If Defense Secretary William Perry brings home any message from Europe to an America anxious about military involvement in Haiti, it may be this: Get used to it.
Nearly everywhere Perry went in his four-country tour, the bottom-line concerned how to respond to the nasty, regional hot-spot wars that seem to be flourishing after the Cold War.Perry returned to Washington late Tuesday with a NATO commitment to get behind more forceful use of air power in the Bosnia war. He spent the day at U.S. military bases in Germany, hearing about the strain on soldiers and fliers by frequent commitments to such places as Rwanda, Macedonia, and the skies over Bosnia and northern Iraq.
"We now face an era with new dangers," Perry said in a speech to officers from former Soviet-bloc states. "There are regional conflicts, ethnic and sectarian upheaval, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, to name just a few."
The soldiers are attending classes taught by their U.S. counterparts in a school at the foot of the Bavarian Alps where they discuss running a military under civilian control and maintaining re-gion-al stability. It is one example, Perry said during the speech Sunday, of "how different the European security environment is as a result of the end of the Cold War."
From Seville, Spain, where the NATO defense ministers met, to France, where Perry discussed instability in North Africa with French Defense Minister Francois Leotard, to Split, Croatia, where he lobbied U.N. officials for tougher strikes in Bosnia, military threats and commitments were the theme.
The reduction in the U.S. force in Europe from 310,000 three years ago to just over 100,000 next year does not mean the troops are putting away their ammunition.
At the Seventh Army Training Center at Grafenwoehr, Germany, Perry saw a live-ammunition tank battle drill and looked at computer simulations of a new combat scenario, revolving around a fictitious country called "Danubia," divided along religious and ethnic lines into warring factions.
How do they develop these new war games?
"All we did was have (Col.) Paul (Lenze) and his scenario writers look at the paper every day," Brig. Gen. Charles Baumann told Perry.
Soldiers man guard posts, enforce cease-fire zones, search homes for weapons and spring into action when shaky peace breaks out into warfare.
"I'd spent so many years in the Army looking at a battlefield that wasn't a real battlefield," said Gen. David Maddox, commander of Army forces in Europe. As the Cold War faded and the war in Bosnia dragged on, "It was my feeling we were going to be in Bosnia-Herzegovina that I said, `We're going to do this.' "
Fliers out of Spangdahlem Air Base in Germany are beyond the stage of scenarios; for the past year they have been flying missions over Bosnia and since the end of the Persian Gulf War they have been enforcing a no-fly zone in northern Iraq.
Perry told fliers with the 52nd Air Wing at Spangdahlem that the Bosnia mission "is going to become even more important in the months ahead as we try to increase pressure on the Bosnian Serbs. You are the tip of the spear; you are the ones we are counting on."