Spare parts.

THE DEFENSE BUDGET is in the news again, the burden of the latest series of stories being that it is bloated with several billion dollars of lard, the excision of which would result in no greater loss than a handful of spare parts. The Pentagon has always been a darling whipping boy of the liberal media, but in this instance the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times, and sundry local common-sense dailies have joined the Washington Post and the New York Times in publicizing revelations of outrageous over-pricing of spare parts sold to the Department of Defense (DOD). Typical examples: $435 for a claw hammer, $437 for a 12-foot measuring tape, $17.59 for a 3-inch steel bolt, $1,118.26 for plastic caps for stool legs. It was the plastic caps, sold by Boeing, that touched off the spare-parts imbroglio in the first place.

The public outrage is fully understandable and to a great extent justified. What red-blooded American taxpayer wouldn't explode at the revelation that an entire year of tax withholding had purchsed only 12 hammers? Nevertheless, a few observations are in order, lest all sense of perspective be obscured.

To begin with, if there must be scapegoats, then the right goats should be caught. The media's wrath has focused too much of the Pentagon, too little on the defense contractors who set the prices in the first place. (Conservative cheerleaders for capitalism should recall that the defense industry is perhaps the least competitive--and hence capitalistic--of all private industries.) Secretary of the Navy John Lehman's insistence that certain contractors refund money reaped from exorbitant prices is a step in the right direction. Within the Pentagon, meanwhile, wrath has descended entirely too mercilessly on the underlings who failed to detect the overpricing, despite the military's tradition that authority can be delegated, but never responsibility.

Scapegoats aside, it is important to recognize that the Pengaton is a bureaucracy and always will be, simply because modern warfare necessitates organizing men and materiel on a scale so colossal that only large bureaucracy cna manage the task. Yet any large bureaucracy will suffer from certain inefficiencies in its nether reaches that cannot, literally cannot, be eliminated entirely. Scholars of organizational behavior have argued this for years. To create a system ofcontrols aimed at totally eliminating waste in the Pentagon would mean setting up a parallel bureaucracy tht itself would suffer from debilitating inefficiencies and that would impose such rigidity on the whole structure as to make it more, not less, unwieldy. No amount of furious knifing by Cap Weinberger will ever change this reality. A certain degree of waste at the Pentagon is as inevitable as taxes and death (though less fatal than either).

A second observation is that DOD, sprawling though it is, is far from being the worst bureacuracy in Washington. Indeed, numerous management consultants and businessmen brought in from the outside to analyze its operations have concluded that it is one of the best managed and most strictly run of Cabinet departments. Waste at DOD tends to attract the public's gaze because the Pentagon, far more than any other bureaucracy in town, is engaged in the business of procurement, of actually purchasing millions of items. Most other departments are engaged largely in the business of transferring Peter's money to pay Paul or of issuing regulations to make us a happier people. The only tangible items such agencies generally procure are typewriters, desks, and filing cabinets (the most dangerous weapons known). The potential waste that can be uncovered in their procurement budgets is thus considerably less than in that of the Pentagon. Yet entire bureaus and subdivisions of many agencies engage in activities of such marginal utility to the country that the organizations themselves might rightly be regarded as superflous and over-priced spare parts. Selective indignation, unfortunately, is endemic to the American media, and is the greatest scandal of all. Nest Question, Please Spy satellites are very nice And missiles made the Reds think twice, But how's a guy supposed to duck When doped-up Moslems gun a truck?

W. H. VON DREELE