The US Military In Germany

January 19, 2004 | Vol. 163 No. 3
Europe
All Ready On The Eastern Front
Will the U.S. military shift from Old Europe to New? The Pentagon ponders bases beyond the Iron Curtain
By ANDREW PURVIS

For 60 years, since the U.S. first Army marched into Nazi Germany in 1944, America's military footprint in Europe has been in the West. Today, more than 117,000 U.S. troops remain ?- the largest noncombat U.S. military presence abroad. But times have changed since Soviet tanks loomed on the eastern side of northern Germany's Fulda Gap. Thirteen years after the end of the cold war, American troops are once again on the move. Thousands of troops based in Germany, Britain and other parts of Western Europe will likely be redeployed over the next few years back to the U.S. Meanwhile, new bases will open up in the former Warsaw Pact countries of Eastern Europe. Some G.I.s may even find themselves in Soviet-era bases that they once defended against. "We're not expecting the Soviet Union to launch a major tank war across the north German plain," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said while visiting Iraq last September. "So we need to adjust our footprint."

Just how that footprint will change has yet to be decided, Pentagon officials say. They denied reports last week that up to 40,000 soldiers and support staff with the First Armored Division and First Infantry Division, both based in Germany, would be pulled stateside by 2006, but acknowledged that at least some elements of those divisions are likely to go home at some point. Other units might go farther east. Rumsfeld's Under Secretary for policy, Douglas Feith, last month led a delegation with his State Department colleague, Under Secretary of State for political affairs Marc Grossman, across Europe and into Romania, Poland, Bulgaria, Turkey and other countries. Officials there have proposed a list of bases that could be used by the Americans. More such visits are expected early this year. Given the economic bounty that an American base represents, talk of a redeployment sent shudders through parts of the "old" Europe and thrills through the "new" Europe in the east.

But those fears and hopes may prove exaggerated. The changes, Pentagon officials say, will begin happening over the next two years and likely will shift heavy armored forces out of Germany. Many Western bases will stay open; others will be consolidated with nato or local forces. In the east, the U.S. is looking to establish less permanent facilities that can be geared up or down depending on requirements ?- which may not prove the economic windfall that politicians there are anticipating. "Things will be happening in 2004," Feith told Time. "Expectations that people are going to see extremely large decisions, extremely quickly, are probably overblown. There aren't going to be any new Ramsteins in Eastern Europe," a reference to the huge airbase in Germany. Large decisions may not be imminent, but they are coming. Rumsfeld, Feith and others continue to argue for faster, leaner, more agile American forces whose purpose, as Feith told reporters in Europe last month, "is to project power into theaters that may be distant from where they are based." That will require a variety of changes on the ground. Of some 500 U.S. military installations in Europe, for example, some 20% are not "terribly useful" and may be shut down, America's top commander in Europe, General James Jones, told reporters last year. Some troops may be redeployed to the U.S., where pressure to keep bases open on home soil is mounting in an election year. Others, particularly those associated with airbases, will be left in place. German officials meeting with their U.S. counterparts were relieved last month to learn that the Ramstein base in the town of Kaiserslautern ("K-Town" to G.I.s), the largest U.S. military community outside the U.S., will remain open. Ditto, probably, for bases at Spangdahlem and at Morón, Spain.

Meanwhile, new troops will be deployed in so-called Forward Operating Bases, or fobs, in Eastern Europe. That move, says Grossman, is partly being carried out because nato is welcoming new members in the east. "You need to think about this as pushing capabilities forward, not shrinking or getting bigger," he told Time. Eastern European bases will also be cheaper to operate, put troops closer to current theaters of war and allow them more room to maneuver, say analysts. The Poles, for example, are offering 12,000 hectares of firing ground about 50 km from the German border that includes a specialized urban-warfare training facility complete with underground passages, a railway station and a bank. The Romanian port of Constanta on the Black Sea, already in use for Iraq, provides sea access to Central Asia and points east.

Feith and other Pentagon officials stress that the aim is not just to move east but to change the nature of U.S. deployments. "We want to do things in a highly expeditionary way: land a battalion, train for a couple of months with a host nation, leave and then come back six months later," said Jones. "We want a family of bases that can go from cold to warm to hot."

Whatever the call, Eastern Europe is ready: Bulgaria's fractious parliament last month approved a proposal in principle to station U.S. troops on its soil. For poor countries only recently emerged from communist rule, the prospect of closer ties with Washington is a powerful enticement: "I have been waiting for the Americans since I was a child," says retired engineer Corneliu Ribu, 74, who lives in Bucharest. "I thought that they would never come."

In Germany, rumors that U.S. troops may be leaving in large numbers sent shock waves through some regions. The Rhineland-Palatinate, home to Ramstein air base, organized a committee to convince the Pentagon that staying was cost-effective. "The U.S. forces bring around j1.4 billion a year into our community," said Peter Grüssner, the state's point man on troop issues. "If they were to leave on short notice, it would be a catastrophe." Hearing last month from Pentagon officials that Ramstein would stay open was a huge relief, he said. Others had more sentimental reasons for wanting the soldiers to stay. "The Americans changed us," says Herbert Grimm, 81, a World War II vet who lives in Baumholder, 50 km from Ramstein, where the U.S. has a training base. "They opened up the world to us. They came as strangers but became part of us." Pentagon officials and military analysts have been quick to insist that the changes have nothing to do with the souring of relations between the U.S. and Germany over Iraq. "It's part of a natural progression, as the U.S. rethinks its positioning globally, to lower-cost, more flexible facilities," says Steven Everts, director of the transatlantic program at the Centre for European Reform in London. The footprint may get larger, but it will also be lighter.

With reporting by William Boston/Baumholder, James Graff/Brussels, Tadeusz L. Kucharski/Warsaw, Mihai Radu/Bucharest, Violeta Simeonova/Sofia and Mark Thompson/Washington