New NATO Strategy: Meld a Multinational Operation

For the crews that staff NATO’s 18 American-made early-warning radar planes here, life on the flight line is unusually complicated.

At other NATO air installations, the pilots and other personnel have had to worry only about air operations. But at this base, where there are people from a dozen different countries, there are other concerns.

To cope with the plethora of languages, NATO officials have deemed English the common language, and last year crew members scrambled to enroll in 162 refresher courses.

Maintenance manuals have been completely rewritten; the original U.S. versions had been classified, with a prohibition against distribution to non-Americans. And last month, World Cup soccer had the mess hall up in arms.

This fall, the Geilenkirchen base may face its toughest challenge: A female U.S. Air Force captain will take command of an all-male maintenance squadron that includes crews from some of Europe’s most tradition-bound societies.

The reason for all this is that Geilenkirchen, unlike other bases of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which rely heavily on U.S. personnel and equipment, is truly a multinational operation.

Under a new strategy designed to adjust NATO’s operations to changing post-Cold War conditions, the base has crews from 12 different nations under a unified command headed by a West German general.

Geilenkirchen is at the leading edge of what strategists say could be the new look and structure of NATO forces in the decade ahead. The 41-year-old alliance, struggling to maintain its military cohesion while defining a new political role for itself as the Soviet threat recedes, has embraced the idea of multinational forces as a politically palatable answer to a host of problems.

The main incentives for the shift are political. For many Western leaders, shifting to multinational forces is the ultimate expression of NATO’s principal but unspoken objective: “To keep the Americans in, the Soviets out and the Germans down.”

U.S. defense strategists say a multinational structure will provide political cover for a continued U.S. military presence in Germany.

Under the multinational mantle, the United States may be able to keep as many as 75,000 troops in the western part of a united Germany for several years to come. And few analysts believe that the German public would tolerate them if they remained exclusively under the U.S. flag.

Just as important, the creation of a multinational force would give West Germany the legitimacy it wants to take the first cautious steps toward deploying German troops abroad--a development that would mark an important re-entry into the new world order.

West Europeans watched apprehensively last year when a contingent of West German soldiers, operating as part of a multinational unit called Ace Mobile Force, took part in maneuvers in Norway for the first time in the postwar era.

But the advantages are not all political. Pentagon officials hope the move toward multinational forces will shift more of the cost of defending Europe to Washington’s allies and help to blunt growing pressure in Congress to pull U.S. troops out of West Germany.

The proposed changes, which were endorsed by NATO leaders at their recent summit in London, have strong political appeal, but military experts warn that they could spawn problems, the kind of problems that are bedeviling the Airborne Early Warning Force here.

The communications equipment of allied nations sometimes uses different radio frequencies, and not all the weapons use interchangeable ammunition. Governments will have to devise common standards--in some cases, even set up new organizations--for buying, repairing and supplying equipment. And they will have to share military secrets that until now they have guarded jealously.

There will be other problems, too: There are serious language and cultural differences. Women have different roles in each of the allied armies. In some countries, soldiers have been allowed to form labor unions.

Finally, if the multinational forces are to be effective, NATO’s political chiefs will have to put aside conflicting national policies and agree to assign these units common military missions--a high degree of unity that has often eluded NATO in the past.

“There’s a cost to multinationality,” Air Chief Marshal Anthony Skingsley has warned. He is deputy commander of Allied Forces Central Europe, the organization that probably will change most under the new initiative. “It doesn’t come for free,” Skingsley said, “and we’re not going to get there without some hiccups.”

But the move will also spark some fundamental changes in the structure of the Western defense effort.

For more than 30 years, six separate NATO allies have stacked their forces along West Germany’s 500-mile eastern border in a “layer-cake” formation. The result was nine interlocking national corps sectors, each operating as a separate unit but confronting the Warsaw Pact with an unbroken line of allied armies.

Now, about half of the 26 once-hostile Warsaw Pact divisions that had been deployed along West Germany’s border with East Germany and Czechoslovakia have been dissolved, including forces from those two countries and from Poland, Hungary and Romania. As a result, public support in NATO countries for massive defense spending has all but disappeared. Clearly, the “layer-cake” concept has grown stale.

What was needed, NATO’s politicians told their military leaders, was a new plan for the alliance’s defense, something lighter, less costly and more politically acceptable to post-Cold War palates.

In a sense, what the NATO countries are trying to do is to turn the alliance’s layer cake into a cinnamon bun--a swirled confection of multinational forces that would be smaller and cheaper and offer the added sweetener of joint operations.

