ISSUE AREAS:

BASIC NOTES

OCCASIONAL PAPERS ON INTERNATIONAL SECURITY POLICY

19 November 2004

The U.S. Global Posture Review:
Reshaping America's Global Military Footprint

By David Isenberg, Senior Analyst, BASIC

Key Points

• The Global Posture Review (GPR) is not primarily about withdrawing U.S. military forces around the world; it is about reconfiguring the U.S. global military basing structure to make it easier to deploy forces in the future.

• The repositioning of U.S. forces started long before the GPR was concluded.

• Despite a rhetorical emphasis on "places, not bases" the GPR envisions building new, permanent bases in certain regions, such as Central Asia.

• The war in Iraq has complicated Bush Administration plans for repositioning U.S. forces.

• The GPR is unlikely to save taxpayers money.
  

Introduction

With the re-election of President Bush speculation is rife as to the direction of U.S. foreign policy in the next four years. There is every indication, despite suggestions from senior administration officials that the administration wants to reach out to European and other allies in its second term, that the basic thrust of Bush's foreign policy will remain unchanged. In its first term, U.S. military power played a leading role in an aggressive foreign policy. Since U.S. military forces are also likely to be a major tool in a second Bush term, the configuration of such forces are an important indicator as to future U.S. foreign policy priorities.

In August , before election fever took hold in the capital, the Bush Administration announced the results of its Global Posture Review (GPR). President Bush announced plans to withdraw as many as 70,000 U.S. troops now stationed in Europe and Asia as part of a major troop realignment. Speaking at a Veterans of Foreign Wars meeting in Cincinnati he said:

[T]oday I announce a new plan for deploying America's armed forces. Over the coming decade, we'll deploy a more agile and more flexible force, which means that more of our troops will be stationed and deployed from here at home.

...

It will reduce the stress on our troops and our military families. Although we'll still have a significant presence overseas, under the plan I'm announcing today, over the next ten years we will bring home about 60,000 to 70,000 uniformed personnel, and about a 100,000 members and civilian employees, family members and civilian employees. See, our service members will have more time on the home front, and more predictability and fewer moves over a career.[1]

This BASIC Note sets out the main changes announced in the GPR and some of determing factors that are driving this review forward, as well as some of the problems that will need to be overcome if it is to be implemented in full.

Drawdown or reconfiguration?

The Bush administration had been considering changes to American global military presence long before the August 2004 announcement. In February, for example, the Pentagon downplayed news reports that it was looking to disband separate military commands in South Korea and Japan [the Combined Forces Command; 8th Army; U.S. Forces Korea; and the U.N. Command] and put them under one commander, simplifying a complicated command-and-control structure.[2]

In fact the GPR is not primarily about withdrawing U.S. military forces from around the world. It is about reconfiguring their military basing structure, i.e, "global footprint", to make it more efficient in the post-Cold War era and to make it easier to deploy forces in the changed geopolitical environment. As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld testified before Congress:

We need the global posture changes to help us reposition our forces from around the world so that we're stationed not where the wars of the 20th century happen to end, but rather they're arranged in a way that will allow them to deter and, as necessary, defeat potential adversaries who might threaten our security or that of friends and allies in the 21st century.[3]

This repositioning of troops was happening even before the GPR was concluded. I In May 2004, for example, the Pentagon announced plans to redeploy the 2nd Brigade of the 2nd Infantry Division from South Korea to Iraq. And in June it was announced that a third of the 37,000 U.S. troops stationed in South Korea would be withdrawn before the end of next year.

The redeployment from South Korea is an example of the new order, embodying what Defense Department officials say is a new vision: transfering U.S. forces around the world from a static stance designed to handle Cold War era Soviet threats to an active one that can deal with new, dynamic threats. However, such remarks are somewhat paradoxical. North Korea, for example, part of the "axis of evil" is still considered a serious danger, though it was and is an old style threat. Some critics have said that redploying troops from South Korea will actually send the wrong signal to North Korea and that it is not in keeping with an administration which has vowed to be tougher with "rogue" states.

Towards a network of expeditionary bases

In congressional testimony Marine Gen. James L. Jones, the commander of U.S. forces in Europe, said he envisions a far-flung network of expeditionary bases in places such as Eastern Europe and Northern Africa. "We could use it for six months, turn off the lights, and go to another base if we need to."[4]

This need for speed and flexibility is because the armed services are being challenged to structure themselves to deploy to a distant theater in 10 days, defeat an enemy within 30 days and be ready to fight again within another 30. These goals are shaped by the Pentagon's classified 2003 "Operational Availability Study."[5]

This service-wide plan emulates the earlier changes introduced by the U.S. Army. More than four years ago, the U.S. Army set up a new, faster timetable for deploying its troops anywhere in the world. In 1999, Gen. Eric Shinseki, then the Army's chief of staff, laid out his transformation plans, including a new requirement to deploy a brigade anywhere in the world in 96 hours, a division in 120 hours and five divisions in 30 days.[6]

This new policy GPR involves constructing an arc of new facilities in such places as Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Qatar and Djibouti that the Pentagon calls "lily pads."

