-Caveat Lector- >From Int'l Herald Tribune Paris, Tuesday, December 15, 1998 Pentagon Building Ties and Security Across Former Soviet Empire ------------------------------------------------------------------------ By Dana Priest Washington Post Service ------------------------------------------------------------------------ TRENCIN, Slovakia - When the Slovak Army wanted to create an elite rapid deployment battalion last year, an officer on the general staff walked down the stairs of the Soviet-era military headquarters here and into the office of three U.S. military advisers. Yes, the Americans said, they would arrange for soldiers from the United States to show Slovak field commanders how to organize the unit. No, they said, they would not equip it with U.S. sniper rifles. Although U.S. foreign policymakers kept the Slovak government at arm's length for several years to show displeasure with the slow pace of democratic reforms, the U.S. military has been intimately involved in remaking the 42,000-strong Slovak Army. In twos and threes, hundreds of American officers have come each year to help the Soviet-trained force shrink to an affordable size, decentralize decision-making, accept a rational budget system and submit to control by civilian leaders. The U.S. military is doing the same thing in 13 countries across Central and Eastern Europe, with plans to expand into the Caucasus and the recently independent states on Russia's southern border. Once the target of U.S. nuclear weapons, these countries are now the site of the most far-reaching U.S. military-to-military contacts anywhere in the world. The goal of the effort is to create ''a security sphere across Eastern Europe,'' General Wesley Clark, NATO's commander and the head of the U.S. European Command, said in an interview. Through the export of its military doctrine and training, the United States has built on widespread aspirations to join NATO to claim a prominent role in the security arrangements of more than two dozen countries. ''There is a great hunger for American values, ideas and security,'' General Clark said. ''Against all of their historical experience,'' he added, ''against all the times they have sought to be with the West and not been protected by the West, they still look to the West. They have these hopes.'' Many current and former U.S. officials share this view. ''I don't know of any historical precedent or any other country doing this in this way,'' said William Perry, who was a guiding force behind the military outreach as secretary of defense during the first Clinton administration. ''There are large risks of failure. What we're doing is very difficult and improbable, but doing nothing guarantees failure.'' Critics see a host of other risks in the U.S. approach. They fear the administration is extending security commitments to an unstable region without public debate. Some argue that the effort distracts the military from its central mission of being prepared to fight wars. Others question whether the reorganization - which includes big increases in U.S. weapons transfers - is encouraging a costly and destabilizing arms race. Some Russia experts say that Moscow, already skittish about the expansion of NATO, may react negatively to an even larger American shadow. American officials ''dangerously misread Russia,'' said Stephen Blank, a professor at the Strategic Studies Institute at the U.S. Army War College. ''They think it will be like post-'45 Germany. I think they are dead wrong.'' ''We are expanding our sphere of influence at the expense of the Russians,'' he said. ''Peacetime engagement,'' as the Pentagon calls it, has become a central mission of the U.S. military since the end of the Cold War at the start of the decade. American special operations forces have reached out to the militaries of at least 110 countries, including every country in Latin America, through exercises and training missions. Naval vessels and military leaders now routinely visit countries in Africa and Asia that were once off-limits or considered strategically insignificant. But nothing rivals the scope or stakes of the involvement in Central and Eastern Europe. U.S. advisers have conducted top-to-bottom assessments of the armed forces of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Bulgaria and Romania and have written the blueprints for their remodeling. In the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Romania and Slovenia, they are revamping command-and-control systems. In 15 countries, American officers and European allies have installed computers for a new budgeting and acquisition system. American advisers have drafted military codes of justice and tactical war-fighting doctrine, and have given some forces their first look at sophisticated special operations equipment. American officials have made the greatest inroads where the transition to democracy is most advanced, like the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, which have been accepted as North Atlantic Treaty Organization members with U.S. sponsorship. In what officials call a crucial step, for example, Poland is allowing an eight-man U.S. military team to help reshuffle its insular general staff, which has resisted transferring control over troops to civilian authorities. The Americans say they will help Poland establish a NATO-style joint staff tied to an interagency political process like that in the United States. In other countries, U.S. involvement has been slowed by lingering suspicion and tradition. In