U.S. Military Presence in Bosnia Seen on Rise : Balkans: There are more than 2,000 troops in largely clandestine effort. But that official number likely is low.

As dusk fell over a Serb-held slope overlooking this city, a U.S. Marine Corps officer poked among the hillside artillery nests to decide for himself whether, as U.N. officials were claiming, all rebel guns had been withdrawn in compliance with a NATO order.

A few days earlier, a U.S. Navy pilot passed through this Bosnian capital on a mission to scope out the effectiveness of the nightly U.S. humanitarian aid drops.

Last year, at the height of a volatile standoff between U.N.-escorted relief workers and Bosnian Serb gunmen over access to the besieged enclave of Srebrenica, two U.S. Army officers were found to be deployed there when aid workers finally pushed their way in.

Although the official U.S. position holds that no American ground forces should be sent to Bosnia, escalating U.S. involvement in the conflict gripping this republic is bringing more and more American military personnel closer and closer to the fighting.

Still, the largely clandestine U.S. role in aiding and monitoring Bosnia has not prevented the absence of significant U.S. ground troops from becoming a bone of contention with NATO allies.

Officials at the Pentagon and at U.S. European Command headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany, acknowledge that 23 U.S. officers are assigned to posts in Bosnia, and the number of soldiers working elsewhere on operations directed at the former Yugoslav federation has soared to more than 2,000 over the last year.

But the official figures seem grossly understated in comparison with the forces visible on the ground.

On the last Saturday afternoon in February, an American reporter counted 30 U.S. troops in the coffee shop at the Split, Croatia, airport, a transit point for U.N. operations in Bosnia and a relief staging area where European Command officials claim only 11 American cargo handlers are at work.

Seven U.S. Army officers were encountered on a single flight from Sarajevo to the Croatian capital of Zagreb in November, belying what was then a routine claim by Americans encountered in Bosnia that they were one of less than a handful of officers seconded from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

On the rural Bosnian roads traversed by aid convoys, outside the offices of Bosnian politicians and military kingpins involved in the conflict, and at U.N. listening posts around this republic that has been torn by ethnic strife for two years, U.S. forces are present nowadays.

Non-military Americans are also increasingly visible in Bosnia. One Western aid agency, in particular, hosts a number of purported American volunteers of middle age who have been spotted by journalists working in other capacities in other global hot spots, such as Central America, Afghanistan and the Middle East, presumably for military intelligence services or the CIA.

U.N. officials here and American military sources in Washington concede that an unspecified number of Americans, presumably intelligence gatherers, have been traveling throughout Bosnia to provide the information needed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to make decisions about future U.S. involvement in the Balkan crisis.

But NATO allies complain that U.S. policy, which often differs sharply from that of the Europeans, is being made in a vacuum because it does not have to take into account the consequences for U.N. troops already deployed here.

U.S. military sources here are virtually unanimous in their opinion that American ground forces, as opposed to the eyes and ears currently deployed by Washington, should continue to stay out.

The U.S. ground presence in Bosnia is minimal in comparison to the contingents deployed by NATO allies France, Britain and Canada, which provide the bulk of the 12,000 U.N. troops now in Bosnia.

But the token American presence is the guiding force for an ever-growing network of humanitarian and observation missions that U.S. officials argue has been a more effective form of intervention in the Bosnian conflict than the U.N. Protection Force approach of sending lightly armed peacekeepers into the midst of the fighting while giving them no authority to try to stop it.

Marine Lt. Col. Mitchell Triplett, the senior U.S. liaison officer at U.N. forward headquarters here, declined to discuss details of what Americans are doing in Bosnia, except to say they coordinate the U.S. roles in operations Provide Promise and Deny Flight. Provide Promise parachutes aid to isolated Bosnian communities; Deny Flight monitors compliance with the “no-fly” zone that the United Nations has imposed over Bosnia.

The chief task of the U.N. mission in Bosnia has been to provide protection for humanitarian aid convoys struggling to make their way through ubiquitous war zones to bring food, medicine and other relief goods to the 2.7 million Bosnians dependent on outside help. That figure represents the vast majority of Bosnians still in this republic, where industries, farming and normal transportation routes have been destroyed by the 2-year-old war.

Much of the aid never gets to its intended recipients, however, because gunmen impose roadblocks in efforts to starve out rival communities.

When the standoffs between U.N. forces and Bosnian Serb gunmen put the besieged Muslim communities of Srebrenica, Zepa and Gorazde at risk of widespread starvation a year ago, the U.S. military began nightly airdrops of aid to endangered enclaves as part of the Provide Promise mission.

U.S. pilots also take part in the humanitarian airlift into Sarajevo that has been in operation since July, 1992, and has saved this city of 380,000 from starvation.

The United States has 613 troops at Rhein-Main Air Base in Germany and 607 more operating out of U.S. facilities in Italy working on the aid deliveries, said Cmdr. Ron Morse, public affairs officer at U.S. European Command headquarters.

Morse said 221 U.S. military personnel are assigned to a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital adjacent to Zagreb’s airport, which has been providing medical care for injured troops of the 29,000-strong U.N. mission throughout the Balkans as well as for some Bosnian civilians evacuated for treatment abroad.

An additional 310 U.S. troops are deployed in the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia to serve as a tripwire against the further spread of the Balkan conflict.

Altogether, Morse said, the United States has “a little over 2,000” military men and women assigned to missions in former Yugoslav republics or on humanitarian operations aimed at assisting Balkan war victims.

“This is why we get more than a little upset when the British and the French start accusing us of not pulling our weight,” said a U.S. Army officer on temporary assignment here. “We’re in this as much as they are, and we’re not going to be bullied into a kind of involvement we don’t think is particularly effective.”

Even the officially acknowledged size of the U.S. role in the Balkans is given little publicity, possibly to avoid negative public reaction to involvement of Americans in an international humanitarian and peacekeeping mission that is quickly racking up record numbers of casualties.

Most of the 80-plus deaths and more than 1,000 injuries sustained by U.N. Protection Force troops have been incurred in the Bosnia operation, although it accounts for less than half of the Balkan-wide mission.

Repeated calls by the U.N. Protection Force for more troops to carry out the Bosnia mission have been declined by the Clinton Administration, which has said American ground troops would be deployed only in the event that a peace agreement is worked out to the satisfaction of all three factions--the Muslims, Serbs and Croats.

Last week, the Muslim-led Bosnian government and ethnic Croatian separatists signed a U.S.-brokered agreement to form a federated state.

But with no comprehensive Bosnian peace accord in sight, discussions of U.S. ground forces remain hypothetical. The only point on which the American liaisons in Bosnia seem to agree is that the U.N. mission here has neither the means nor the marching orders to bring about peace.

“Everything I’ve seen in my brief time here has convinced me we made the right decision in staying out of this mess,” said an Army officer seconded to the U.N. Protection Force. “There are no white hats here. This is a civil war and we don’t have any business taking sides in it.”

Pentagon and State Department officials in Washington acknowledge that the views of Bosnia-based Americans are often influenced by those of the U.N. or NATO agencies they most often have contact with, which in turn tend to be colored by the combatants they most often encounter.

Pentagon officials emphasize that they are aware of the potential for conflicting assessments and that they attempt to come up with a balanced picture on which to base decisions about further involvement.