New Battle Stations?

Kurt M. Campbell & Celeste Johnson Ward

From Foreign Affairs, September/October 2003

Summary:  The Pentagon is planning the greatest change in the U.S. overseas military posture in 50 years. Small, light forward bases in new countries are to replace large, heavy deployments in Germany, Japan, and South Korea. But such changes may have unintended political consequences, ones Washington has yet to seriously consider.

Kurt M. Campbell is Senior Vice President at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and Director of the Aspen Strategy Group. Celeste Johnson Ward is a Fellow in the International Security Program at CSIS.

Many of the underlying concepts and objectives for changing the U.S. military posture have been identified in documents such as the Bush administration's 2002 National Security Strategy, the Defense Department's 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review, and speeches and remarks by the president and administration officials. These documents emphasize the need for military forces that are deployed to strike rapidly in unexpected places.

Another impetus for change is apprehension among U.S. officials about the reliability of traditional allies. Many in Washington find unsettling the signs of strategic drift in Berlin and Seoul and worry that policy disagreements could lead to crippling restrictions being placed on U.S. forces by host nations. In today's security environment, such officials believe, the United States cannot risk being denied unfettered access to key regions, and so they want to expand and diversify the list of places from which operations can be launched.

Other possible motivations might be at work as well. The plans bear the unmistakable imprint, for example, of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who has been determined to transform the way the U.S. military does business. And some analysts suspect that one of the aims of the new military posture is to encourage a radical redesign of the army's force structure. Early in the Bush administration, officials discussed eliminating at least one of the army's ten active divisions, and over the past three years, the army has borne the brunt of the administration's plans to transform the military into a lighter, more mobile, and more nimble force. To some defense reformers, tank divisions seem a glaring anachronism in the face of twenty-first-century threats. So it is no accident, in the view of some in uniform, that the units most affected by the new global reorientation of forces may be the army units currently based in Germany and South Korea.

WHAT PRICE FLEXIBILITY

Military planning and the day-to-day management of global military operations are clearly the Pentagon's responsibility. But changes of the magnitude now envisioned would also have significant foreign policy implications, and so other parts of the U.S. government, not to mention the various allies in question, need to be included in the planning process. Such consultations do not seem to be taking place, however.

This is not to deny that changes may be needed in the global U.S. military footprint; indeed, many changes are long overdue. For example, it is hard to justify maintaining approximately 100,000 personnel and over 400 military facilities in Europe today when the region faces no imminent threat. Similarly, the strategy and posture of U.S. forces in South Korea have not changed much for a decade, even as the rest of the U.S. military has been transformed. With the advent of greater speed and lethality, American troops no longer need to sit at the border in order to deter, and if necessary halt, a North Korean attack. In general, the changes planned would offer U.S. forces overseas greater mobility and flexibility, allowing them to respond more effectively to the threats of the post-September 11 world.

Still, the most serious potential consequences of the contemplated shifts would not be military but political and diplomatic. Any change in U.S. overseas deployments, even on the margins, attracts enormous attention abroad and raises questions about Washington's intentions. The United States' foreign military presence remains a compelling symbol and bellwether of U.S. attitudes and approaches to foreign and defense policy, and so it is watched closely. Unless the changes that the Pentagon is contemplating are paired with a sustained and effective diplomatic campaign, therefore, they could well increase foreign anxiety about and distrust of the United States

A key premise behind the U.S. global footprint in the 1990s was that American forces helped maintain regional stability. The new posture, deliberately optimized for flexible war fighting, will be viewed as supporting a very different and more controversial strategy, one based on preemption and armed intervention. As the military analyst Andrew Bacevich of Boston University has observed, "the political purpose [of U.S. troops abroad] is [now] not so much to enhance stability, but to use U.S. forces as an instrument of political change."