Thanks, But No Tanks

By JAMES O. JACKSON HEIDELBERG

In southern West Germany about 75 miles east of Stuttgart, U.S. Army Captain Terry Quinn points cheerfully at a squat, wide-track staff vehicle parked near a rural Bavarian crossroads. "That," he says, "is a tank." Nearby a sergeant fans a deck of cardboard chits with shell totals printed on them. "And this," he says, "is our ammunition."

Quinn's half a dozen soldiers are playing war games with their car and their cards, part of an annual exercise that once was the spectacular, costly and sometimes dangerous pride of the U.S. armed forces. The maneuvers, part of the "Reforger" exercise by which the Pentagon annually tests its ability to deploy its forces in case of a Soviet attack, no longer produce the vast, make-believe tank battles that previously raged across the fields and the flowerbeds of resentful German farmers.

In the past two weeks, for the first time since exercises began in 1969, the U.S. Army in Europe went through its paces without tanks and almost without combat troops. Faced with mounting German annoyance, multimillion-dollar damage charges and the collapse of East European communism, commanders turned to microchips and game boards for training and did their best to keep out of sight.

"It's mostly being done by computers," says Quinn, a career officer based at Darmstadt. "People weren't too happy about tanks and tracks all over the place. They see East and West getting together, and they wonder why we're doing this."

Allied commanders say they must stay alert because the Soviet Union still has formidable forces across the crumbling East-West divide. "Yes, communism is proving to be a failure, but the fact is that the Soviet army hasn't retreated," says General Crosbie E. Saint, commander of U.S. Army forces in Europe. "They have taken some old equipment out, some second-echelon stuff, but not much has changed as far as we're concerned. It isn't over, over there."

Saint and his NATO and U.S. superiors are concerned about a reversal of the political process in Eastern Europe and about the instability shaking the old Soviet bloc. But they are even more worried about what military planners call "a diminished threat perception" in the West. They fear that this will lead to a precipitous and unwarranted U.S. withdrawal from Europe, whose defense accounts for about 24% of the annual $286 billion Pentagon budget. "What we consider to be the immediate threat from the Warsaw Pact has receded," says NATO Secretary-General Manfred Worner. "We have to base our security preparations not on the intentions of the other side but on the potential."

Nevertheless, many of Worner's West German compatriots and politicians are stepping up protests against the 250,000-strong uniformed U.S. presence in a country about the size of Oregon with the population density of Connecticut. "We're holding something like 1,100 exercises a year, and these people simply won't put up with it anymore," says a civilian adviser to the U.S. Army command. "I can't say that I blame them. If we had a military presence like this in New Jersey, we wouldn't stand for it either."

A majority of West Germans accepted the necessity of a heavy U.S. military presence as long as they could discern a clear Soviet military threat from the East. But with the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev, the end of Stalinism in the East bloc and the progress on arms control, Germans have lost that fear. Resentment, long repressed, burst into the open in 1988 when three Italian jets collided during an air show at the U.S. Ramstein air base, killing 70 spectators and pilots. Although the accident had little to do with U.S. military operations, it galvanized public protests against ubiquitous and often frightening low-level flight training by NATO fighters.

The Ramstein accident also exposed limitations on German sovereignty that had gone unnoticed -- and unresented -- before the crash. "People realized that their Defense Minister technically didn't have the right to ban air shows in their own territory," says an American official. "Allied military rights had been pretty much taken for granted, but now they are a political issue."

Many Germans were also outraged to learn that the U.S. military is free to tap German telephone lines without court orders or even the knowledge of the Bonn government. The Allies retain the right to impose death sentences, control inter-German airspace and veto West German decisions concerning Berlin. The rights are resented even if they go unused, as has been the case with death sentences, and more so when used, as happened in 1988 when a U.S. eavesdropping operation exposed the fact that a West German firm was helping build a poison-gas plant in Libya.

With the two Germanys discussing the prospect of reunification, many West Germans want to reduce or eliminate most of those old Allied rights, including Soviet rights in East Germany. Horst Ehmke, foreign policy spokesman for the opposition Social Democrats, calls for using all-European diplomatic instruments to replace the residual rights of the Allies. "If you talk in terms of occupation powers, then Germans will react with feelings of nationalism," he says. It would be better, he argues, to use the 35-nation Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe to bring a formal end to the postwar division of Europe.

U.S. forces in Germany have never before encountered that kind of pressure, which is reaching down to the field-operations level. West German authorities are asking for the right to inspect military vehicles for compliance with civilian safety and pollution rules, and some labor leaders are suggesting that civilian employees of the U.S. forces be given the management- participation rights that workers have in West German industry. U.S. officials, mindful of the delicacy of relations, are cautious about asserting their rights and fearful of another Ramstein-like disaster, especially with elections coming up in December. "We're in a situation here where we just can't afford any accidents or incidents," says an adviser.

That political caution was a major reason for the tankless Reforger maneuvers. "We have always been reluctant to run over people's potato patches, and we have always tried to be polite," says Saint, the U.S. Army commander. "But they don't design 60-ton tanks to be polite."

Saint is also worried about cost. "I saw these M-1 tanks lined up on the road at 3 gal. to the mile, and I saw the cost of training going up and the effectiveness going down," he says. Faced with such pressures, Saint and his advisers put the armored formations into a computer program instead of onto farm fields, giving staff officers electronic experience in battlefield decision making. Ordinary soldiers could get their training in exercise areas, out of sight and mind of irascible civilians.

As usual in Pentagon matters, military publicists called the trimmed-down exercise an "enhancement." Saint explains the exercise with the refrain, "We're training smarter." In truth, the annual mass armored maneuvers have long been recognized as having marginal value to the men on the ground. "We are hemmed in with towns and roads and traffic lights," says one of Saint's advisers. "We knew that the poor 'snuffy' ((the armored divisions' equivalent of the infantry's grunt)) out there wasn't getting much out of sitting in a huge tank at a village intersection waiting for the light to change."

U.S. commanders say the low profile will save money at a time when Congress is in a budget-cutting mood. The Defense Department's proposed 1992 budget, to be released this week, is expected to be $292 billion, down about 2% from the current budget after adjustment for inflation. The armed-services committees on Capitol Hill could trim that even further. But the financial benefit of reducing Reforger is marginal, at least in the Pentagon's megabillion terms. The Army predicted a saving of about $52 million; a similar exercise in 1988 cost $143 million and put 1,200 tanks and 7,000 other tracked vehicles into West German fields. A major portion of the saving will be in reduced damages to land, fences and civilian cars, which average $29 million annually in West Germany.

Despite the damage, the complaints and the military fears, there has been relatively little real antagonism toward American soldiers, especially among the conservative farmers of Bavaria and Baden-Wurttemberg, where the exercises are concentrated. "The people around here are pretty nice to us," says Second Lieut. David Dubeau, 23, leader of a military police platoon guarding a bridge near the village of Fessenheim during the exercise. "But we get flipped ((the middle finger)) sometimes up around the Frankfurt area." Dubeau, normally assigned to the East-West German border near Fulda, says the U.S. Army has proved popular with East Germans visiting the West. "They really accept the Americans," he says. "When they started coming through, they waved at us and seemed really overjoyed to see us. They'd practically kiss our feet."

Like the Army at large, Dubeau welcomes such changes but considers his job vital as long as Soviet divisions are stationed beyond the border fences. "I don't feel any less necessary than before the Wall came down," he says. "But I feel a lot more secure."