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Further Reading

Austria

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the territory occupied by present-day Austria had been ruled by the Habsburg Dynasty for more than 600 years. This territory was the core of an empire that at its height in the sixteenth century included Spain and its colonies in the New World, and much of Italy and the Low Countries. Although a military defeat at the hands of Prussia in 1866 had weakened Emperor Franz Joseph I (r. 1848-1916) and had obliged him to make such significant concessions to his Hungarian subjects the following year that the lands he ruled came to be known as Austria-Hungary (also seen as the Austro- Hungarian Empire), his empire remained one of Europe's great powers. The new Austrian state was only one-fourth as large as the empire. In the eyes of many of its citizens, it was a mere "rump state" and was neither economically nor socially viable. Many argued that it logically should be part of Germany.

In the early 1990s the Austrian military was restructured, from a force intended to defend Austria's territory against threats arising from hostilities between North Atlantic Treaty Organization and Warsaw Pact countries to a force that could react rapidly to local crises. Under the restructuring plan, both the standing army and reserves are to be scaled back but are to maintain individual units in a rapid-response status, enabling the army to intervene quickly with appropriate forces to prevent instability in Austria's border areas. In view of the civil warfare in the former Yugoslavia and the breakup of Czechoslovakia into two states, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, as well as the possibility of overwhelming movements of refugees fleeing violence in nearby states, Austria considers itself to be in a highly exposed position in spite of the end of East-West confrontation in Europe. The intervention of the Yugoslav army in Slovenia and Croatia in 1991 prompted the largest mobilization of the Austrian army since it was reconstituted in 1956.

The Austrian armed forces consist of only one branch, the Bundesheer (Federal Army), of which the air force (Fliegerdivision) is a component. There is no navy. Ground forces consist of 46,000 men on active duty, 19,500 of whom are conscripts who serve for six months, followed by sixty days of refresher training with their mobilization units spread over a ten-year period. There are 6,000 men in the air force, 2,400 of whom are conscripts. (These are no women in the Austrian armed forces.) The main active combat units are three mechanized brigades equipped with M-60 main battle tanks and Saurer armored personnel carriers. Two squadrons (twenty-four aircraft) of Draken fighter aircraft acquired from Sweden defend Austrian air space. Including activated reserve infantry brigades and regiments, total mobilized strength is about 200,000, but the mobilization level will decline to 120,000 under the reorganization plan, the New Army Structure, announced in late 1991 and to be completed in 1995.

Weapons of mass destruction and guided missiles were prohibited under the State Treaty of 1955. Also in 1955, parliament enacted a constitutional law prohibiting participation in any military alliance and specifying that the armed forces were to be used only for the defense of the country. However, neutrality, according to the Austrian interpretation, did not preclude contributing to peacekeeping operations under United Nations (UN) auspices. As of 1993, Austria had battalion units serving the UN in Cyprus and on the Golan Heights in Syria. Austria did not, however, participate in the UN-supported coalition against Iraq after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

The withdrawal of the Allied forces as a result of the State Treaty of 1955 dramatically affected the general strategic situation in Central Europe. The presence of two neutral countries--Switzerland and Austria--in effect split the defenses of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) into northern and southern tiers. Links between NATO forces in southern Germany and northern Italy had to be routed through France. Moreover, if Warsaw Pact forces had chosen to violate Austrian neutrality by driving westward through the Danube Basin, they would have been able to outflank strong NATO defenses on the central front and avoid a contested Danube River crossing in Bavaria. A second line of potential Warsaw Pact attack ran along the southern flanks of the main Alpine range from the Hungarian Plain leading into northern Italy.

The early years of the Bundesheer were directed by military leaders whose experience reflected their service as mid-level officers in the German army, the Wehrmacht. The army's structure resembled that of European NATO powers but on a smaller scale. Its combat units were filled with permanent cadre and nine-month conscripts. It lacked sufficient manpower and air cover.

In 1956 the Bundesheer was called on to handle the first of two border crises. It was in that year that the Hungarian uprising was crushed by the Soviet Union, and 170,000 Hungarians fled into Austria. The second was in 1968 when Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia. Austria's experiences during the Hungarian and Czechoslovak crises helped clarify the nature of the potential threat to the nation's neutrality and led to a reorientation of defense policy and a revised definition of the military's mission.

After 1970, under the influence of a majority of the Socialist Party of Austria (Sozialistische Partei Österreichs-- SPÖ) in parliament, military service was deemphasized and conscription reduced to six months. However, with the system of refresher training for former conscripts, the basis for a large militia program was established, and there was more total manpower available. The example of Switzerland's reliance on mobilization units to uphold its neutrality provided a useful lesson. However, strict budgetary limits continued to delay the acquisition of modern supersonic combat aircraft until the late 1980s.