European Stars And Stripes (Newspaper) - May 20, 1988, Darmstadt, Hesse                                Friday May 20, 19s3 the stars and strikes p3bb 7 soviets May be ready to Cut forces . Wary of breakthrough offer at Summit Washington a . Officials Are bracing for the possibility that Kremlin Leader Mikhail s. Gorbachev will offer 10 Cut soviet troop strength sharply in Eastern Europe a development he hat been hinting at for nearly two years. One possibility said a . Official is that Gorba will use the Michev Wil May 39-june 2 Summit in Moscow to suggest that the superpowers sit Down this fall and discuss cutting their ground forces in Europe by As much As 23 percent. Another official said Gorbachev May wait Umil after the Summit to make a dramatic gesture possibly announcing the unilateral withdrawal or 50,000 to 70,000 soviet troops. Another is. Official said tuesday As Many As 100,000 red army troops could be pulled Back. All three officials spoken condition of anonymity. Gorbachev wants to Cut conventional forces to free up Money badly needed for hit economic reforms Robert Legvold director of soviet studies at Columbia University said in a recent study. Were he Able to demobilize a Large fraction of the 20 divisions currently deployed in East Germany the gains to his modernization program would be sizable Teuvo Idsaid. Condol Ceza Rice of Stanford univ Cristy told a House committee on april 27 that the goal of current soviet strategy including their extraordinary flexibility in arms control is to create a benign foreign policy environment this would allow the soviets to divert resources from direct investment in defense and 10 reap the eco nomic benefits of ethnological cooperation with he advanced capitalist slates Rice said. Western analysts have been predicting such a development since june 1986 when Gorbachev and Warsaw pact allies meeting in Budapest Hungary called for the iwo sides to reduce their forces along the Central front by about 500,000 soldiers apiece by the Early 1990s. One soviet academic Vitaly Thurkin. Subsequently proposed cuts of i million men on each Side. Thurkin and other scholars in Kremlin think tanks have devoted considerable Ink to expanding on the doctrine of reasonable sufficiency introduced by Gorbachev at the 27lh communist party Congress in february 1986. Gorbachev Thurkin and others argue that a nation wastes Money by building More armaments than it needs to defend itself and hat the soviet Union does not need its current vast Lank army to deter an attack. Conventional military forces must be lowered to a level of reasonable sufficiency that is to a level Essen tial for solving Only defensive tasks iwo of Thurkin s colleagues Andrei Kokoshin and v. Larionov wrote in a watershed article published in August i9s7, to achieve his certain changes will have to occur in the Way military professionals think. Legvold quoted them As writing. Soviet military1 officers including chief of staff marshal Sergei Fakhr Omeyer responded with what hey called defensive sufficiency a Force adequate to Deal crushing retaliatory  in other words a massive counterattack against any nato agg Sion Ricc who met last month in Moscow with soviet military officers and scholars described the internal debate in the Kremlin As a Battle  . Government analysts conclude that Gorbachev won the debate and May be ready to unilaterally Cut Warsaw pact forces Fay 50,000 to 100,000 troops to win support for a new round of East West negotiation on conventional forces according to the International Institute for strategic studies in London the soviet Union keeps 380,000 ground troops at a High stale of readiness in East Ger Many 80,000 in Czechoslovakia and 40,000 in Poland. A unilateral soviet withdrawal of thai scale would have Little Impact strategically one  official said. But the political payoff could be immense in Western Europe where polls show great enthusiasm for Gorba Chev s foreign and Domestic policies. Common cause Calls for investigation of Wright Washington