THE NEW SOVIET UNION : U.S. Studies New Role for Troops in a Changed Europe : Policy: With the Cold War over, the GIs now may help ensure stability and an American ‘seat at the table.’

As the Cold War dawned in 1949, Army Gen. John R. Galvin was starting his military career as a private in the Massachusetts National Guard, wielding pick and shovel to help fight a series of forest fires then raging throughout New England.

Today, the Cold War is over, and Galvin, who has risen to command all U.S. troops in Europe, says he could be back in the firefighting business--figuratively, at least. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces that Galvin would have led in any major war in Central Europe now are more likely to fight brush fires--political and otherwise--and the human miseries and mass migrations that attend them.

“NATO’s future contingencies might well look much more like the coalition’s assistance to the Kurds than anything we have planned for in the past,” Galvin said in an interview last week. “What you’re talking about is humanitarian relief, assistance to agencies of humanitarian relief, or you’re talking about disaster control.”

So this is what’s to become of the best-trained, most heavily armed military force left in the world? With the Warsaw Pact dissolved and the Soviet Union in a tailspin, will the U.S. warriors who guarded the north German plains for almost 40 years become itinerant disaster relief workers?

More important, if so, will Americans continue to spend billions of dollars per year to station 150,000 U.S. troops in Europe indefinitely? And will Europeans, eager to wrest control of their own security policies from 47 years of American domination, let them stay?

Such fundamental questions are among those that Galvin and the U.S. military’s war planners, who have invested large parts of their careers planning and training and equipping troops for the big war in Central Europe, are facing for the first time in more than four decades.

Already, the Pentagon has accelerated plans to halve the number of American troops based in Europe by 1995 and has announced the closure of 314 U.S. military installations in Europe, with more to come. As they have done so, Defense Department officials have struggled to define the new role of U.S. troops in Europe and wrestled with the persistent question, “What are they there for?”

“We’re not looking for missions that can justify their presence,” says a senior Defense Department official who oversees U.S. policy in the NATO alliance. “We’re trying to get more understanding for the idea that there is a mission in terms of overall stability, without dealing with any particular scenario. It’s worth reminding people that the purpose of our presence in Europe all these years has been deterrence anyway.”

Military officers also have begun to view the situation in such terms.

With the Cold War gone, Galvin concedes that many military professionals have somehow lost their “Linus blanket”--the “too systematic and too inflexible” notion that an entire legion of American GIs should be drilled and trained and focused on a single, big-war scenario. It is time, he adds, to “drop the old Cold War thinking” and return to “a more generalized approach” to ensuring the security of Europe.

“Rather than a massive, very predictable threat, there is the possibility of great instabilities coming about that have military aspects to them,” Galvin says. “We’re seeing that in Yugoslavia, for instance.”

But if nettling instability, rather than massive confrontation, is to become the rationale for America’s military presence in Europe, some experts ranging across the political spectrum are saying that U.S. troops should come home.

Both houses of Congress adopted resolutions this year urging the Bush Administration to reduce U.S. troops in Europe to fewer than 100,000 from the 1990 level of 300,000--a proposal that would slice deeper than the Pentagon so far has been willing to go. As a first step, the Senate voted to lower the ceiling on U.S. troops in Europe in the next fiscal year from 261,855 to 235,700.

At the least, says RAND Corp.’s Robert Komer, a former Defense Department official, this is the time to reapportion the financial burden of maintaining U.S. troops in Europe.

“When a situation is in flux is a time to get change,” says Komer. “An aggressive U.S. policy at this point could bring change under which most of the U.S. military’s overseas costs could be picked up by the Europeans and Japanese. It’s time to get the Europeans to do more to pay the cost of maintaining troops there.”

But more recently, some of the nation’s most prominent conservatives have gone a giant step further, arguing that with the Soviet threat to them removed, the Europeans now can afford to provide for their own security.

Under the headline “Now That Red Is Dead, Come Home America,” conservative columnist Patrick J. Buchanan wrote recently that, in return for a Soviet troop withdrawal from Eastern Europe, the Baltics and the Ukraine, “the United States should pull all troops and atomic weapons out of Europe, deed NATO over to the Europeans (and) reclaim our freedom of action in deciding whether to go back in the event of war.”

But that, says Galvin, would cost the United States its “seat at the table” in the shaping of future security in Europe. And in the final analysis, Bush Administration officials say that holding that seat has become the real mission of U.S. troops in Europe.

“Every time before in this century that we’ve left it to the Europeans, they’ve screwed it up, and they realize that,” said a senior Defense Department official. “And every time we’ve gone off in an isolationist mode, we’ve helped screw it up.”

In the short run, that view has its subscribers throughout Europe. Polls taken in the last 18 months by the European Community and the U.S. Information Agency have found that most West Europeans believe that a continued U.S. troop presence in Europe is needed to guarantee their security in the near term.

But the polls also make clear that Europeans will not tolerate a U.S. troop presence forever. The EC found that majorities of Europeans would prefer to see the European Community form a common defense organization to protect their interests in the future. The USIA tallied similar figures, finding that 70% of the French population and 40% of Germans and Britons favored a European security structure revolving around the EC.

With the dizzying acceleration of change in the Soviet Union, experts say those views are likely to take deeper hold throughout Europe, and sooner rather than later. And as they do so, the continued U.S. presence, say some, will look more and more like a Cold War anachronism--or worse, an occupation force.

As a result, critics of the Bush Administration’s NATO policy warn that Washington’s determination to keep troops in Europe in the face of growing congressional and European opposition may have the opposite effect. It could, they say, cost Washington the voice it wants in future European decision-making.

“Rather than bend, spindle, mutilate and fold NATO into a political-security institution that barely resembles itself and is scarcely relevant to the conditions of a reunified Europe, allied policy makers ought to be planning for its eventual dissolution,” says Hugh DeSantis, a professor of international security affairs at the National War College.

“There are two ways to phase out the American troop presence,” DeSantis adds. “You can resist changes and have Congress and the European publics impose themselves politically and withdraw the troops completely, in which case you weaken American national interest. Or the Bush Administration can seize the initiative and work with the Europeans in devising a security structure that would help provide for the orderly withdrawal of troops in a way that strengthens U.S. national interests.”