COLUMN ONE : Wishing for a War Without Blood : Americans’ low tolerance for casualties causes some to wonder whether the U.S. has the fortitude to undertake a major military operation.

The images are haunting still: the twisted wrecks of helicopter gunships shot down in the Oct. 3, 1993, firefight that killed 18 U.S. Army Rangers in Somalia; the charred body of an American soldier paraded through the streets of Mogadishu by a chanting crowd.

Vivid even now, they are driving the national debate--leading to today’s scheduled vote in the Senate--over President Clinton’s plan to send 20,000 U.S. ground troops on a potentially hazardous peacekeeping mission in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

“I don’t want to see the . . . corpse[s] of Americans dragged through another city like they did at the war in Mogadishu,” Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.) admonished top Clinton administration policymakers at a recent hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

No less an internationalist than Sen. William S. Cohen (R-Me.) has misgivings.

“When body bags come home, as they’re likely to do,” he warned at the same hearing, there will be “tremendous pressure” to bring the American troops back home, well before their one-year mission is up.

To some policymakers and top military planners, the public’s seemingly low tolerance for U.S. military casualties poses a fundamental question: Do Americans still have the fortitude to undertake a serious military operation, particularly for global peacekeeping?

Senior military leaders have complained privately that public expectations for a “bloodless war” have grown so high that planners feel pressed to avoid riskier military ventures for fear of setting off the kind of backlash that Cohen predicts.

Moreover, they say, America’s adversaries have learned to play on the public’s fear of casualties as a way to hamstring U. S. forces. Americans’ preoccupation with the whereabouts of Air Force Capt. Scott F. O’Grady, downed over Bosnia in June, impeded NATO air strikes there for almost a week before he was rescued.

“The expectations are so high in this regard--it’s so troublesome,” former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Gordon R. Sullivan told Congress recently.

Feeding these expectations is the memory of the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Its low overall casualty rate and footage of precision-guided munitions dropping into Iraqi chimneys heightened the public conviction that modern war could, finally, be almost risk-free.

Military analysts say the heightened concern over casualties to some degree reflects longer-term changes both in American society and in the makeup of the armed forces.

The end of the Cold War has removed the last big, overriding threat that had prompted generations of Americans to accept heavy casualties as a likely consequence of conflict between the superpowers.

And today’s military, more professional and made up entirely of volunteers, is far better educated and better trained than the armed forces in previous generations. Its soldiers regard the military more as a career than as a brief call to battle.

The record suggests that Americans’ distaste for combat casualties in strange corners of the globe is not totally new. The deaths stemming from the 1993 firefight in Somalia, for example, set off an immediate push in Congress to compel the administration to pull U.S. troops out of the country even though the American mission was far from accomplished.

The firefight also sparked a barrage of criticism of the United Nations, for ostensibly ordering the raid. Actually, both the chief U.N. envoy and the commander of U.N. forces in Somalia were Americans, and military experts say it was mainly their mistakes that led to the disaster.

The October 1983 truck bombing of a U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut--which killed 241 U.S. servicemen--prompted then-President Ronald Reagan to bring American troops home immediately, for fear that to delay might spark a public backlash that would force him to order a retreat later.

Here too analysts have placed much of the blame on U.S. leaders: first, for openly aiding the Israelis a few days before the bombing, thus abandoning any claim to evenhanded treatment of the Arabs; and second, for failing to take adequate security precautions at the barracks.

Americans have not always been so reluctant to accept casualties once the battle is finally joined. U.S. commanders in World War II and the Korean War often sent troops into battle with the assumption that large numbers would be killed.

By today’s standards, the American tolls of those wars were spectacular: more than 400,000 killed and 670,000 wounded in World War II; more than 33,000 killed and 100,000 injured in Korea. While the nation grieved for the dead and wounded, it accepted the casualties as part of the cost of war.

All that changed with the Vietnam War in the mid-1960s, when television cameras brought grisly color footage of battlefield deaths--and the return of soldiers and airmen in body bags--into the nation’s living rooms.

Then came the Gulf War--the “mother of all battles,” in Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s memorable phrase.

In an operation involving more than 500,000 U.S. troops pitted against a reasonably well-trained Iraqi army, the total of American deaths resulting from hostile action was 148.

The public grew alarmed early in the war, when photos of U.S. airmen taken prisoner by Iraq stirred some opposition to launching a full-scale ground war. And later, an Iraqi Scud missile fell on a U.S. barracks near Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killing 27 reservists.

