WITHIN a few weeks of announcing that American soldiers would remain in Bosnia indefinitely, President Clinton set forth a plan to reinforce the U.S. presence overseas, increasing funding by 20 per cent and personnel by even more. The problem for Secretary of Defense William Cohen? The windfall went not to our shrunken, strained, and underfunded military, but to the Peace Corps.

Like many other institutions, the military is a trinitarian structure consisting of mind, body, and soul. Issues of the mind revolve around strategy and doctrine. The body is represented by personnel and materiel. The soul is concerned with those intangible issues of morale, esprit de corps, and culture that have proved so consequential in the history of warfare. As Patton remarked, ``It is not the sharpness of the bayonet but the gleam in the attacker's eye that will break the enemy line.''

Unfortunately, in today's military, the putative attackers have lost much of the gleam in their eye, and their bayonets aren't particularly sharp either. The military is beginning once again to take on the hollow feel it had in the 1970s (yet another instance of retro chic?). It is caught in a downward spiral continuously exacerbated by a national-security strategy that is at once an abstraction and a fabrication, a funding and readiness crisis that steadily eats away at the ability of our forces to carry out missions more challenging than peacekeeping, and a cultural imbroglio over issues of identity, institutional ethos, and sexual integration. Small wonder that few have joined Newt Gingrich in proposing to shift some of the possible budget surplus to the military. Who wants to throw good money after bad?

The U.S. now offers the world a grand strategy that is, in essence, a gigantic bluff. With a force shrunk by some 40 per cent over the past seven years, America promises to lead the defense of five separate regions of the world, be prepared to defeat both Iraq and North Korea handily at almost the same time, and take on most of the peacekeeping and humanitarian relief tasks that arise. The immediate result of the chirpy strategy of ``doing more with less'' is a 300 to 400 per cent increase in the pace of operations. The Army, which conducted 10 ``operational events'' outside of normal training and alliance commitments in the period of 1960 - 91, has conducted 26 since 1991. The Marine Corps undertook 15 ``contingency operations'' between 1982 and 1989 and 62 since the fall of the Berlin wall. Units of all the services meet themselves coming and going in a frenetic drive to carry out the many different tasks of U.S. strategy.

Nonetheless, a bluff is not a bluff until it is called -- the thought with which our strategists comfort themselves. And U.S. strategy rests on the fragile assumption that nothing too serious will happen anytime soon -- at least, not during this Administration. Short-term tactical planning has reached cynical heights. The President's official national-security strategy of ``Engagement and Enlargement'' -- a therapeutic document described as ``pabulum'' by Johns Hopkins University Professor Eliot Cohen -- offers an insight into Clintonian thinking. ``Diplomacy is our first line of defense against threats to national and international security,'' it reads. So much for deterrence. Thus, as in the recent stand-off with Iraq, Madeleine Albright and her black Stetson will be dispatched to bring peace in our time, and the military can be left to the important business of ethnic reconciliation in the Balkans. It is a strategy that assumes the triumph of good intentions whenever the U.S. encounters a potential adversary.

This approach belies some fundamental dicta that four thousand years of strategic history have given us. First, the credibility of a policy of deterrence lies in the ability of the deterring force to visit powerful destruction upon a possible enemy. Second, as Lady Thatcher is always quick to point out, it behooves a great power to prepare for the worst. And third, no great power ever remained so by showing what Jonathan Clarke calls ``an instinct for the capillaries.''

THE continued truculence of Saddam Hussein highlights the precipitous erosion of the U.S. military deterrent. Our Armed Forces could not replicate the Desert Storm force today. They couldn't come even close. In 1998, almost all the active Army's heavy-tank and armored-cavalry units outside of Korea and Bosnia would have to go to the Persian Gulf in order to equal the fighting power of America's VII Corps in 1991. And VII Corps was only one of three American corps engaged in Desert Storm. In October of 1990, before General Norman Schwarzkopf had VII Corps, the best attack plan he could come up with was the infamous ``Hey diddle diddle, straight up the middle'' assault. The additional American forces sent to him in the late fall of 1990 allowed for the unprecedented boldness of the ``left hook'' and proved again the truth of the old Trotskyist expression that quantity has a quality all its own.

