NATO Plans Trip-Wire German Defense : Military: Congress is told that a thin line of troops will guard the nation’s eastern border.

In the wake of German unification, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is adopting a strategy in which a thin trip-wire line of troops will guard Germany’s border with East Europe, in place of the shoulder-to-shoulder contingents that have been facing the Iron Curtain, a senior Pentagon officer told Congress on Thursday.

But in the first Senate hearing on the unification treaty signed by the United States, Britain, France, the Soviet Union and the two former German states, lawmakers expressed reservations about its possible impact on U.S. national security.

Although Bush Administration officials remained upbeat about the pact, described as “the peace treaty of World War II,” there were indications that U.S. and German interests already are diverging as a result of unification and a separate agreement between Bonn and Moscow governing the withdrawal of Soviet troops.

Defense and State department officials were pressed at Thursday’s hearing, for example, to explain provisions of the unification pact that authorize the presence of more Soviet troops than U.S. forces on German soil for the next few years.

“How does NATO defend borders with Soviet forces garrisoned within them?” asked Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), who presided over the hearing. “What will be the mission of American troops? Where will they be deployed? Against what threat?”

Other senators noted pointedly that the cost of maintaining the Soviet forces will be paid by the Germans under a recent agreement between the two countries, while U.S. troops in Germany will remain a financial burden on hard-pressed American taxpayers.

Maj. Gen. John Sewall, representing the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described the new NATO strategy in Germany as seeking “to transition from forward defense toward forward presence.”

Forces near the German border will be “smaller, with greater emphasis on mobility and versatility than in the current NATO structure, to allow maximum flexibility in times of crisis,” Sewall said.

The general said that nuclear weapons would “continue to fulfill an essential role in overall alliance strategy to deter war,” although future emphasis would be placed “on making nuclear weapons truly weapons of last resort.”

Sewall said that NATO deployments now involve huge contingents stationed side by side.

The new doctrine will place a smaller force in position not so close to the border, with a larger mobile reserve in the rear ready to move to counter any attack. “I’d call it defense of the border, rather defense on the border,” Sewall said.

He noted, however, that the unification treaty prevents any NATO forces from being stationed on East German territory. Only German territorial forces, akin to border guards and operating outside the NATO structure, may be deployed there until Soviet troops are withdrawn by the end of 1994, according to the treaty and a separate Soviet-German agreement.

Even after the Soviets leave, only German troops can move into the eastern territory. U.S. and other NATO forces will be required to get permission from the German government to fly over or conduct ground exercises in the area, said Deputy Assistant Secretary of State James F. Dobbins Jr. Such exercises probably will be limited to 13,000 or fewer troops.

The restrictions on U.S. forces, Sewall said, “are acceptable.”

He added: “Extended warning time and the virtual removal of possibilities for a short-warning attack on NATO countries by the Warsaw Pact dramatically reduce the risk associated with these restrictions.”