Panel Urges U.S. Armed Forces Teamwork : Military: Commission dismisses concerns over unneeded duplication among four services. But it does recommend abolishing some civilian posts.

A congressionally chartered blue-ribbon commission set up to ferret out unneeded duplication among the armed forces asserted Wednesday that most of the overlaps exist for good reason and instead urged the Pentagon to do more to force the services to work as a team.

The 11-member Commission on Roles and Missions was established a year ago to look into questions such as why each of the services has its own air component, why the nation has two land armies--the Army and the Marines--and which specific functions should each service perform.

Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee when the panel was formed, expressed hopes at that time that the panel might come up with recommendations for economies that would save billions of dollars. Earlier efforts by the Joint Chiefs of Staff were regarded as weak.

But the panel, composed of retired officers and civilian officials, dismissed concerns about possible duplication as unimportant and said the real question was how well the four services were combining their efforts to make joint military operations more effective.

In a 124-page report, the commission recommended dozens of potentially far-reaching proposals for doing so, from increasing the say of top field commanders in broad-scale Pentagon planning to eliminating scores of high-level civilian political posts and revamping the military reserves.

“Our most important finding is that traditional approaches to roles-and-missions issues are no longer appropriate,” the commission said in a preface to its report. “Today, it is clear that the emphasis must be on molding . . . effective unified military operations.”

However, critics pointed out that many of the steps that the panel recommended are already under way inside the Pentagon, and the commission gave few specifics about how its proposals should be carried out.

Robert W. Gaskin, a former Pentagon planner now with Business Executives for National Security, a defense-monitoring group, called the panel’s report “disappointing” and said it had “failed to build any framework for future war fighting.”

“The sad result is that the commission was simply unable to transcend interservice rivalries,” Gaskin said. “Fundamental reforms have been camouflaged by a fine mist of proposals that fail to address the structural imbalances plaguing the American military.”

Congressional reaction to the report was lukewarm. Nunn and Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.), the current chairman of the Armed Services Committee, issued separate statements that conspicuously avoided commenting on the substance of the report.

They said the Armed Services panel will hold hearings on the proposals later this year.

The Defense Department issued a statement saying it would conduct “an extensive analysis and review” of the panel’s proposals, but it also sidestepped any comment on their contents. Defense Secretary William J. Perry is required to issue a formal response within 90 days.

John P. White, who served as chairman of the panel during its deliberations, has just been named deputy secretary of defense, replacing John M. Deutch, who left to head the CIA.

The panel’s recommendations fell into three broad areas: how to improve joint military operations in which all four services work together; how to streamline the military support system, and how to improve the Pentagon’s effort to provide management and direction.

The report includes these major recommendations:

* Thoroughly restructure the Pentagon’s system for planning and budgeting, conduct a full-scale strategy review every four years and gear budgeting, procurement and personnel decisions to assessments of what each service can contribute to joint operations.

* Turn over many of the military’s support activities--from weapon maintenance and supply distribution to financial activities and management of military housing--to private contractors, who presumably could perform them less expensively than the military.

* Increase the power of the Joint Resources Oversight Council, run by the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to coordinate the services’ long-range plans and to overrule the individual services on questions such as which weapons to buy.

* Give regional commanders in chief, known as CinCs, far greater say in writing doctrine, developing command-and-control systems and deciding what kind of forces and equipment they need to carry out joint-service military operations in world trouble spots.

* Create a special new interservice command with responsibility for training and providing forces and equipment from all four services for joint-service combat operations anywhere.

* Cut back the size of the Army Reserve and National Guard and integrate them more effectively with active-duty forces. The report says the Army has more reserves than are needed to meet current requirements for fighting two major regional wars at once.

* Streamline the Pentagon’s bureaucracy by eliminating most of the assistant secretaries of the Army, Navy and Air Force. Instead, the panel would leave a civilian secretary in charge of each service, with the bulk of the political oversight coming from the secretary of defense.