Ten Years After Cold War, U.S. Military Spread Wider

The most recognizable change in the U.S. military in the decade since the Berlin Wall fell is its size--fewer troops, fewer weapons, fewer bases. Less well known is that the military is more far-flung--showing the flag in such unlikely lands as Albania, South Africa and even Russia.

As a result, an American military in transition is doing more, in more places, with less.

As Defense Secretary William Cohen is fond of saying, this is not the bipolar world of the Cold War in which the United States and the former Soviet Union were locked in a superpower struggle.

Today, American forces operate in obscure places such as East Timor, Haiti and Kosovo. Defense dollars go toward stopping black market Russian nuclear materials and preparing against North Korean long-range missiles.

In just the last year, U.S. forces have participated in a 78-day NATO air war over Kosovo while keeping a shaky peace on the ground in Bosnia--even as U.S. warplanes skirmished almost daily in the sky over Iraq.

“Within a very short period of time we had more people involved in more deployments, of longer duration, of a greater variety . . . than ever before,” Cohen said in a recent speech.

This is partly because the nature of security threats has changed since 1989 and partly because the Clinton administration, recognizing that change, is using the military as a tool to prevent future conflicts.

“Preventive defense,” is what William Perry, Cohen’s immediate predecessor, calls it.

In many ways the American military is busier now than in the final days of the generation-long Cold War. The Berlin Wall then symbolized not just the East-West division of Germany but also the split between Moscow and its communist allies on the one hand and Washington and its capitalist allies on the other.

When the wall came down on Nov. 9, 1989, the Soviet Union still was the focal point of the U.S. military’s structure, planning and thinking. While the Pentagon was moving into nontraditional duties such as fighting the drug war, it was geared toward stopping the Red Army in central Europe. Now the United States is helping Russia improve the security of its nuclear weapons.

Retired Army Gen. George Joulwan was a 2nd lieutenant when he was first sent to Germany in 1962, just months after the wall went up. He commanded the Army’s 5th Corps in Europe when it came down.

Looking back, Joulwan said the military did not realize how difficult the post-Cold War changes would be.

“We’re very slow to adapt to the new challenges we face,” said Joulwan, who rose to become Supreme Allied Commander Europe, head of all American and NATO forces, before he retired in 1997.

Leighton Smith, a retired Navy admiral, agreed that the adjustment has been slow but believes the U.S. military is stronger today in some ways.

“We have gone down in numbers, but we have gone up in technology,” said Smith, who was director of operations at U.S. European Command in Germany when the Wall came down and later commanded Allied Forces Southern Europe.

There were 2.1 million American men and women on active duty when the wall came down, including about 325,000 in a dozen European countries--all of them allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Today there are 1.4 million men and women on active duty. While there are only about 100,000 in Europe, they are spread across 36 countries, from Finland to Bulgaria--neither of which is in NATO.

The defense budget has gone from about $300 billion in 1989 to about $270 billion this year. About $1 billion of today’s budget is for something few could have imagined in 1989: aid to states of the former Soviet Union.

Ten years ago, keeping the peace meant preventing the outbreak of World War III, avoiding a nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union.

Today, peacekeeping of a different sort is a staple of the U.S. military’s mission, especially in the Balkans, where about 5,200 soldiers are in Bosnia and 6,300 are in Kosovo. That is nearly as many as were in strategically important Panama or the Philippines a decade ago.

In Pentagon parlance, the U.S. military has become more expeditionary--ready on short notice to jump into the fray far from home. An example of this was the role of Air Force B-2 Stealth bombers in the Kosovo air war, which flew round-trip missions from their home base in Missouri, refueling in flight.

Today’s military looks different in other ways:

* The share of federal spending devoted to defense has shrunk to about 15% of the government’s total budget, from 23%. But the Pentagon still is spending billions of dollars yearly to maintain a nuclear arsenal of bombs and missiles that remains at the core of the nation’s defense strategy.

* The Army no longer has a single nuclear weapon, yet the backbone of the U.S. nuclear arsenal remains intact: intercontinental ballistic missiles in underground silos in Montana, North Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado and Nebraska; long-range missiles carried on Trident submarines based in Georgia and Washington state; and bombs for aircraft. The only U.S. nuclear weapons stationed outside the United States now are aircraft bombs based in Europe, and there is talk of removing those too.

* More combat roles are available to women. Early in the first Clinton administration, the Pentagon opened up numerous slots, including duty on aircraft carriers and bombers and fighters, although the Army still accepts only men for front-line combat positions like tank drivers and attack helicopter pilots. There also is more gender integration in military training, except in the Marine Corps.

For all the change, some constants remain. The Army and Air Force maintain about 37,000 troops in South Korea, nearly half a century after the Korean War ended in a truce but with no peace treaty.

There also are about 40,000 American troops in Japan, including Marines on Okinawa and the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk, which is in port at Yokosuka, outside of Tokyo.