U.S. Expedites Reshuffling of Europe Troops

Fueled by resentment over the opposition of “Old Europe” to the war in Iraq, the Pentagon is accelerating plans to move tens of thousands of U.S. troops out of Germany and to establish new bases in the former East Bloc countries of Hungary, Poland, Romania and Bulgaria.

The first concrete evidence of the shift is the movement of the Army’s 17,000-strong 1st Armored Division, which deployed to Iraq mostly from bases in Germany but will not return there, senior military officials said.

The plans represent the most significant reshuffling of U.S. forces in Europe since the end of World War II, when American troops tore the swastikas off hundreds of German army facilities and moved in to protect the emerging West Germany against Soviet ambitions.

With the Pentagon’s recent expansion across Central Asia, the move into Eastern Europe means the U.S. military will span the globe as never before.

“If you want to talk about suns not setting on empires, you know, the Brits had nothing compared to this,” said John Pike, a defense analyst with GlobalSecurity.org, an intelligence and military policy think tank based in Alexandria, Va.

But even as the Pentagon proposes deploying troops to new places, it envisions more temporary assignments, allowing larger numbers of troops to be based in the United States.

More than 112,000 U.S. troops are based in Europe, 80% of them scattered around Germany. But with some Western European nations increasingly reluctant to house U.S. troops and with formerly communist countries signing up for NATO and eager to play host to the Americans, Pentagon officials say change is imminent.

The move is also being driven by the vision of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld -- who coined the dismissive “Old Europe” tag when France and Germany balked at supporting the war in Iraq -- for a leaner, faster military. Moving out of some of the hundreds of small, scattered U.S. military installations in Europe and into countries along or near the Black Sea coast would make it easier to quickly deploy troops to the Middle East and Africa.

“Why do we need a joint force to be in Germany, where there’s nothing happening?” a senior military official asked. “You have to have troops close to ports and airfields that are closer to the action. And you also want to have them in a place where people agree with what you’re doing, so they don’t shut down ports and they don’t shut down airfields.”

With its clear military supremacy, the Pentagon feels free to flex its muscle with little regard to the diplomatic consequences of moving into Russia’s backyard or leaving the impression of snubbing Germany.

“The U.S. is this staggering military power and, the fact is, the Russians lost the Cold War,” said Eliot Cohen, a Johns Hopkins University professor of strategic studies who is highly influential with senior Bush administration officials.

Referring to Russia’s opposition to the Iraq war, he added, “We were very sensitive to their feelings for quite some time, and I think what might begin to happen is, particularly after their behavior in this conflict, we may begin to be less sensitive.”

As for Germany and France, Cohen said: “Whereas there may have been a lot more hesitation about doing this in the past, I think that is now less likely because of where the Germans were on the war and the extent to which they sided with the French.”

Initial Pentagon plans call for building U.S. bases at the Sarafovo airfield in Bulgaria and the nearby Black Sea port of Burgas, where U.S. KC-135 refueling tanker aircraft and more than 200 troops were based during the Iraq war.

U.S. facilities will also be built at the Romanian air base of Mihail Kogalniceanu and the Black Sea port of Constanta, both of which were used to ferry troops and equipment into Iraq.

The Pentagon also plans to take over vast military training grounds and firing ranges once used by the Soviet armed forces in Hungary and Poland, including the Krzesiny air base outside Poznan in western Poland.

Major U.S. bases in Germany and Italy, including the largest facilities in and around Ramstein Air Base near Frankfurt, will remain, although they will house fewer troops. Details of how many troops will be pulled out of Germany and where they will go have not been announced.

Pentagon officials publicly deny that the repositioning of U.S. forces in Europe is motivated by the recent politics of the Iraq war. Rumsfeld assigned top aides to study such moves even before he took office.

“We have been examining our posture and presence across the globe,” Douglas J. Feith, undersecretary of Defense for policy, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in March. “Our decisions about where we want to base, exercise and stage our forces are not being driven by transient considerations of current events.”

Privately, however, senior military and civilian officials at the Pentagon say the speed with which the Defense Department is moving forward with its plans in Europe is being driven in large measure by tensions with Germany, France and Turkey.

The Turks were demanding billions of dollars in aid for letting U.S. ground troops enter northern Iraq from Turkey, before they finally refused the U.S. access. In April, the Pentagon withdrew 30 of 80 aircraft and almost half the 4,500 troops from Incirlik Air Base in Turkey.

“This is a purposeful effort to possibly leave places where they may not want us or they are snubbing us,” one senior military official said. “The Eastern Bloc countries have reached out to us. They are not looking for outright bribes like some countries did recently that shall go unnamed. They are looking for a partnership.”

One key issue within the Army is whether the tradition of families accompanying troops overseas -- a costly perk that is good for morale -- will continue.

Under the original “lily pad” vision of Rumsfeld and Marine Gen. James L. Jones, commander of U.S. forces in Europe, the new bases, ports, airfields and training grounds would be staffed with limited numbers of highly mobile units that would be deployed without their families for six-month rotations. They would be able to jump from country to country on a moment’s notice.

That proposal aroused the ire of Army officials, whose Europe-based troops and their families now stay for two years. Although the lily pad plan hasn’t been rejected, a revised proposal, still under discussion, would staff the new bases with skeleton crews and pre-position equipment there. The bases would be used periodically for military exercises by troops based permanently in the United States.

“I don’t think we’re talking about building another Ramstein or another ... large installation where you have the small-town USA come with it, like families and schools and everything else,” Jones said in Washington this week. “But what we’re trying to do is develop a family of bases that ... can go from being cold to warm to hot if you need them, to be very efficiently and economically built.”

The point is to increase the speed and flexibility with which U.S. troops can deploy.

Germany was uniquely suited to rapid deployment of U.S. troops when America’s primary adversary was the Soviet Union. Armored battalions based in Germany could literally roll their tanks into position against a Soviet foe within minutes.

But with Europe now primarily a platform from which to send U.S. troops elsewhere, the limitations of basing personnel in places such as Germany and Italy are becoming evident. It took many days to move American armored divisions and their equipment out of Germany to ports to be ferried by sea to the Persian Gulf region.

And when the Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade left its base in Italy to parachute into northern Iraq, it was delayed several days while the Pentagon obtained the Italian government’s permission to allow the brigade to deploy from that country.

“Everything we’re doing is about speed,” said one admiral briefed on operational planning at the Pentagon. “Our goal is to swiftly defeat the adversary.... We can’t do that unless we can get in better position to move faster.”