“Multinational forces are the flavor of the decade,” a NATO planning official said. “The problems will have to be overcome, the soldiers will just have to get on with it.”

But some analysts fret that while the cinnamon-bun notion may be tempting, baking it may cause some heat in NATO’s military kitchen. To begin with, it isn’t easy to run an army under policies that require international approval of individual missions.

Gen. Crosbie E. Saint, commander of the U.S. Army in Europe, notes that NATO’s often-protracted debates over lofty political issues are not likely to translate easily into simple orders like “take that hill.”

“Coalitions are a real bitch,” Saint said.

Indeed, many professional U.S. military men fear that integration problems and political haggling over specific missions will produce armies that are capable of dying but not fighting, capable of suggesting political solidarity but not deterring aggression.

“I am not going to create a force that can’t operate,” Saint said.

Some analysts raise questions about how much money the new concept will actually save. Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, agrees that the plan could eventually save billions, but only after years of heavy investment in common equipment.

Maj. Gen. Peter H. Carstens, the West German who commands the Ace Mobile Force, says his own unit’s experience shows that the cost of satisfying the communications needs of the new multinational forces could well double or triple under the plan.

In the early 1960s, NATO members learned the hard way how difficult it is to subordinate political differences when the alliance tried to establish a multilateral force of ships that would have crews of mixed nationalities and carry nuclear weapons.

Then, as now, the prospect that Germans would have control of nuclear weapons, even in peacetime, spawned serious concern. Today, there is widespread acceptance that nuclear missions are too controversial and provocative to be conducted by a multinational force.

But even lesser missions for multinational forces have run into roadblocks.

Greece and Turkey, which are in a tense standoff over Cyprus, have placed conditions on their participation in the NATO force. When an airborne warning and control system (AWACS) plane is operating over one of those countries, its crew may not use radar to control warplanes in the other.

Caution of a similar sort prompted NATO allies to circumscribe the role of the Ace Mobile Force. Often described as a “political” or “deterrent” force, the 5,600-man AMF is designed not so much to fight a prolonged battle as to act as a tripwire, signaling to an aggressor that attacking it would trigger full retaliation.

The AMF, designed for quick deployment on NATO’s flanks in a crisis, can be deployed only with the unanimous agreement of all the participants in the force, as well as the host country--a procedure that many believe could cripple its ability to respond.

Politicians would retain control down to the tactical level--actual operations that most commanders consider their province. Decisions to attack could be made only with the approval of NATO foreign ministers.

In the face of such concerns, many military voices, particularly American, have urged the alliance to limit such mergers to the corps level, coordinating the actions of two national divisions, which would operate as separate units. Strategists argue that this would minimize many of the differences between units.

“There’s no question that the more you gain in political benefit, the more you lose in effectiveness,” said a senior U.S. official monitoring the venture into multinational forces.

Indeed, Washington’s ambassador to NATO suggested recently that the trade-off between politics and military effectiveness would be a key virtue of the new forces and that this should help convince the Soviets that NATO poses no threat to them.

The Soviets “should like the whole concept” of multinational forces, the ambassador, William Taft, said in an interview. “They will see that the chances of aggression from a multinational corps are very remote. The idea of trying to get a multinational force to move forward is something that just doesn’t wash. It’s hard to conceive of.”

For now, it seems as though the shift to multinational forces will not come quickly. Analysts point out that the AWACS plan here at Geilenkirchen was conceived in the early 1970s, established in 1980 and not raised to its full strength until 1988.

After 30 years in operation, another key experiment in multinationalism--the Allied Command Europe Mobile Force, based in Heidelberg--is faced with the continuing need to find ways to overcome national differences in equipment and military procedures.

Still, many analysts believe that as Western governments rush to reduce their troop levels, the remaining forces from individual countries may end up being too small for NATO to afford the luxury of maintaining separate national divisions--and that this will force NATO into multinationalism.

“This is not the time for nations involved to look at this strictly from the point of view of its military rationale,” a West German defense official says. “Military effectiveness may not matter as much in the new situation.”

NATO troops based in West Germany Dutch: 5,500 Canadian*: 7,100 Belgian: 26,600 French**: 50,000 British: 66,900 American: 245,800 W. Germany: 495,000 * Canadians are based west of the U.S. troops ** French are based west of the U.S. and southernmost West German troops

Sources: British American Security information Council, NATO