Defense Misspending - Review of Robert Komer's Maritime Strategy or Coalition Defense?

Broad questions of strategy rarely receive the attention they deserve in the debate over American military policy. Rather, defense issues tend to be dealt with piecemeal, one weapon program or budget item at a time. Should we, or should we not, build new aircraft carriers or the MX missile or pursue ''Star Wars'' technologies? These are the questions that dominate the headlines. Moreover, the defense debate often assumes strategically meaningless forms, as in the yearly clash over how much to spend on defense, which typically divides proponents of more from proponents of less without revealing much about the content and direction of policy. But what does it all add up to? What strategic priorities are implicit in the choices that are made about how to spend America's defense dollars?

Robert W. Komer, in ''Maritime Strategy or Coalition Defense?,'' tries to draw our attention to these broader considerations. Writing with the authority of more than two decades of involvement in America defense policy, including a four-year stint as a senior official in the Pentagon during the Carter Administration, Mr. Komer has produced a provocative short polemic, in the best sense of that word, on the nature of strategy and the relative merits of the strategic alternatives described in the title of this book.

Strategy, Mr. Komer writes, is the art of establishing priorities among strategic aims and allocating defense resources accordingly. As he puts it, ''The essence of real-life strategic decision making is to face up to the hard choices among competing needs in the context of constrained resources.'' Mr. Komer is at pains to remind us of this straightforward notion because of his distress that the Reagan Administration seems never to have learned it. Rather, he believes, it has ''ducked this necessity for choice'' by embracing ''an ambitious all-inclusive global strategy'' that is really little more than ''an amalgam of parochial service views.'' The result is that despite its large increases in defense spending, the Reagan Administration has widened the gap between its far- flung strategy and its inevitably constrained military capabilities. Mr. Komer finds this unsatisfactory, to say the least - ''This strategy is so divorced from real-life budget constraints as to smack of an unconstrained theoretical exercise.''

But what really animates his book is Mr. Komer's grave concern that the Reagan Administration has, more by default than by design, made the wrong choice in deciding in favor of a maritime rather than a coalition strategy. Himself a vigorous advocate of a NATO-oriented coalition strategy that gives highest priority to enhancing the West's capability to resist Soviet conventional attack in Central Europe, Mr. Komer believes that the current Administration has chosen a maritime strategy that emphasizes naval forces and third-world contingencies at the expense of our ability to defend Western Europe. More disconcerting still, the Administration's heavy investment in naval shipbuilding over the past several years will result in a future force posture, balanced in favor of the United States Navy, that will limit the strategic options of this country for years to come.

MR. KOMER pulls no punches in asserting that a maritime strategy is wrong for the United States. His essential reason for rejecting it is simple - Eurasia is the great prize in the Soviet-American competition, and naval power, capable of operating only along the Eurasian periphery, cannot prevent the spread of Soviet power into key regions such as Western Europe or the Middle East. Rather than abandon its coalition strategy, the United States should improve its coalition defense. This approach, he suggests, will enable the United States to capitalize on one of its great advantages in the East-West competition - its rich allies. And it is the most effective and affordable approach to countering Soviet power in the regions that matter most to us.

Even those who disagree with his arguments will find this slim book useful in clarifying the strategic choices confronting the United States and in making explicit the arguments for and against them. Mr. Komer hopes to provoke debate on this subject, and such a debate is certainly most urgently needed. For if Mr. Komer is correct, the Reagan Administration will have spent tens of billions of dollars moving American defense policy in the wrong direction.