TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/020590/0205105.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 9.6 KB | 203 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 21

Thanks, but No Tanks


Now that the Berlin Wall is open, the U.S. Army plays war a
little differently

By JAMES O. JACKSON/HEIDELBERG


    In southern West Germany about 75 miles east of Stuttgart,
U.S. Army Captain Terry Quinn points cheerfully at a squat,
wide-track staff vehicle parked near a rural Bavarian
crossroads. "That," he says, "is a tank." Nearby a sergeant
fans a deck of cardboard chits with shell totals printed on
them. "And this," he says, "is our ammunition."

    Quinn's half a dozen soldiers are playing war games with
their car and their cards, part of an annual exercise that once
was the spectacular, costly and sometimes dangerous pride of
the U.S. armed forces. The maneuvers, part of the "Reforger"
exercise by which the Pentagon annually tests its ability to
deploy its forces in case of a Soviet attack, no longer produce
the vast, make-believe tank battles that previously raged
across the fields and the flowerbeds of resentful German
farmers.

    In the past two weeks, for the first time since exercises
began in 1969, the U.S. Army in Europe went through its paces
without tanks and almost without combat troops. Faced with
mounting German annoyance, multimillion-dollar damage charges
and the collapse of East European communism, commanders turned
to microchips and game boards for training and did their best
to keep out of sight.

    "It's mostly being done by computers," says Quinn, a career
officer based at Darmstadt. "People weren't too happy about
tanks and tracks all over the place. They see East and West
getting together, and they wonder why we're doing this."

    Allied commanders say they must stay alert because the
Soviet Union still has formidable forces across the crumbling
East-West divide. "Yes, communism is proving to be a failure,
but the fact is that the Soviet army hasn't retreated," says
General Crosbie E. Saint, commander of U.S. Army forces in
Europe. "They have taken some old equipment out, some
second-echelon stuff, but not much has changed as far as we're
concerned. It isn't over, over there."

    Saint and his NATO and U.S. superiors are concerned about
a reversal of the political process in Eastern Europe and about
the instability shaking the old Soviet bloc. But they are even
more worried about what military planners call "a diminished
threat perception" in the West. They fear that this will lead
to a precipitous and unwarranted U.S. withdrawal from Europe,
whose defense accounts for about 24% of the annual $286 billion
Pentagon budget. "What we consider to be the immediate threat
from the Warsaw Pact has receded," says NATO Secretary-General
Manfred Worner. "We have to base our security preparations not
on the intentions of the other side but on the potential."

    Nevertheless, many of Worner's West German compatriots and
politicians are stepping up protests against the 250,000-strong
uniformed U.S. presence in a country about the size of Oregon
with the population density of Connecticut. "We're holding
something like 1,100 exercises a year, and these people simply
won't put up with it anymore," says a civilian adviser to the
U.S. Army command. "I can't say that I blame them. If we had
a military presence like this in New Jersey, we wouldn't stand
for it either."

    A majority of West Germans accepted the necessity of a heavy
U.S. military presence as long as they could discern a clear
Soviet military threat from the East. But with the reforms of
Mikhail Gorbachev, the end of Stalinism in the East bloc and
the progress on arms control, Germans have lost that fear.
Resentment, long repressed, burst into the open in 1988 when
three Italian jets collided during an air show at the U.S.
Ramstein air base, killing 70 spectators and pilots. Although
the accident had little to do with U.S. military operations, it
galvanized public protests against ubiquitous and often
frightening low-level flight training by NATO fighters.

    The Ramstein accident also exposed limitations on German
sovereignty that had gone unnoticed -- and unresented -- before
the crash. "People realized that their Defense Minister
technically didn't have the right to ban air shows in their own
territory," says an American official. "Allied military rights
had been pretty much taken for granted, but now they are a
political issue."

    Many Germans were also outraged to learn that the U.S.
military is free to tap German telephone lines without court
orders or even the knowledge of the Bonn government. The Allies
retain the right to impose death sentences, control
inter-German airspace and veto West German decisions concerning
Berlin. The rights are resented even if they go unused, as has
been the case with death sentences, and more so when used, as
happened in 1988 when a U.S. eavesdropping operation exposed
the fact that a West German firm was helping build a poison-gas
plant in Libya.