But the war was going so well by then that the criticism was muted. In fact, the 235 accidental deaths exceeded those from hostile action.

Although U.S. military leaders have argued that the Gulf War was an aberration resulting from stupid military decisions by the Iraqis and a flat, easy-to-bomb desert terrain, the public seems to have accepted it as the standard for low-casualty wars.

The current U.S. peacekeeping mission in Haiti, where only four American soldiers have died (three from suicide) since their deployment in September 1994, has only reinforced the widespread perception that military operations should be casualty-free.

“We have created an illusion that you can carry out large operations and not suffer casualties,” said Marine Corps Gen. John J. Sheehan, head of the joint U.S. Atlantic Command, which is providing some of the troops for the Bosnia operation.

Most of America’s allies do not share the U.S. preoccupation with potential casualties. In France, for example, the public generally regards soldiers as professionals for whom risks are part of the job.

Unlike Americans, the French do not even publicize the number of their soldiers who are declared to be missing in action. The French public displayed little anger when the two-man crew of a Mirage jet was captured last summer in Bosnia. (The airmen were released Tuesday.)

The American public’s preoccupation with ensuring casualty-free military operations comes at a time when at least some of the factors that once drove political sentiment--that many soldiers were draftees and often inadequately trained--no longer apply.

Unlike the largely conscript Army of the Vietnam era, when young men were forced into battle against their will, today’s fighters are volunteers. They were aware of the risks--or should have been--when they signed up.

And, as virtually all the major social and military indicators agree, today’s armed forces are far better trained and better equipped than any in the nation’s history, able to best almost any potential enemy.

Sociologists who specialize in studying the military cite several factors that may be contributing to the strong public feeling about casualties:

* Today’s families are smaller than those of a generation ago and so parents tend to be more anxious--at least subconsciously--about the prospect of losing a son or daughter and more vocal in protesting when their children are sent into battle.

* The proportion of U.S. military personnel who are married is far higher than it was a few years ago. So more soldiers have families to think about than was the case when the bulk of the fighting force consisted of single men.

* Although everyone in the armed forces today is a volunteer, some appear to have signed up primarily for the job security and training benefits, without giving much thought to the prospect that they someday may be called upon to go into battle.

The classic case came in 1991, when an Army reserve physician refused her assignment to the Gulf War. She claimed she had agreed to become an officer because the Army offered her a scholarship to medical school; she had never expected to be sent into a war zone. She was court-martialed. Other, similar cases turned up in the Gulf War.

David R. Segal, a University of Maryland military sociologist, says public apprehension about the mission to Bosnia may also be fueled by the fact that the biggest danger to U.S. troops seems to come not from regular enemy armies but from paramilitary groups and terrorists.

“A lot of the concern is the ambiguity of the risk,” he says.

Indeed, Segal argues that, apart from the concern about the possibility of casualties from car bombs and sniper bullets, lawmakers may be overreacting to perceptions of public opposition to placing U.S. soldiers at risk. “I’m not sure it’s as much of a problem as policymakers perceive it to be,” he said.

Robert W. Gaskin, a former Pentagon planner, argues that policymakers’ worries about low public tolerance for casualties are based on a misinterpretation of what is really at the root of Americans’ misgivings about sending U.S. troops to Bosnia.

“The American people will accept casualties as long as it is for a cause that they fully understand,” Gaskin said. “The problem with the Balkans deployment is that people don’t identify with Bosnia. They don’t see where it’s in the national interest.”

Public-opinion polls appear to provide some credence to that analysis. A Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll published Friday showed that the proportion of Americans who believe that Congress should refuse to approve the deployment had shrunk to 49%, from 65% in October, before the administration began making its case.

(In fact, Senate approval would be symbolic since the president, as commander in chief, has the power to dispatch troops.)

Administration officials have been trying to face the issue squarely.

Although the officials understandably have refused lawmakers’ demands to make public predictions of how many U.S. casualties the administration expects in Bosnia, Defense Secretary William J. Perry has conceded that some are inevitable, even under the best of circumstances. Military operations are “inherently dangerous,” Perry said.

But analysts say the specter of mounting U.S. casualties still frames the debate and raises the possibility that this administration--and any that follow it--may be unable to pledge the use of U.S. troops for peacekeeping duty if the Bosnia venture backfires.

A recent Time magazine cover showing a youthful soldier with the caption, “Is Bosnia worth dying for?” appeared to strike a chord in Congress, where it was cited--and waved about--by lawmakers.