Thanks, But No Tanks

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."