“We are expecting that at the end of January or the beginning of February the U.S. State Department and Congress will decide about stationing American troops in Bulgaria and that it will be positive,” the country’s defense minister, Nikolay Svinarov, told the newspaper Trud December 3 in Sofia, the country’s capital.

Svinarov said this is important because Bulgaria, which joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in March 2004, is “the eastern boundary of NATO right now and very soon Bulgaria is going to be the eastern boundary of the European Union (EU).” Sofia has applied to join the EU and hopes to do so in 2007.

The Bulgarian parliament has backed the move. It stated in December that it “supports the redeployment of American forces in military bases abroad and approves of the consultations already begun on the issue between the United States and Bulgaria.”

For Washington, this is part of repositioning U.S. forces in Europe away from bases in Germany, where they had been concentrated during the Cold War, and farther to the east—including eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Middle East.

Sofia has built a record of military cooperation with Washington, sending troops as part of the NATO forces in Kosova, and more recently in Afghanistan and Iraq.

According to Bulgaria’s defense ministry sources, Trud said, Washington is considering leasing the airfields Graf Ignatievo near the southern city of Plovdiv, Bezmer near Yambol in the southeast, and Sarafovo near the Black Sea port of Bourgas, as well as the Novo Selo military base near Sliven. The Pentagon has already used Sarafovo, where U.S. KC-135 refueling tanker aircraft and more than 200 troops were based during the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The main task of the U.S. bases in Bulgaria would be “providing support in air-to-air refueling of airplanes in the region of the Black Sea,” Svinarov said, according to Agence France-Presse, with about 500 U.S. troops on the ground. They would be “totally different compared to the U.S. bases that have been located in western Europe and more particularly in Germany after World War II,” he added, which were “base towns and base cities” with tens of thousands of U.S. troops and their families stationed there for years or decades. The bases in Bulgaria will be “small and provisionally used,” said Gen. Nikola Kolev, Bulgaria’s chief army commander.

“Why do we need a joint force to be in Germany, where there’s nothing happening?” said a U.S. military official, according to the Los Angeles Times. “You have to have troops close to ports and airfields that are closer to the action. And you also want to have them in a place where people agree with what you’re doing, so they don’t shut down ports and they don’t shut down airfields.”

The government of Turkey refused to allow U.S. ground troops to use its soil to invade Iraq from the north in March 2003. In April of that year, the Pentagon withdrew 30 of the 80 aircraft and almost half the 4,500 troops from the Incirlik Air Base in Turkey.

In addition to Bulgaria, the Pentagon plans to build facilities in neighboring Romania, at the Mihail Kogalniceanu air base and the Black Sea port of Constanta, both of which were used to ferry troops and equipment into Iraq. It also plans to take over military training grounds and firing ranges in Hungary and Poland, which were used in the past by forces of the former Soviet Union.

Under the “lily pad” vision of the Pentagon, these new bases will be staffed with limited numbers of highly mobile units that would be deployed without their families for six-month rotations. This is part of the overall “transformation” of the U.S. military into smaller, more agile, and more lethal brigades that are being located closer to theaters of conflict and are being trained and equipped for deployment at a moment’s notice.  
 
 
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