Every Man a Fighting Man

All week long banner headlines told of the ferocious battles. Yugoslav television carried filmed reports of the fighting and a somber briefing by a major general on each day's action. One big Zagreb daily put out a special battlefield edition for the troops.

For all its realism, it was not a war but a war game--the largest Yugoslav maneuvers since World War II, involving some 40,000 regular army troops and innumerable armed civilians. The exercise, pointedly called "Freedom '71," was designed as a defiant answer to the summer-long Soviet threats and maneuvers against the Yugoslavs. Moscow was furious with Belgrade for cozying up to Peking. The Russians were also hoping to exploit the ancient regional rivalries and not so ancient economic quarrels that plague Yugoslavia.

In hopes of reducing the centrifugal strains on his country, President Tito last July established a collective presidency and granted considerable autonomy to the country's six republicans and two provinces. It remains to be seen, however, whether the reforms will keep Yugoslavia together once the unifying presence of Tito, 79, is gone--and lately the Soviets have seemed to be looking for an excuse to intervene. Consequently, though Tito and Leonid Brezhnev exchanged conciliatory pledges in Belgrade last month, the Yugoslavs went right ahead with their maneuvers less than two weeks after the Soviet party leader's departure.

New Concept. The main object of the games was to test a new Yugoslav defense concept devised after the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. In a development that has gone almost totally unnoticed abroad, Yugoslavia has quietly carried out the world's fastest buildup of conventional forces. More than 1,000,000 Yugoslav workers between the ages of 18 and 45 have been organized into a new auxiliary territorial army, supplementing the regular armed forces and fully equipped with heavy infantry, antitank and antiaircraft weaponry. By 1973 the number will grow to 3,000,000, giving the country a militia-style defense force more than twice as big as South Viet Nam's People's Self-Defense Force. The new defense system, borrowing heavily from the example of the Partisans in World War II, is designed to turn practically every Yugoslav into a fighter.

Chalk Talk. Will the plan work? The war games began with enemy air attacks on towns in a large area southwest of Zagreb. Enemy tanks sliced southward from the direction of Hungary, the scene of recent Warsaw Pact maneuvers and an obvious route for possible Soviet invaders.

The Yugoslav strategy was not to withdraw at once into the country's hills, where Tito's Partisans waged an effective fight against the Italian and German occupiers, but to hit the enemy with a quick, strong counterattack. Accordingly, the regular armed forces used tanks, paratroop drops and Soviet-style massed artillery barrages to block the mock attack. Meanwhile, the territorial defense forces, including youth units composed partly of armed girls, harassed the enemy with sniper fire and staged sabotage raids behind his lines. Some members of the youth brigades got so carried away that they slashed the tires and tore out radios from the enemy vehicles. The Yugoslav chief of staff finally appealed to them to use white chalk marks to indicate equipment that they had "destroyed." On the third day, the defenders mounted a strong counterattack that, in theory at least, routed the aggressor.

The growth of the territorial army has come during a time when the strength of the regular armed forces has remained stable at about 223,000 men. The armed forces are pugnacious and well trained, but they need new equipment to replace aging Russian tanks and MIGs acquired during a period of Khrushchevian good will. Were an emergency to erupt, however, the U.S. has contingency plans to send extensive aid, short of troops, to Yugoslavia's military. And while some analysts consider the army to be the only institution capable of holding the country together once Tito is no longer around, Yugoslavia's soldiers have shown no inclination in recent years to mix in the country's politics.

The territorial forces, which are strictly under regional party control, could prove much less reluctant to meddle. In any event, their swift expansion is an indication that Yugoslavia is irrevocably embarked upon a political decentralization that will match the economic decentralization of the 1950s, which turned Yugoslav plants over to a worker self-management system. In a sense, the armed workers recall Marx's reflections about the creation of an "armed people" as the replacement of the traditional standing army. They also serve as a warning to the federal government in Belgrade that it will inevitably be more difficult to reimpose strictly centralized control on the country should some future ruling group attempt to do so.

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