Gen. Powell Backs East Bloc on New Defensive Strategy : Military: Top U.S. officer reassures Warsaw Pact that NATO will not launch offensive operation.

America’s senior military officer Tuesday endorsed the East Bloc’s move toward a more defensive military posture and reassured his Warsaw Pact counterparts that the United States and its NATO allies will not launch an offensive military operation against Eastern Europe.

At a meeting in Vienna, Gen. Colin L. Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, cited “initial evidence” that the Warsaw Pact is restructuring its forces in line with new defensive military doctrines in the wake of the Cold War.

Despite the encouraging signs, the West’s key concern remains “the specter of confronting greatly superior forces armed, trained and suited for offensive ground operations,” Powell said in prepared remarks at a Vienna session of defense chiefs representing 35 nations from both the East and the West.

“Throughout Eastern Europe we see the dramatic movement toward political pluralism,” Powell said. “For the United States, as for any democracy, glasnost-- public discussions and debates over military strategy and programs--is as important as perestroika. For through real glasnost, national security and military policies will no longer be the purview of the few but the responsibility of the many.”

Powell’s remarks appeared to be directed primarily at the chiefs of Eastern Europe’s military organizations, whose future roles in the Warsaw Pact are uncertain as a result of the the major domestic upheavals that have swept their nations.

Powell also met Tuesday for the first time with the Soviet chief of staff, Gen. Mikhail Moiseyev, an encounter that officials said would allow Powell to raise further questions about the Soviets’ efforts to restructure their military forces.

U.S. military intelligence officials have complained that while the Soviets say they are reshaping their forces for defensive operations, they continue to deploy large supplies of spare weapons parts and huge ammunition caches near the East-West border, where they could be used by troops in an offensive operation.

If the forces had genuinely renounced offensive operations, the analysts said, the supply and ammunition sites would be withdrawn from the border.

The Vienna meeting came as the East European nations, several of which sent new defense chiefs to represent them, are debating the roles of their militaries at home and in potential joint military actions with the Soviet Union.

Several of those countries, including Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia, have moved to impose extraordinary new restrictions on the use of their troops outside their national territories--gestures that Powell appeared to applaud.

Contrasting the postwar origin of the Atlantic Alliance with that of the Warsaw Pact, Powell said that in Eastern Europe, “the instruments of war were replaced by the instruments of coercion. Throughout the capitals of Eastern Europe, the liberated became the occupied.”

Powell delivered his remarks on the first day of an unprecedented “military doctrine seminar” organized by a 35-nation forum that negotiates limitations on the military operations and practices of its member countries, most of which are European nations.

Saying the seminar’s task “is to help shape a new order in Europe,” Powell defended U.S. military initiatives that have introduced to Europe new, long-range weapons designed to attack Soviet forces sent in to reinforce the first wave of a Warsaw Pact attack on Western Europe.

“This NATO commitment to preserve territorial integrity at every potential point of attack . . . explains the NATO strategy of bringing force to bear on successive echelons of attacking forces,” Powell said, noting that NATO would be overwhelmed quickly if it had to face the full brunt of the Warsaw Pact’s tank armies.

“Under no circumstances, however, does this imply the alliance’s intent to invade and seize territory,” Powell said.

He also echoed suggestions by other U.S. officials that American ground forces will shrink significantly in response to changed military threats in Europe, while the U.S. Navy is expected to remain large.