Perhaps it's time to change the name of America's armed forces. Here are a couple of suggestions: the World's 911 Number, or Uncle Sam's Salvation Army.
This is one way of saying that the Defense Department's role is changing. Its purpose used to be to fight - and win - the nation's wars. Now it looks like a huge relief and foreign-aid agency.Since the Persian Gulf War ended, American troops have rescued Kurds in northern Iraq, helped south Floridians after Hurricane Andrew, broken the famine in Somalia, airdropped supplies to civilians in Bosnia, picked up Haitian refugees at sea and built a tent city for them at Guantanamo Bay.
Even as President Clinton sent soldiers to alleviate Rwanda's suffering, he ordered 1,000 California-based Marines to Washington state to fight forest fires.
What's wrong with all that, one might ask. Isn't it better to feed the hungry and protect the threatened than to shoot people?
Of course it is. But that misses the point. Fighting starvation and sheltering refugees are primarily the duties of a raft of United Nations and private relief or-gan-i-za-tions.
When the job is done by the U.S. military, combat training suffers, readiness is eroded and scarce funds are diverted from defense needs. And Congress, with its preference for pork and entitlements, is unlikely to make up the shortfall.
The United Nations and other countries have devised a sly method for getting the Americans involved. Only you, they say flatteringly, have the airlift (or sealift or expertise) to meet this terrible need. And Good Soldier Sam soldiers on, carrying a disproportionate load.
Some very rich nations - Japan and Germany leap to mind - have developed sophisticated rationales why they can't do their share in handling international crises. And they take unkindly to suggestions that Washington be compensated when the United States does too much.
When Washington participates in a U.N. peacekeeping or relief operation, it pays about one-third of the cost. When it undertakes a U.N.-type mission on its own, as in Rwanda, it picks up the entire bill.
Thus the world is and will be tempted to ring up the U.S. emergency number instead of building an adequate international rescue force of its own.
Also, the aircraft and ships the United States uses to answer calls for relief were built in the Reagan era of growing defense budgets. But the Pentagon budget has been sharply cut the past five years, and the $244 billion for 1995 is truly bare bones.
Signs exist that America's big heart is draining its war-fighting ability. For example, the Army has sent five shiploads of medical supplies, tents and trucks from Thailand, Saipan and Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean, to Rwandan refugee camps.
That equipment had been pre-positioned to supply American troops if war breaks out in Korea, which could happen.