Trooplessness.(reorganization of American military bases abroad)

NEW YORK, JUNE 4

IT is now official. There will be a substantial redeployment of our standing military forces. There are several reasons for this, the most intriguing, that we are deploying not only soldiers and sailors, but also political clout. It made much sense over the Cold War years to administer NATO out of Brussels, and to house our major European force in Germany. But the centers of friction have moved eastward and southward, and changes are in order. The two divisions we have in Germany will be moving back to the U.S., we are told; naval headquarters now located in Britain will move to Italy, and an air-force wing might move to Turkey. Such redeployments have side effects which aren't fully predictable. But Donald Rumsfeld's continuing transformation of our military defense is sensible, and accommodates myriad pressures.

It was, throughout the Cold War, assumed that stationary and resolute military strength was required to deter the aggressive legions in Moscow. Since the Cold War's end, we have learned that rapid-deployment alternatives serve most foreseeable military challenges. And we learned last year that putative allies can be overcome by pressures very different from armies of invading Russians. In leaving Germany, we operate implicitly on the assumption that if the emergency arose, France and Germany could hustle together an army sufficient to deter an invasion from revanchist Luxembourg.

The call for smaller forces strategically placed and readily transported is fueled by a real manpower problem brought on, oddly enough, by the success of our military campaigns in Iraq, in 1991 and 2003. We accomplished our objectives using a trimmed-down military. We were facing, a dozen years ago, an oversubscription of volunteers. We moved to lessen the call of the military by trimming pay and benefits and entitlements. But we have gone so far in this as to choke down sharply the call to military careers, and right now we face a deficit of 10,000 in the army, 20,000 in the navy, and an unspecified number in the air force.

There are several approaches to the problem, the first being the ...