug enforcement efforts at home, with programs designed to decrease the use of narcotics by teen-agers and college students.

As a result, with the approval of Congress, the Pentagon has eliminated 24 of its 170 counter-narcotics programs and cut its spending on anti-drug operations by $273 million--a reduction of nearly one-fourth from the high of $1.2 billion in fiscal 1993.

The military also has begun rechanneling its efforts from trying to stop drug traffickers on the high seas to helping the military and police organizations in such drug-growing countries as Bolivia, Peru and Colombia stamp out drug cartels.

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The changes have drawn some protests, primarily from law enforcement officials in states such as Florida and Texas, who fear that the cutbacks will undermine their ability to stop drugs at the border.

But Brian Sheridan, deputy assistant secretary of defense for drug enforcement, insists that the changes will not affect the military’s ability to help local law enforcement officials.

“We are not backing away--what we are doing is fine-tuning the whole effort,” Sheridan says. “We had a program that was fat, that was unfocused and that had no major goals or objectives. Now, it’s lean and can be more effective again.”

The Pentagon’s appetite for getting involved in the nation’s drug enforcement effort has been constantly changing.

Before 1989, military leaders were strongly opposed to using the armed forces for counter-narcotics missions, contending that it would distract from their war-fighting readiness.

But the George Bush Administration pushed the services into the fray, promoting drug enforcement as a reason to keep a strong military despite the breakup of the Soviet Union. Then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney called drugs “a direct threat” to U.S. sovereignty.

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Today, hit by demands for a U.S. military presence in Bosnia and other global hot spots and pinched by White House and congressional spending cutbacks, the military again has lost its enthusiasm for diverting resources to the drug war.

While insisting that the military will continue some interdiction efforts, Sheridan argues that Americans “need to develop realistic expectations of what the Defense Department is equipped to do.

“Somewhere along the line, people began to think that if the military gets into the act, we will stop the flow of drugs into the United States flatly,” Sheridan says. “That is not going to happen. We can help law enforcement agencies. But demand for drugs is too high.”

Law enforcement officials say privately that the Pentagon’s changes probably will not make much difference, partly because much of what the Defense Department labeled as new programs in the drug war actually were not new.

For example, one federal official points out, the military always had some ground troops conducting training exercises in the Southwest. In 1989, these units were renamed as part of “Joint Task Force Six,” and the exercises were counted as counter-narcotics efforts.

“A lot of this was little more than an accounting effort,” one official says.

Experienced drug enforcement officials say the military’s efforts over the last few years have made a “modest contribution” to the anti-drug war, forcing traffickers to change their routes or send goods by ship. But they have not reduced the total flow of drugs.

They say the military’s most effective contribution has been to provide intelligence about aircraft and ships, as well as communications equipment for other enforcement efforts. “We’re dealing mainly at the margin here,” a drug enforcement officer says.

Pentagon officials insist that most of the 24 programs they have cut were modest--such as a runway sensor device that had proved ineffective in detecting landings or a blimp-based radar-tracking program that could be run less expensively by land.

One of the most controversial cuts involved trimming the drug enforcement budget of the National Guard by $30 million--a move that officials concede most likely will leave fewer helicopters available for eradicating marijuana plants.

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The Administration also took $17 million out of the Defense Mapping Agency’s $25-million budget for making special counter-narcotics maps.

Even so, officials say such efforts have not proved crucial, and the military is pushing to use the money elsewhere. “How many anti-drug maps can you make?” a Defense Department official asks.

Officials also point to new operations that they say will continue or improve the previous drug-tracking efforts at less expense. For example, the Navy has begun using over-the-horizon radar units that can cover the entire Caribbean at a fraction of the cost of patrol ships.

Times staff writer Ronald J. Ostrow contributed to this story.