Helping All of Us Become All We Can Be : Affirmative action: The armed forces’ success with programs can be duplicated in the private sector.

Affirmative action can be effective, fair and productive, if it is done right. These are President Clinton’s conclusions, and no institution demonstrates his argument better than the U.S. armed forces.

Our military is the best in the world. It is also one of this nation’s most racially diverse institutions: Minorities constitute nearly 15% of active duty officers and more than 30% of noncommissioned officers.

The military is a unique institution. It exists to fight wars, and soldiers are subject to much stricter discipline than are most civilians. Still, some of the keys to its success are highly relevant to other sectors. Here are three lessons we’ve learned:

* You must have the right motivation. The armed forces, like other American institutions, have been subjected to enormous external pressure to enhance opportunities for minorities and women. But external pressure was supplemented by military necessity.

It wasn’t a blinding flash of racial enlightenment that led commanders to desegregate during the Korean War; it was the urgent need to fill in the ranks of decimated front-line units.

During the Vietnam conflict, complaints rose that an overwhelmingly white officer corps was ordering a heavily black rank-and-file into battle. That proved to be both politically troublesome at home and, perhaps more significant, militarily untenable on the battlefield. So, the services set about to make the leaders look more like the led.

The services also had been pressed for years to open more assignments to women. But what produced solid movement during the 1970s was a shortage of male volunteers after conscription ended; we needed women to make up the deficit.

Significantly, the military’s quality has improved as its diversity has increased. When you broaden the recruiting pool--a good affirmative action program will do that--you don’t have to dredge to the bottom of the pool.

This nation’s demographic makeup is changing. In the coming years, the entering labor force will have a higher percentage of minorities and women than ever. Smart employers already have figured out how to recruit from that increasingly diverse talent pool.

* You have to invest in your people. The military spends billions of dollars on education and training. We operate some of the most extensive and intensive unit training in the world; we send people to college to get advanced degrees in everything from Armenian to zoology, and the military is one of the few institutions that teaches leadership.

No private employer can afford the equivalent of professional military education. But the amount invested is less important than the attitude toward the investment. The military sees it as something the institution does for its own benefit. That attitude has an important side-effect: The military sets the standards and takes responsibility for ensuring that everyone meets them. Why? Because people’s lives may depend on it.

Recently, I was lying face-down in the tail section of a KC 135 high above the East China Sea, watching an air refueling operation. One at a time, three F-15 fighters pulled within 30 feet of the tanker’s tail, maneuvered to the boom and stayed there for the 30 seconds needed to take on several thousand pounds of volatile jet fuel. Someone mentioned that one of the F-15 pilots was a woman--the first female fighter pilot assigned to the 18th Wing. Did the guys in the tanker care? No, what they cared about was that she had been trained to fly in close formation at 400 miles per hour, take her gas and peel off.

* You need committed leadership. It helps enormously if there’s a determined driver behind the wheel. For example, during a brief period in the late 1970s, the number of black generals in the Army nearly doubled. In the ‘80s, however, there was virtually no change. The difference lay in who was minding the store.

During the 1980s and early ‘90s, women made up about 10% of the Navy’s new recruits. In 1993, Navy Secretary John Dalton set out to open more assignments to women. Today, women comprise more than 20% of the new recruits.

Leadership also is the key to doing affirmative action right in the private sector. Lawrence Otis Graham, in his book “The Best Companies for Minorities”, describes 90 businesses that aggressively support minority employment and career development. They tend to be highly profitable firms that are in the forefront of commercial or technological change. This is not mere coincidence. Graham makes a good case that “companies which make the best employers for minorities are usually also the most progressive in terms of other business practices”.

Military people make huge sacrifices on behalf of their country. The least we can do is to protect them from discrimination and harassment and give them every opportunity to advance. Affirmative action programs have helped us do that.