WASHINGTON, Feb 10: The United States is studying a radical overhaul of its military presence in Europe that would replace its large garrison force and big Cold War-era bases with rotating, expeditionary forces, US newspapers reported Monday.

A Pentagon spokesman said the US military is engaged in “strategic thinking” about its military presence worldwide, but denied it was linked to a raging dispute with Germany over US plans for war against Iraq.

“There are no plans on paper to reduce forces in Europe,” said Major Tim Blair.

He said Pentagon’s long-term thinking on the subject “has no direct correlation to the current dispute between the United States and Germany over potential hostilities in Iraq.”

General Jim Jones, the new supreme allied commander Europe and former commandant of the Marine Corps, briefed US lawmakers on the concept in Munich over the weekend, The Washington Post and The New York Times reported, citing lawmakers and their aides.

Lawmakers said the US military presence in Europe would eventually be scaled down from the 100,000 forces now there.

Instead, they said, Jones envisions a concept more like Kuwait, where the United States keeps warehouses full of pre-positioned tanks and armoured vehicles, and rotates forces into the country for training or in times of crisis.

US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who has remarked that Europe’s center of gravity is shifting eastward, told reporters over the weekend that the Pentagon is studying base closings overseas as well as in the United States.

“Where they might shift, I have no idea,” Rumsfeld said. “Some might stay, some might shift other places. Some might go back to the United States.”

“At the end of the Cold War, the purpose of our forces around the world was to deter and defend from the Soviet Union. Today our threats are quite different,” he said.

“Just as everything else in the department has to be looked at, needless to say we have to look at how we are organized and trained to deal with these new threats,” he said.

A major review of US military strategy begun shortly after the Bush administration took office recommended a move to a lighter, more mobile force structure from the heavy, garrison forces that grew up in Europe and Asia during the Cold War. The quadrennial defence review also called for a shift in posture from Europe to Asia.

German Defence Minister Peter Struck, who met Rumsfeld at a security conference in Munich, Germany over the weekend, said Rumsfeld denied any plans to close US bases in Germany or to pull troops out of the country.

Last month, Washington also denied Polish press reports that the United States intended to move its German bases to Poland.—AFP