STUTTGART – The US Army’s headquarters for Europe (EUCOM) denied a report in the Wall Street Journal that a final decision about the size of the cutbacks in US military forces in Germany had been reached.

A spokesman at EUCOM in Stuttgart, asked about the report, stated: “There is no final decision yet about the figures.”

At the German Defence Ministry in Berlin, a spokeswoman told Deutsche Presse-Agentur, dpa that it had no information about the US troop cutback plans.

The Wall Street Journal reported a top Pentagon political official, Douglas Feith, had informed top-ranking German officials in December about the plans to pull out its heavily-armed ground forces in 2005 and 2006.

This would probably mean 30,000 to 40,000 troops, chiefly those of the 1st Armoured Division based in Wiesbaden and the 1st Infantry Division based in Wuerzburg, the paper said.

The United States has long been thinking out loud about plans to reposition its military forces in Europe, which are chiefly concentrated in Germany, to take into consideration the changed political-military situation after the end of the Cold War.