    With the two Germanys discussing the prospect of
reunification, many West Germans want to reduce or eliminate
most of those old Allied rights, including Soviet rights in
East Germany. Horst Ehmke, foreign policy spokesman for the
opposition Social Democrats, calls for using all-European
diplomatic instruments to replace the residual rights of the
Allies. "If you talk in terms of occupation powers, then Germans
will react with feelings of nationalism," he says. It would
be better, he argues, to use the 35-nation Helsinki Conference
on Security and Cooperation in Europe to bring a formal end to
the postwar division of Europe.

    U.S. forces in Germany have never before encountered that
kind of pressure, which is reaching down to the
field-operations level. West German authorities are asking for
the right to inspect military vehicles for compliance with
civilian safety and pollution rules, and some labor leaders are
suggesting that civilian employees of the U.S. forces be given
the management-participation rights that workers have in West
German industry. U.S. officials, mindful of the deli cacy of
relations, are cautious about asserting their rights and
fearful of another Ramstein-like disaster, especially with
elections coming up in December. "We're in a situation here
where we just can't afford any accidents or incidents," says
an adviser.

    That political caution was a major reason for the tankless
Reforger maneuvers. "We have always been reluctant to run over
people's potato patches, and we have always tried to be
polite," says Saint, the U.S. Army commander. "But they don't
design 60-ton tanks to be polite."

    Saint is also worried about cost. "I saw these M-1 tanks
lined up on the road at 3 gal. to the mile, and I saw the cost
of training going up and the effectiveness going down," he
says. Faced with such pressures, Saint and his advisers put the
armored formations into a computer program instead of onto farm
fields, giving staff officers electronic experience in
battlefield decision making. Ordinary soldiers could get their
training in exercise areas, out of sight and mind of irascible
civilians.

    As usual in Pentagon matters, military publicists called the
trimmed-down exercise an "enhancement." Saint explains the
exercise with the refrain, "We're training smarter." In truth,
the annual mass armored maneuvers have long been recognized as
having marginal value to the men on the ground. "We are hemmed
in with towns and roads and traffic lights," says one of
Saint's advisers. "We knew that the poor `snuffy' [the armored
divisions' equivalent of the infantry's grunt] out there wasn't
getting much out of sitting in a huge tank at a village
intersection waiting for the light to change."

    U.S. commanders say the low profile will save money at a
time when Congress is in a budget-cutting mood. The Defense
Department's proposed 1992 budget, to be released this week,
is expected to be $292 billion, down about 2% from the current
budget after adjustment for inflation. The armed-services
committees on Capitol Hill could trim that even further. But
the financial benefit of reducing Reforger is marginal, at
least in the Pentagon's megabillion terms. The Army predicted
a saving of about $52 million; a similar exercise in 1988 cost
$143  million and put 1,200 tanks and 7,000 other tracked
vehicles into West German fields. A major portion of the saving
will be in reduced damages to land, fences and civilian cars,
which average $29 million annually in West Germany.

    Despite the damage, the complaints and the military fears,
there has been relatively little real antagonism toward
American soldiers, especially among the conservative farmers
of Bavaria and Baden-Wurttemberg, where the exercises are
concentrated. "The people around here are pretty nice to us,"
says Second Lieut. David Dubeau, 23, leader of a military
police platoon guarding a bridge near the village of Fessenheim
during the exercise. "But we get flipped [the middle finger]
sometimes up around the Frankfurt area." Dubeau, normally
assigned to the East-West German border near Fulda, says the
U.S. Army has proved popular with East Germans visiting the
West. "They really accept the Americans," he says. "When they
started coming through, they waved at us and seemed really
overjoyed to see us. They'd practically kiss our feet."

    Like the Army at large, Dubeau welcomes such changes but
considers his job vital as long as Soviet divisions are
stationed beyond the border fences. "I don't feel any less
necessary than before the Wall came down," he says. "But I feel
a lot more secure."