The fact is that the United States has not had President Clinton's ``two major regional conflicts'' force since 1991, if then. The President and his strategic advisors (by the way, for the first time this group of top civilian officials and their deputies includes not one who has worn a uniform) aren't worried. Congressman Floyd Spence (R., S.C.), the chairman of the House National Security Committee, recently wrote to the Pentagon asking exactly how a small and strained military might carry out its stated strategy. The then former Deputy Defense Secretary, John White, replied: ``We have an extraordinarily ready force. . . . We took 889 people out of Albania last month without any injuries or any difficulties because the force was ready to do that.''

Obviously, one Albanian evacuation does not a great power make. But Clinton officials have chosen to focus resources on whatever grabs their attention while paying mere lip service to the more consequential tasks of national security. Thus the military runs hither and yon pursuing the crise du jour -- the Army recently announced that it had GIs in a hundred different countries around the globe -- steadily eroding its ability to respond successfully to crises of greater magnitude than Albania's. The ephemeral public support for such tangential operations locks Mr. Clinton's strategists into a vicious circle. In venues such as Haiti and Bosnia, U.S. military engagement is kept at a low cost in lives so as not to excite the kind of public reaction that forced the withdrawal from Somalia. The imperative of caution, however, then ensures that such tepid nation-building exercises will not construct anything lasting. The problem our soldiers' inaction has perpetuated then requires their continued presence. Thus we have prevented a single American life from being taken in combat in Bosnia at the cost of an indefinite commitment (and $8 billion to date).

The eagerness of this Administration to cut personnel and spending while refusing to cut military commitments has left the military intolerably thin. Not only is the force level too small for many missions, but the budget will not support even this inadequate force. Underfunding estimates range from the Congressional Budget Office's $11 billion per year to the $20 billion predicted by several centrist think tanks. Conservatives in Congress have added money to the defense budget for three years running, but much of it has been sunk into strategically useless pork projects.

All the services have suffered from overuse and underfunding in the past three years. The strain on troops and equipment literally wears out the forces, prompting readiness crises, equipment and personnel shortages, curtailed or poorly executed training, a lack of investment in future weapon systems, and severe problems with recruiting, retention, and morale. A sampling of the most recent evidence, amassed in numerous media reports and several congressional investigations, is compelling:

-- Even a Navy reduced by some 180 ships in seven years finds it difficult to recruit and retain enough sailors to operate them. The Navy has missed its retention goals four years running. Some ships are undermanned by as much as 25 per cent, especially in key areas: fire controlmen, electronics technicians, sonar operators, intelligence specialists. Naval officers, especially aviators, have left in record numbers; not enough are staying to staff senior positions in the fleet. A Navy Times story chalked up the exodus to the pace of operations and to officers' being ``discouraged by changes in the culture and by funding and parts shortages.''

-- The Air Force, although cut from 35 tactical wings to 20 in the past seven years, has similar personnel problems. Repeated deployments have prompted a mass departure of pilots from the service. In 1996, 498 trained pilots quit the force. By September 1997, another 626 had walked. Healthy re-enlistment bonuses have not stemmed the tide; the Air Force's director of military personnel announced that the service would be short at least 350 pilots by later this year. Money targeted for investment in new aircraft or spare parts has been raided to pay for current operations, which portends not only the increased use of current aircraft (some are already flying at twice the recommended rate of use) but also the further postponement of replacements. Most important, perhaps, performance ratings at combat-training centers have shown that despite the increased ``seat time'' that pilots get in the many new deployments, combat skills have eroded significantly.

