NEWS ANALYSIS : Bush Aims to Pare Defense Costs, Lock In Soviet Cuts

President Bush’s surprise proposal to withdraw even more U.S. and Soviet troops from Europe than expected has at least two purposes: to lock in the force reductions being demanded of the Soviets by their former Eastern European allies, and to make a virtue of necessity by acceding gracefully to congressional demands for larger cuts in U.S. defense spending.

But the offer also has two parts, and one is likely to be more acceptable to Moscow than the other.

One part of the Bush plan, set out in his State of the Union address Wednesday night, would cut the manpower of the superpowers to equal ceilings of 195,000 each in the central zone of Europe--Czechoslovakia, East Germany and Poland in the East, West Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands in the West.

That is probably acceptable to Moscow in principle.

But Bush also wants to keep 30,000 more Americans than the Soviets would be permitted elsewhere in Europe, for a total of 225,000 U.S. troops. Most of those extra U.S. forces would be in Britain, Turkey and Italy; the Bush plan would permit no Soviet forces to be stationed outside the Soviet Union.

The Kremlin can be expected to object to this condition. As Jack Mendelsohn of the private Arms Control Assn. noted, Moscow may point out that Washington has always insisted--at least until now--on equal ceilings in arms negotiations.

However, a senior Bush adviser said the Administration is hopeful that the Soviets will accept the plan nonetheless. “We thought that there might be some receptivity on the part of the Soviet Union or we wouldn’t have put it forward,” he said.

The Bush plan, if it should be accepted, is expected to result in the eventual demobilization of most, if not all, of the troops affected, though officials caution that little or no budget saving is likely in the immediate future because any such cutbacks are likely to require extensive negotiations.

The President outlined his proposal to Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev in a telephone call Wednesday morning, the official said. Gorbachev did not immediately accept or reject it but said he would study the plan, the official said.

Officials said Bush and his advisers designed the proposal in part to encourage the Soviet Union to comply with demands from Czechoslovakia, Hungary and other Eastern European countries for withdrawal of Red Army units, which have been in those countries since the end of World War II.

The move also reflected the desire expressed by some senior officials to lock in Soviet arms reductions now, while Gorbachev and his policies continue, lest he--or another Soviet leader--shift to a more conservative stance.

“I think we ought to lock in agreements while we have the opportunity to lock them in . . . because we don’t know how much time he’s got and these are both pretty good agreements for the United States, especially CFE,” or Conventional Forces in Europe, a senior Bush adviser said last week.

“We think that this proposal not only gets us out again in command of events, but it gives us a base which we think is sustainable through this current period” of rapid change, the official said.

With its proposal, the White House seeks to fix the U.S. troop level in Western Europe for the foreseeable future to avoid repeated adjustments that would occur if the Soviets were to make cuts in the future, for whatever reasons. The aim is to “prevent what otherwise could be a kind of free fall” in troop levels, the senior official explained.

The proposal would maintain a U.S. troop presence in Europe, the official said, and would continue to support NATO’s twin strategies for guarding against an invasion from the East, strategies known as “forward defense” and “flexible response.”

Last May, Bush proposed that the United States and Soviet Union cut their forces in Europe to 275,000 each. This represented a 10% cut for U.S. troops, from 305,000, and more than a 50% cut for Soviet forces, from roughly 570,000. The Soviets had offered a 300,000 ceiling for both sides.

The 23 nations of NATO and the Warsaw Pact have been negotiating this difference at the Conventional Forces in Europe talks in Vienna, along with reductions each side proposed in aircraft, tanks and other weapons, and verification procedures to ensure the withdrawal of the troops and destruction of the equipment.

At their summit meeting in Malta last December, Bush and Gorbachev agreed that they wanted the conventional forces agreement completed this year.

But the major upheavals in Eastern Europe this fall have led to demands by Czechoslovakia and Hungary that all Soviet forces in those countries--about 75,000 and 65,000, respectively--be withdrawn. Poland, with about 35,000 Soviet troops, could follow suit. So could East Germany, which hosts a massive Soviet contingent of between 370,000 and 400,000.

“Events were running ahead of the negotiations,” the senior official said, “with the collapse of Communist regimes, with . . . East Europeans suggesting the Soviets ought to pull out their troops.”

So Bush has now put forward the new force cut proposal in an attempt to make irreversible the anticipated Soviet troop cuts at a time of profound change and instability in Moscow, including recurring questions about how long Gorbachev and his policies will survive.

The White House insisted that the new proposal should not derail the current conventional forces negotiations. “We have a full-court press on to get those negotiations completed as quickly as possible,” the official said. “We see no reason there has to be interference. If there is, we will put it on the back burner until we can get” agreement on the initial May offer, he said.

Administration officials who outlined the Bush proposal for reporters on Wednesday were reticent about predicting any early financial savings from the troop cuts, saying that was not a major motivation for the plan.

“These force levels are not going to come out instantaneously,” a senior official said. Asked if the cuts could provide a “peace dividend” for the 1991 federal budget, which Bush sent to Congress this week, the official said: “I doubt it.”

But Jonathan Dean, a former U.S. arms negotiator, estimated that the eventual savings from the proposed cuts could reach $8 billion.

“By cutting a division, you’d save a little more than $2.5 billion a year,” he said. Bush’s proposed reduction of U.S. forces, Dean said, “is really the equivalent of three divisions, and you could save about $8 billion a year.”

The proposed new cuts in U.S. forces would have a relatively minor impact on military planning for the increasingly unlikely scenario of a conventional war in Germany, officials said.

“Does this upset the apple cart? No,” a senior Army officer said. “This is well within the planning parameters we had developed anyway” in dealing with coming budget cutbacks.

Rep. Les Aspin (D-Wis.), chairman of the powerful House Armed Services Committee, congratulated Bush for proposing greater troop cuts, saying the plan better represents the “reality of what is happening in Eastern Europe and what is likely to happen with defense budgets in the United States.”

But he cautioned that even the 195,000 level may be too high for the Soviets. “We should be careful not to give the Soviet Union a reason to keep more troops in Eastern Europe than it would without an agreement,” Aspin said. The troop limit “should be a ceiling, not a floor.”

Bush’s proposal marks a shift from a position he took only eight weeks ago, shortly after the Malta summit, when he said he did not favor deeper troop cuts.

“I’d like to get CFE I (the current proposal) in the bank first--get it locked up,” he said then. “We ought to manage that before we start the architecture of something else.”

On Wednesday, Administration officials defended the shift, saying Bush had never meant to rule out a deeper cut for all time.

Times staff writer Melissa Healy also contributed to this story.