Bulgaria, where a pro-Communist government kept Americans at bay until an electoral upset last year, the U.S. team has had little contact with Bulgarian officers and few Bulgarians have been promoted on their return from U.S. training. Much of the U.S. effort has been carried out under the Partnership for Peace, a NATO program involving 27 nonmembers that is designed to bring militaries up to NATO standards through multilateral exercises and defense restructuring. The partnership program is also a nonaggression pact and includes the right of members to request high-level NATO consultations in times of crisis. While European militaries also play a role in the program, its agenda and budget are dominated by Americans. But the enterprising character of U.S. engagement is best captured by a little-known initiative called the Joint Contact Team Program. The program is run by the U.S. European Command, based in Stuttgart, with no direct involvement by NATO. On an annual budget of $20 million - less than the price of an average F-16 fighter jet - the program assigns four- or five-member teams to work in the defense ministries or general staff offices of 13 countries. The teams arrange exchanges that this year have brought some 1,400 U.S. military personnel to the region to teach and train 100,000 troops, according to the European Command. Some 1,400 Eastern European officers have traveled to the United States or to U.S. bases in Europe for classroom training and seminars. The program has had an entrepreneurial flair since its start in 1992, when General Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sent a team to advise Hungary on everything from ordering uniforms to establishing a military legal system. As protection from the cumbersome and political Pentagon budgeting process, the program was initially paid for from a discretionary fund held by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. To work within congressional prohibitions on training foreign troops, the visits by U.S. military experts are called ''exchanges'' and the experts are called ''contact teams'' rather than trainers. Some analysts say that the program is an example of how the Pentagon is eclipsing the State Department as the most visible agent of U.S. foreign policy overseas. ''The State Department has become a very small organization, mostly underfunded and undermanned,'' said Andrew Nichols Pratt, a professor at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies in Germany and a former Marine Corps colonel. ''Engagement is easier for the military. We have the infrastructure and the educational programs. The military has the ability to move around and we have the resources.'' Where the U.S. military's influence has taken hold, the impact can be pervasive. On the grassy hills outside a noncommissioned officer corps academy in Kaunas, Lithuania - a campus modeled after the U.S. Marine Corps academy - a Lithuanian Army major, Kestutis Kurselis, recently watched as a platoon of recruits moved toward a mock enemy camp. ''The camouflage, that's American. The way they wear their gear, that's American,'' whispered Major Kurselis, commander of the academy. ''All these maneuvers and patrol techniques we learned from the Americans. For two years we've concentrated on small-unit tactics.'' What Major Kurselis is doing with his young noncommissioned officers is precisely what a team of high-level Pentagon officials recommended for Lithuania, which had few machine guns and not a single tank or combat aircraft when it regained its independence at the end of the Cold War. During an assessment this year of the Lithuanian Army, Major General Henry Kievenaar Jr. of the U.S. Army sent an American team to every active air base and naval facility and on inspections of companies and platoons. The team's findings have become ''our road map,'' said Jonas Kronkaitis, Lithuania's deputy defense minister. Lithuania hopes to be admitted soon to NATO while trying to preserve its good relations with Russia. To show its commitment, it has increased defense spending by 50 percent in the last year, to $153 million. Lithuania's Parliament has pledged further increases. A seven-member U.S. team was on the ground in Vilnius, the capital, four months before the last Russian troops left in 1993. Today, four U.S. officers work out of the stone national guard headquarters. Inside a small suite of offices are computers, a bookcase of U.S. Army field manuals, maps and texts on U.S. military procedures. In the last five years, the teams have organized 450 exchanges, including combat training, and have played host to special operations units that have come to teach Lithuanians long-range reconnaissance and hiding techniques. By reinforcing the position of national militaries as the dominant institutions in many countries, some critics said, the United States may actually be retarding the emergence of strong democratic institutions. ''It's a diversion from the important goal of stabilizing societies and economies in the region,'' said Daniel Plesch, director of the British American Security Information Council, an independent research and advocacy organization. ''And it really provides an unnoticed and massive extended mandate for American security commitments,'' ''These countries may not be in NATO but, all the way out to Kazakhstan, they see themselves related to the U.S. military.'' ~~~~~~~~~~~~ A<>E<>R The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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