SU(4)XSU(2)(L) X SU(2)(R) AS A SURROGATE SUSY GUT

We consider a supersymmetric SU(4) x SU(2)L x SU(2)R model broken at 10(16) GeV, and propose natural solutions to the problems of Planck-scale unification and light fermion masses in this model. The resulting model shares many of the successes of conventional SUSY GUTs such as the successful prediction of sin2 theta(omega) and Yukawa unification for the third family, without suffering from the potential problems of Higgs doublet-triplet splitting, the mu-problem, and the incorporation of adjoint representations into a fully unified string model.