Heavy losses; the dangerous decline of American defense.

• Author: Gellman, Barton

James Coates, Michael Kilian. Viking, $22.95. It is hard to read any couple of months' clippings on the Pentagon without a lurking sense of unease Here a major weapon scores a pyrotechnical fizzle. There a contractor is indicted. There again the command bureaucracy coughs and stumbles at some especially sensitive point.

Reporters and congressional staffs do a brisk trade in these "horror stories." Most make for one-day headlines, but the best of them--the $435 hammer, the interservice bickering over transport of wounded marines, the stunning incompetence of the Sergeant York gun--wend their way into folklore, told and retold to suit the prejudice of the teller.

For a layman the moral is ambiguous. An impression accumulates that something is seriously wrong-but what?

Coates and Kilian try to tell us, but they have undertaken two incompatible tasks. One is a wide-ranging polemic on everything from procurement to strategic nuclear doctrine, which begins with the thesis that "American defense simply does not work." The other is a walking tour of the military establishment, with 21 brief chapters on the chain of command, the Soviet threat, congressional oversight, industrial contractors, the structure

of American alliances, and so on. Both parts-the polemic and thetextbook-have points in their favor, but the product as a whole is disappointing.

Both long-time writers for The Chicago Tribune, Coates and Kilianmight have done with their book what cannot easily be done on deadline: delve deeply into a problem or craft a narrative to match the complexity of their subject. Instead they labor through what amounts to a 21-part series. In fact, it's worse than that. Most of the chapters cover so broad a canvas ("The Red Menace"' "The Hill," "Friends and Enemies") and do so little new reporting, that they fail to match newspaper work at its best.

The book does come alive in its anecdotes. Chapter one, a 12-page profile of Air Force Colonel Christopher Branch, is a vivid portrayal of the life and social environment of "the high-tech Pentagon breed-the kind of officers who have the most to do with running the military and who have the best hope of becoming generals." Then there is the not-so- funny tale of the time Ronald Reagan's "football officer," the man who carries the nuclear war codes for fighting, was left stranded at the Washington Hilton after the president was shot in 1981, Elswhere we find then-Senator John Tower intervening with the commander...