DEFENSE : Pentagon Looks to Start High-Tech Revolution in Ways of War : Current means of fighting may soon be history. Even ‘smart’ Gulf War weapons could be outmoded by new techniques.

Remember the 1991 Persian Gulf War? Precision-guided bombs that were able to fly into a tiny chimney? F-117 Stealth fighters that could penetrate Iraqi airspace undetected? A satellite tracking system that helped pinpoint Iraqi positions?

Well, you haven’t seen anything yet. Pentagon planners say that as a result of such flashy new technology, the world may be on the verge of a full-scale revolution in the way the major powers fight their wars--possibly the biggest such advance in war fighting since World War II.

Sparking the revolution is the military’s increasing ability to use computer links, communications systems, satellites and sensors to boost dramatically both the range and the accuracy of conventional weapons such as bombs and missiles.

This means that U.S. troops increasingly will fight from longer distances, not actually moving into a battle zone until after most of the weapons in the area have been destroyed. That should reduce U.S. casualties.

At the Defense Department, five task forces are studying the new ways of warfare. Both the Defense Department and some defense-oriented consulting firms have begun conducting classified war games designed to probe the capabilities of the new technology.

Officials predict that within a few years, the military will begin phasing out its current way of war fighting and replacing it with futuristic techniques that would have been inconceivable even at the start of the Persian Gulf War three and a half years ago.

“We’re just at the beginning of kind of fully exploring and understanding what they really might be,” says Andrew W. Marshall, director of the Defense Department’s Office of Net Assessment, a top-secret Pentagon think tank charged with investigating such questions.

Although Marshall refuses to go into details, the changes now being considered would effectively junk much of today’s war-fighting doctrine and substitute new forms of military tactics based on the improved technology:

* Instead of dispatching huge armies to the battle zone, the Pentagon will deploy its forces at a distance, using long-range, precision-guided missiles that will replace face-to-face combat. Navy warships far out at sea might be called upon to attack enemy tanks ashore.

* Both missile and artillery fire will be targeted by space-based, intelligence-gathering satellites, which would not only track enemy troops and weapons but also direct U.S. firepower beyond the horizon and even assess the damage once the American barrage had ended.

* Staples of today’s armed forces--such as tanks, manned bombers and aircraft carriers--will become obsolete, to be replaced by “super-smart” missiles and high-speed land vehicles. If ground troops are needed, they will be sent on supersonic transport planes.

Moreover, U.S. forces will be able to launch simultaneous sorties against massive numbers of targets all across a theater of operations, melding air, sea and land forces as never before. Soldiers will be kept abreast by direct satellite links.

As a result, Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr., a retired Army lieutenant colonel who worked with Marshall at the Pentagon, says warfare will soon become “a competition between ‘hiders’ and ‘finders.’ ” Any target that can be identified most likely can be destroyed at once.

That means the United States and its competitors will be vying to maintain what Marshall calls “information dominance” by using increasingly sophisticated satellites and sensors to detect and destroy enemy weapons while trying to deny adversaries the ability to do the same.

The four services also will have to work far more in sync with one another than they have in the past, blurring some of the distinctions between air, land and sea forces. Air Force radar planes are already supplying intelligence to other services.

Krepinevich and Marshall liken the current situation in war fighting to the one that existed in the 1930s, just before the outbreak of World War II.

Although the latest military technology--tanks, radios, machine guns and airplanes--were available to all sides then, it was only in 1935, when the Germans put them together into a new kind of high-speed assault known as a “blitzkrieg,” that they became truly effective.

Krepinevich contends that war fighting today is at a similar threshold: The Gulf War showed off the new technology and proved its effectiveness in military operations, but the Defense Department was still using the same doctrine and tactics that it had developed to fight the Soviet Union.

However, he and James A. Blackwell, a strategist for Science Applications International Corp., a defense-oriented think tank, warn that merely having a head start on potential enemies by having invented the technology is not likely to be enough.

Whoever develops tactics designed to employ the technology more effectively will have the edge in future wars, Blackwell predicts. “The key is developing battle-command systems that allow you to determine what an enemy’s critical vulnerabilities are,” he says.

Robert W. Gaskin, another former Pentagon planner, points out that much of the high-technology gadgetry the United States used in the Gulf War--including global positioning system satellite receivers and night-vision goggles--already is widely available.

Technology for building cruise missiles no longer is difficult to obtain. Weapons experts predict it will only be a few more years before North Korea and other potential enemies will develop medium-range ballistic missiles that can threaten the West.

Not everyone is an unabashed booster of the push toward a full-fledged revolution.

Dan Goure, an analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, says reorganizing the military to exploit the new technology may be fine for a battle against the Russians in Europe, but it is of only marginal use in a regional war such as Desert Storm.

Goure argues that the Administration should wait until it has decided clearly what kinds of wars the United States will be fighting before it decides to go ahead. “If you don’t see a big threat on the horizon, maybe you don’t want that much of a revolution,” he says.

The pace of the predicted revolution in war fighting is unpredictable. Marshall’s own efforts still are far from complete. And with a few notable exceptions, the nation’s senior military leadership has seemed lukewarm to the changes.

Michael J. Mazarr, a congressional military expert, points out that the highly touted “bottom-up review” of policy that the Defense Department completed early last year does not even broach the subject. “They are fighting the last war,” he says.

Even more troublesome to proponents of the new technology, the budget squeeze may end up preventing the military from adopting some of the new techniques.

Still, planners for all four services have begun mulling new ways to deploy combat units to take better advantage of the new technology.

And the effort is receiving new attention from two new players--Defense Secretary William J. Perry, who played a major role in developing some of the new technology, and Adm. William Owens, the new vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Even so, the Pentagon’s Marshall and his supporters are far from sanguine. Without the press of an imminent war to fight, Marshall says, “I don’t think there is that much of a vision.”