DATE: Wednesday, March 12, 1997             TAG: 9703120427

SECTION: FRONT                   PAGE: A5   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY DALE EISMAN, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: WASHINGTON                        LENGTH:   59 lines

PENTAGON'S SYSTEM OF MEASURING READINESS HAS SOME SHORTCOMINGS THE MILITARY'S RATING CONTRADICTS CONCERNS SOME PEOPLE HAVE.

American military forces are as well-trained and prepared to fight as at any time in their history, civilian and uniformed defense officials asserted Tuesday.

But even as they hailed current efforts to keep troops sharp, a series of generals, admirals and an undersecretary of defense told a House subcommittee that the way the Pentagon measures readiness is seriously flawed.

The system ``does not. . . tell us whether a unit has too few - or even too many - resources,'' Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Louis C. Finch told a House subcommittee. Nor does it provide much information about a unit's ability to prepare for battle quickly, or about how the condition of supply lines to the unit affects efforts to get it ready, he said.

The system also doesn't measure the strain that the pace of military operations around the world has put on units that are in demand, Finch said. Army, Marine Corps and Air Force generals at the hearing said troops in such units typically are spending six months or more away from home each year.

Tuesday's three-hour hearing was the third in nine days called by Rep. Herbert H. Bateman, R-Newport News, chairman of the House subcommittee charged with overseeing military readiness.

Bateman and other lawmakers said Pentagon officials need to explain an apparent disconnect between the rosy pictures of readiness produced by the military's assessment system and warnings Congress has been receiving about deteriorating readiness from a variety of military leaders.

The services track readiness, which the Clinton administration has made the military's top priority, through a program called SORTS -- Status of Resources and Training System. Units get ratings from C-1, for those judged able to handle the full range of wartime jobs for which they were designed, to C-5, for those ``not prepared to undertake. . . wartime missions.''

To come up with those ratings, commanders assess troop levels in each unit, as well as the condition of equipment, supplies and training resources. Most of the data is statistical; only in assessing training do unit leaders have leeway to change ratings based on their subjective judgments about how well troops are performing.

``We have been told by a variety of military leaders that some commanders may view the SORTS reports they prepare as scorecards on their capabilities and performance,'' said Mark Gebicke, a General Accounting Office analyst who tracks military readiness. As a result, he suggested, those officers ``are relucant to report degraded readiness.''

Gebicke said the ratings also do not measure joint readiness -- the ability of units to work with their counterparts in the other military services. Current American military planning emphasizes joint training among Army, Navy and Air Force units that once rarely interacted. Gebicke said the Pentagon ``is in the beginning stages'' of developing a better way to assess overall readiness.

Finch had a more upbeat view of the Pentagon's efforts to improve readiness assessments, noting that former Defense Secretary William J. Perry created a Senior Readiness Oversight Council more than two years ago.

He said that group meets monthly to review a range of information about readiness -- beyond that provided by the SORTS reports. KEYWORDS: U.S. MILITARY

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