Military Force Reductions

The federal commission created to review proposed military base closings Friday added another 36 installations, including the Long Beach Naval Shipyard, to the list of bases under consideration for phase-out or force reductions. The unexpected action by the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission significantly expands the initial pool of 43 military facilities that the Pentagon has recommended closing.

The Air Force, acknowledging for the first time that looming defense cuts will cause major layoffs within its ranks, said Friday that new personnel policies will force as many as 11,000 uniformed personnel out of the service during the next two years. Affected servicemen and women will begin receiving notice of their shortened tenure at the end of this month, Air Force officials said.

Lt. Gen. Boris Gromov, commander of Soviet forces in Afghanistan, became the last Soviet soldier to leave the embattled country when he crossed into the Soviet border town of Termez at 9:55 a.m Moscow time today, the official Soviet news agency Tass reported. Today was the deadline for troop withdrawal under a U.N.-sponsored accord designed to end the nine-year Soviet intervention in Afghanistan.

The Red Army said farewell to Kabul in a ceremony at the frigid airport Monday, then paratroopers in padded uniforms decorated with Afghan medals were flown away. Some Soviet soldiers remained--although authorities declined to say how many--but officials said they will be gone by Wednesday, the deadline for the Kremlin to have all its forces out of a civil war it entered more than nine years ago. U.N.

Flanked by guards posing for the television cameras, a gray-bearded Afghan rebel leader proclaimed here Wednesday that the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan was "one of the most unprecedented events of the last few centuries" and that it "defeated communism's philosophy all over the world as a whole."

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev announced Thursday that the Soviet Union will withdraw all its nuclear-armed submarines from the Baltic Sea in a step toward making Northern Europe a nuclear-free zone. Gorbachev, pressing the Kremlin's overall disarmament drive and its goal of a world eventually free of nuclear weapons, said the Soviet Union has already removed or repositioned all its tactical nuclear missiles capable of striking Northern Europe.

A contingent of 850 U.S. Marines is set to head for home beginning Tuesday morning, officials said Sunday, marking the end of the 40-day military buildup that has brought more than 25,000 uniformed Americans to fight famine in Somalia. The pullout of the 3rd Battalion, 9th Regiment of Marines from Camp Pendleton, to begin on President Bush's last full day as commander in chief, will be the first significant cut in American force levels in Somalia.

The Soviet Union announced Friday after talks in Ulan Bator that it will withdraw the last of its troops from Mongolia over the next two years. The official news agency Tass said remaining Soviet combat troops would be pulled out in 1991 and military units supervising the withdrawal of military hardware would leave the year after.

The United States, driven by budgetary realities and nature's explosive whims, reached a new bases agreement with the Philippines on Wednesday under which it will abandon Clark Air Base in 1992 but keep the sprawling Subic Bay Naval Base for 10 more years. Clark, one of the largest and oldest U.S. military outposts overseas, was buried under thousands of tons of ash when Mt. Pinatubo exploded into life in mid-June after more than 600 years of inactivity. U.S.

The top Soviet general in Afghanistan said Tuesday that once the pullout of his forces is completed by the Feb. 15 deadline, Moscow will no longer use its air power to support the Afghan government. The Soviet Union has been using air power increasingly since last fall to try to push back guerrilla forces besieging Afghan cities, and recently to help keep open a key highway from the Soviet border.