Building strategic alliances and enforcing a '1-4-2-1' defense strategy

However, some other news reports indicate that at least in some places the Pentagon is still locked into the old Cold War empire mode of permanent bases. In March 2004, for example, it was reported that the Pentagon envisioned building 14 long-term "enduring bases" in Iraq, though that has likely been scaled back due to the intensification of the insurgency.[7] The likely future U.S. military presence in Iraq has been described by one U.S. think tank in the following terms:

The US plans to operate from former Iraqi bases in Baghdad, Mosul, Taji, Balad, Kirkuk and in areas near Nasiriyah, near Tikrit, near Fallujah and between Irbil and Kirkuk... enhance airfields in Baghdad and Mosul... The U.S. Army's top general said 28 January 2004 he is making plans based on the possibility that the Army will be required to keep tens of thousands of soldiers in Iraq through 2006. Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, told the House Armed Services Committee of the United States that "for planning purposes" he has ordered his staff to consider how the Army would replace the force that is now rotating into Iraq with another force of similar size in 2005 - and again in 2006.[7]

Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz articulated some of the thinking behind the new posture in an interview with the New York Times in 2002, saying the new installations, would "send a message to everybody, including strategically important countries like Uzbekistan, that we have a capacity to come back in and will come back in -- we're not just going to forget about them.''[9]

It is not widely realized that, despite current strains on U.S. military forces due to their deployment in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, U.S. military plans still call for other potential military engagements around the world. Guidance issued by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld actually increases both the number of contingencies that war planners must consider and the number of plans they must prepare.

The Rumsfeld plan envisions what it labels a "1-4-2-1 defense strategy," in which war planners prepare to:

• fully defend the United States;
• maintain forces capable of "deterring aggression and coercion" in four "critical regions" (Europe, Northeast Asia, East Asia, and the Middle East/Southwest Asia);
• maintain the ability to defeat aggression in two of these regions simultaneously; and
• be able to "win decisively" up to and including forcing regime change and occupying a country in one of those conflicts "at a time and place of our choosing."[10]

The 1-4-2-1 construct, first spelled out in Contingency Planning Guidance signed by President Bush in August 2002 and refined over the last two years, orders the military to prepare 68 war plans. This is a bit ironic as Rumsfeld had actually hoped to reduce the number of war plans. Under Bill Clinton, the military had 66 such plans. Under the Rumsfeld strategy the new plans will be focused on "theaterwide" rather than "country-specific" scenarios.[11] It was felt that it would be possible to reduce the number of plans since the view within the Pentagon is that U.S. military forces are so good that they can beat virtually any nation with the same plan and thus do not have to focus on country specific details. It is not clear what this moderate increase in the actual number of plans says about this level of confidence.

The rise of new permanent bases

The Bush administration says, as part of wanting to strengthen its alliances with friendly countries in the Central Asian region and its access to their military facilities, it is pursuing a strategy of "places, not bases". It says it does not want to engage in extensive base building, as the U.S. did in Western Europe after World War II and in Northeast Asia after the Korean War.

Nevertheless some big, permanent bases in the are likely. "What people aren't telling you is that 'places, not bases' depends on having bases somewhere," said Kurt Campbell, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for Asia and now director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies' International Security Program.[12]

Although currently the largest number of U.S. troops deployed abroad are in Iraq, there are still considerable numbers elsewhere in Germany, South Korea, Japan and Italy; largely a legacy of the Cold War and World War II - as shown by Tables I and II below.

Table I: U.S. Bases and Forces Stationed in Europe, by Service

Table II: U.S. Bases and Forces Stationed in East Asia and the Pacific, by Service

Source: http://www.cbo.gov/showdoc.cfm?index=5415&sequence=5

Iraq continues to complicate the picture

But the war in Iraq has complicated Bush Administration plans for repositioning U.S. forces. The need for more troops in Iraq has delayed the shift of troops from

Germany to the United States and, as mentioned above, drove the Pentagon to announce in June that it would move troops off the Korean peninsula to Iraq. That redeployment of Korean based troops limits the administration's choices. With 12,500 troops being sent to Iraq, it forecloses the option of sending them elsewhere or paring overall troop numbers.

