World: PREPARING FOR THE UNPREDICTABLE

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In addition, the Soviets have moved westward the Red Army's logistical support system, either expanding existing or establishing new repair facilities and supply and ammunition dumps throughout the East bloc. In fact, the Soviets have assumed what NATO military planners call "an attack posture." Says a ranking Allied general: "The imbalance between the two forces is so great that it could be dangerously misleading to Moscow and perhaps tempt the Soviets into applying military pressure in the West as well as among their allies."

NATO has moved expeditiously to counter the growing Soviet naval presence in the Mediterranean, where the U.S. Sixth Fleet's some 50 ships, including two aircraft carriers, still remain more than a match for the Red newcomers. To keep tabs on the whereabouts of the Soviet men-of-war, NATO organized a new air command called MARAIRMED (for Maritime Air Forces, Mediterranean) that will coordinate some 30 reconnaissance aircraft, flying from fields in Turkey, Greece, Italy and Malta. Unfortunately, the alliance so far has taken virtually no other positive military action.

Fall-Back Space. At the annual conference of the Atlantic Treaty Association in Lisbon, General Lyman L. Lemnitzer, NATO's supreme commander since 1963, delivered some long-overdue straight talk about the alliance's unhappy condition. He rebuked the U.S. for stripping equipment and trained men from its NATO-committed forces for use in Viet Nam and upbraided the Europeans for their unwillingness to develop stronger conventional forces.

Lemnitzer's main criticism was aimed at Charles de Gaulle, who withdrew France from NATO's military activities two years ago. The U.S. general finally said in public what military experts have known all along—that France's refusal to commit itself in advance to let NATO forces use its territory imperils the alliance's defense position in Europe. In the event of a Soviet thrust, the NATO armies, whose conventional forces are too weak at present to repel a Red Army attack, would have limited space to fall back in. The result, as Lemnitzer puts it, is that NATO forces "would be forced to commit nuclear weapons at an earlier point." Such a necessity would leave even less time for rationality on both sides to prevail.

Belgium's Paul-Henri Spaak, the grand old man of NATO, seconded Lemnitzer's censure of Gaullist France. While also criticizing the Johnson Administration's lack of empathy with its European Allies, he faulted France for obstructing the prospects of European unity. Declared Spaak, now 69: "The construction of a united Europe is the only way to save our liberty and our civilization. If necessary, we must pursue [this goal] without France."