-- The Army too has witnessed a decline in combat skills that service officials scramble madly to put their own spin on. Reduced money for training has forced a scaling back of live-fire training and of unit rotations through the national training center in the California desert. Units that make it to the training center often face manning problems and a shortage of pre-rotation training that make for steadily deteriorating performances. A recent Senate investigation revealed that infantry units reporting for their training rotation often had a 50 per cent shortage; other specialties had even greater shortages. In moves reminiscent of the hollow Army of the 1970s, some battalions have ``zeroed out'' one of three infantry squads in order to man fully the remaining two. A House National Security Committee report found five battalions of infantry undermanned; it also found 134 tank crews and 199 armored-vehicle crews that were undermanned or unqualified.

While at least one high Army officer -- Lt. Gen. Jay Garner -- has publicly admitted that ``we have a creeping hollowness'' in the force, the official line is one of qualified denial. Although the Army requires approximately 520,000 soldiers to staff its force structure, a DoD-mandated cut to a ceiling of 480,000 has prompted no internal reorganization. And future prospects are not good. The Army has just concluded its worst recruiting year since 1979. Only by revising its goals and comprehensively lowering its standards did the Army make its final quota. In doing so, it garnered the ignominious distinction of coming in last among the services on two important measures of recruit quality: the percentage of recruits with a high-school diploma and the average military-aptitude test scores.

The obvious dichotomy between the truth in the field and the story put forth by the brass is itself eroding morale. Some junior officers are told by superiors what to annotate on their readiness reports, regardless of the state of affairs in their unit. One former colleague of mine, commanding an aviation company in Korea, was given the choice of resigning his position or falsifying a readiness report -- a situation with which far too many officers are familiar. Independent military newspapers act almost as confessionals, with anonymous letters attesting to the enforced fabrications in unit-status reports. A gag order issued last August by Louis Finch, the deputy undersecretary of defense for readiness, only reinforced the notion that the truth was being squelched. All this contributes to a deeper hollowness of spirit in today's fragile military.

THE issues that trouble the soul of the military can best be summed up as an institutional identity crisis. Strategically, there is confusion about enemies and missions. Those told to be prepared to give their lives for the common defense find themselves asking against whom, where, and for what. Is it any wonder that a recent survey showed that only one-third of the Army's women and just over half its men believe that the principal mission of the Army is to fight and win in combat? More damning, the same survey found that only 37 per cent of men and one-quarter of women in the Army would ``feel good about going to war with [their] company.''

The military also lacks a social sense of self. The military ethos and culture is continuously pressed to change in order to conform with the mores of present-day society as interpreted by Clinton Administration appointees. Some ground has been won back in this area recently, with the sensible conclusions of the Kassebaum - Baker commission on sexually integrated training and the outrage over the Marine-bashing comments of now former Assistant Secretary of the Army Sara Lister. But these reactions may merely slow the military's march away from common sense. Military leaders and GOP politicians still focus more on having the military capitulate in the gender wars than on preparing for the real ones. The pandering to the feminist lobby is all the more extraordinary given recent public outrage over the softness of sexually integrated boot camp. Don't count on the other services moving toward the Marines Corps' segregated-training model. During stump speeches to troops, a three-star Army general commanding one of America's most powerful combat corps, Lt. Gen. Thomas Schwartz, stated that because there was no serious external threat until 2020, his short-term priorities were improving family support, creating better opportunities for single soldiers, and increasing the proportion of women in his corps from 12 to 17 per cent.

The Army Chief of Staff, meanwhile, recently had the chance to recommend some professional reading in an e-mail message to his officers. Despite all the excellent military history that has been written recently, by Stephen Ambrose and others, what the Chief recommended was Step Forward: Sexual Harassment in the Workplace, What You Need to Know by Susan L. Webb. If the next war is fought on the set of the Oprah Winfrey show, then we are a sure bet to win. It won't be, of course. But that's a contingency that the new military, increasingly hollow in every sense of the word, would prefer to ignore.

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