In Europe, specifically Germany, the plan to move the U.S. Army's two fighting divisions from German garrisons to smaller bases to be built throughout Eastern Europe?where the troops would be closer to potential trouble spots?is on hold because of the burden of the Iraq conflict on an already stretched Army.[13] For example, one of the German-based divisions, the 1st Armored, already has been sent to join the fight in Iraq. Because of the length of the deployment, the strain it has placed on soldiers' families and the larger constraints of the war in Iraq, defense officials say the idea of rotating the 1st Armored into and out of bases in Eastern Europe for short tours without the soldiers' families will have to wait.

Cost savings?

Will a restructuring of forces save money? It seems unlikely. A study by the U.S. Congressional Budget Office found that any significant shifts in forces overseas would require substantial spending.[14] It estimated that although annual savings could exceed $1 billion, the net up-front investment to resettle U.S. troops "would be substantial-on the order of $7 billion."

In the view of a number of analysts some of the changes proposed for the U.S. Army could worsen an overdeployment problem that poses the greatest challenge to the all-volunteer force in its 30-year history. According to Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institute, given the ongoing strains of the Iraq and Afghanistan missions, it simply makes no sense to take large numbers of Army soldiers out of bases in Germany, where they are stationed with their families, and deploy them on unescorted tours to Eastern Europe .

Conclusions

The Global Posture Review was portrayed as an attempt to reduce U.S. military presence overseas. In fact, it's actual aim was quite different. It is nothing more, and nothing less, than an attempt to rationalize and rightsize the foreign basing structure of a downsized U.S. military in the post-Cold War era. Nothing in the GPR should be taken as a sign that the U.S. military intends to militarily intervene less in the world. Indeed, if anything, its supporting planning documents assume a more interventionist role in the world than was the case in the Clinton administration.

The release of the GPR was partly driven by the recent U.S. election. President Bush needed to respond to Senator John Kerry's campaign-trail criticisms that he was overdeploying the U.S. army abroad and imposing undue stress on the military. Portions of the GPR are positive, notably plans for reducing overall numbers of U.S. military forces deployed in other countries. And the part of the GPR that calls for streamling complex and overlapping command structures in Hawaii, Japan, and South Korea is long overdue.

But the GPR is not without costs, such as the setting up of new bases, even if they are billed as "forward operating sites" or "cooperative security locations." And while it was conducting the GPR the Pentagon consulted very little with its allies; hardly a way to build the cooperative relationships with other countries the GPR envisions.

Further Reading

Department of Defense, Bast Structure Report (A Summary of the DoD's Real Property Inventory), Fiscal Year 2003 Baseline. http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Jun2003/basestructure2003.pdf

Worldwide Manpower Distribution by Geographical Area, September 30, 2003, http://web1.whs.osd.mil/mmid/M05/m05sep03.pdf

Endnotes

[1] The Newshour with Jim Lehrer, "Troop Realignment," August 16, 2004," http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/military/july-dec04/troops_8-16.html

[2] Jeremy Kirk, "Report: USFK, Japan Commands To Merge Under Camp Zama Three-Star," Pacific Stars and Stripes, February 4, 2004

[3] House Armed Services Committee hearing, "The Defense Fiscal Year 2005 Authorization Request," February 4, 2004

[4] Joseph C. Anselmo, "Deciding Which Bases To Close Down Takes On A Global Perspective," Congressional Quarterly Weekly, March 13, 2004, Pg. 648.

[5] Jason Sherman, "U.S. Shifts Troops Around The World," Defense News, May 31, 2004, Pg. 4.

[6] Megan Scully, "U.S. Army Weighs Deployment Goals Against Reality," Defense News, May 17, 2004, Pg. 11.

[7] Christine Spolar, "14 'Enduring Bases' Set In Iraq: Long-term military presence planned Chicago Tribune, March 243 2004.

[8] Iraq Facilities, GlobalSecurity.org, http://globalsecurity.org/military/facility/iraq-intro.htm, accessed November 9, 2004.

[9] James Sterngold, "After 9/11, U.S. Policy Built On World Bases," San Francisco Chronicle, March 21, 2004, Pg. 1.

[10] William M. Arkin, "War Plans Meaner, Not Leaner: Streamlining was promised but has not occurred--and postwar strategy still gets short shrift," Los Angeles Times, March 21, 2004.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Michael Kilian, "U.S. Expanding Military Sites In Mideast, Asia: Network counters 'arc of instability'," Chicago Tribune, March 23, 2004.

[13] Esther Schrader, "Iraq Conflict Disrupts U.S. Plans For Military: Goals of moving troops and building new bases to reflect end of Cold War are put on hold,".Los Angeles Times, June 15, 2004, Pg. 1.

[14] Options for Changing the Army's Overseas Basing, U.S. Congressional Budget Office, May 2004, http://www.cbo.gov/showdoc.cfm?index=5415&sequence=0

[15] Michael O'Hanlon, "Bold Basing Plan," Washington Times, April 4, 2004, Pg. B3.