NATO: Cutback

It was at one of those London dinners where white ties and tails and decorations are worn. The honored guest, NATO's new Supreme Commander. U.S. Air Force General Lauris Norstad, heard himself felicitously toasted but also told in plain language by Britain's Prime Minister Harold Macmillan: "Insurance is a fine thing, but overinsurance can be debilitating . . . What the balance should be, under our democratic society, is a matter for statesmen responsible to their Parliaments and their people."

With this warning that they were not to be dissuaded, the British last week served notice that they would cut their NATO contribution from the present 80,000 troops in West Germany to perhaps 50,000.

NATO's Norstad was not surprised by the long-expected British cutback, but he was nonetheless pained. In secret talks that preceded last week's announcement, Airman Norstad was concerned by the widespread tendency to say that ground troops no longer matter, since they can be compensated for by more technological weapons. If the British reason for reduction in force is economic, he pleaded, they owe it to their partners to say so. This the British did. This explanation, Norstad hoped, would not give other NATO nations an excuse to follow suit, since all of them except the U.S. spend less on defense than Britain.

After the British cuts, Norstad will have fewer than 15 divisions in his command—though the French have promised to restore to the NATO shield "as soon as possible" two divisions withdrawn last year for service in North Africa.

In Bonn, West German Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauss, who has pledged to field three of seven promised NATO divisions this summer, last week showed off the new German uniforms, almost identical with the army and Luftwaffe uniforms of World War II .The German army boot was back too, but this time with a difference. "Gentlemen," grinned Strauss to an audience assembled to view the new uniforms, "these boots do not permit heel-clicking or the reverberating sound of marching. These boots are fitted with demokratisch-bürgerliche Gummisohlen [democratic civilian rubber soles]."