More on US force withdrawl from Germany...
United States, Germany Plan Major Military Restructuring
dw-world.de
The Pentagon has confirmed the United States will pull armored units from Germany as it realigns its military. Separately, the German Defense Ministry is reportedly planning massive budget cuts for its own armed forces.
A Pentagon spokesman on Friday confirmed the United States was planning withdraw its tanks and other heavy armor from Germany in the coming years, as part of Washington’s efforts to restructure the global deployment of its forces.
The spokesman, Major Paul Swiergosz, did not give numbers or a timeline for the withdrawal, but the Wall Street Journal reported last week around 30,000 to 40,000 soldiers from the U.S. Army’s 1st Armored Division and 1st Infantry Division could leave Germany in 2005 or 2006.
Swiergosz said Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman, and not Pentagon policy advisor Douglas Feith as the Journal had reported, had discussed the issued with German officials in December. “He said some of the heavy forces might be pulled out, it's likely," Swiergosz said according to the AFP news agency.
Presently there are some 70,000 U.S. troops stationed in Germany. U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has made no secret he would like to reshape the American military from its Cold War era deployments like those in Germany to smaller, more flexible units based closer to potential flashpoints in the Middle East and elsewhere.
U.S. officials have repeatedly said that the decision to pull forces from Germany is unrelated to Berlin’s opposition to the American-led war in Iraq, and both the key U.S. airbase in Ramstein and the U.S. headquarters in Stuttgart are likely to largely unaffected by the redeployments.
However, a number of East European nations that supported Washington during the conflict are now being considered for new bases. Poland has said it favors hosting U.S. forces and according to the Reuters news agency, Romania has also offered the United States a choice of sites for small military bases.
“We've identified a couple of locations. It's up to them to choose one or more of those, but probably (on) the Black Sea,” Romanian Foreign Minister Mircea Geoana said on Friday.
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