Candidacy of Iconoclast Sends Military a Message

He’s blasted the military’s top-heavy bureaucracy, enraged the Air Force by appearing to put down air power and, at times, collided with his service’s boss, the Marine commandant.

For this crockery-breaking candor, the Clinton administration soon may give Gen. John J. Sheehan a job usually reserved for calm, conciliatory personalities: chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Sheehan, the imposing 6-foot-2 Marine who now runs the powerful Norfolk, Va.-based Atlantic Command, has clearly caught the attention of reform-minded Defense Secretary William S. Cohen. And aides say President Clinton would like the splash he’d get by replacing retiring Chairman John M. Shalikashvili, an Army general, with a Marine, which would be a first in the post’s half-century history.

But before filling the post later this spring, Cohen and Clinton must first wrestle with a few questions: Is picking a boat rocker the best way to lead the military services toward the change they sorely need? And is Sheehan’s brand of reform the same as theirs?

Whatever the choice, insiders say, it will reveal much about the path the new Defense secretary plans to take--and how far he believes he can go--in his attempt to reshape the Pentagon for a new age.

Sheehan, 56, a Boston native and decorated Vietnam veteran, faces a field of skilled and sophisticated rivals for the job. They are believed to include Air Force Gen. Joseph W. Ralston, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Gen. Ronald R. Fogleman, also of the Air Force.

Yet while others would be tip-toeing in a competition like this, Sheehan hasn’t changed his outspoken ways. To the contrary.

In the past year or so, Sheehan has:

* Annoyed some fellow Marines by arguing that Army units--rather than Marines--should be used on some aircraft carriers.

* Denounced the huge concentration of 150,000 military personnel around Washington, pointing out that there are only 129,000 sailors in the entire Atlantic fleet.

* Decried what he sees as the excess staffing of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

* Declared that the kind of low-cost, casualty-free overseas peacekeeping missions that some lawmakers and average Americans hope for simply “can’t be done.”

Sheehan has stepped on the toes of the chief of his own service, Marine Commandant Gen. Charles Krulak, by calling for a slimming of the corps’ senior ranks just as Krulak was asking for more generals. (Krulak got his way.)

Sheehan has tried the patience of the Air Force and the Navy’s aviators as well. He has proposed that with no rival superpower in sight at the moment, the military should consider skipping the entire next generation of tactical fighters, saving billions of dollars.

And he has riled those who see the Air Force as the preeminent service in the new age of war by arguing that masses of ground troops will continue to be needed to resolve every war.

“Combat in urban areas does not require airplanes,” Sheehan told the Assn. of the U.S. Army last February. “Combat in urban areas . . . requires tough infantrymen.”

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Some Air Force officers were piqued at that speech, perhaps especially so because many in the service are hoping that the chairman’s job will go to an Air Force officer for the first time since Gen. David C. Jones vacated the spot in June 1982.

“If this guy really believes this, he’s not the guy you’d want in the chairman’s job, period,” fumed one retired Air Force officer, who asked to remain unidentified. “He rankled the Air Force quite a bit.”

“Sacred cows make the best hamburger--that’s his view,” said one senior military official who is a Sheehan fan.

Sheehan has “sort of a typical Northeastern kind of personality: He can break the crockery; he can get people excited,” said retired Gen. Carl E. Mundy Jr., the former Marine commandant. Sheehan also has a record of getting things done, Mundy added.

In the Gulf War, Sheehan oversaw the amphibious planning for the 17,000 Marines who landed off Kuwait. He also won favorable notice as the operations officer at the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the successful intervention in Haiti in 1994; he’s still involved with the Haiti deployment in his job at Atlantic Command.

“He’s got the operations experience, he’s got military-diplomatic skills,” said retired Adm. David Jeremiah, the former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

In his current job, which he has held since the fall of 1994, Sheehan has authority over 80% of the U.S. combat forces. When an overseas crisis develops, the Atlantic Command chooses the forces that will go, knits them together and sends them to the scene.

The general, who was traveling and unavailable for an interview Friday, is a graduate of Boston College with a degree in English. He won a Silver Star in Vietnam.

Military experts who want the Pentagon to shake off its old Cold War ways are rooting for Sheehan. But even some admirers say that his understanding of the system’s weaknesses is keener than his notion of how to remedy them.

“He’s a drive-by defense intellectual: He sprays everybody with his keen insights and observations, then he’s gone,” said John Hillen III, a former Army officer now with the Heritage Foundation in Washington. “His thoughts are incomplete.”

Sheehan’s rivals for the job have thought through the Pentagon’s problems as well.

Ralston, a smooth, low-key executive, has in his two years as vice chairman gained familiarity with the job of trying to match the Pentagon’s needs and its dwindling resources. He has been in the middle of the big study now underway to rethink the Pentagon’s post-Cold War mission--which has given him a lot of “face time” with Cohen.

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Ralston’s candidacy says “I know the building,” said Andrew Krepinevich, analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment, a Washington think tank. And some say that Ralston is Shalikashvili’s pick.

Fogleman, the Air Force chief of staff, is seen as an air-power theorist and a man not afraid to challenge orthodoxy. This year, Fogleman has broken with the conventional view that the Pentagon should be prepared to fight two big regional wars nearly at once.

But some people believe Fogleman’s candidacy may have been hurt by the unsolved bombing of an Air Force barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, last June, which killed 19 people. Even though the units were reporting to a regional command, rather than Fogleman, the Air Force chain of command has taken a lot of the heat.

If Sheehan is chosen for the post, it will mark a shift from a low-key style found not only in Shalikashvili but also in predecessors Gen. Colin L. Powell and Adm. William J. Crowe.

One former defense official who knows all the candidates said Cohen’s decision may simply come down to which style he believes will be most effective in navigating the course to reform.

Cohen may decide, this former official said, that in his unusual and somewhat delicate position as the sole Republican in the Clinton Cabinet, he may not want to form a partnership with an iconoclast.

Or, “he could conclude that having Sheehan around here would send the best possible message: We’re going to shake things up.”