thedrifter
08-29-04, 07:47 AM
08-26-2004
Redeployment Is a Good Start
By Paul Connors
The announcement last week by the Bush administration that it planned to redeploy 70,000 of the 267,000 American troops currently stationed overseas drew a firestorm of criticism from the very people who not so long ago, advocated the very same policies.
Interestingly, the responses across the spectrum are almost the reverse of what they were at the end of the Cold War in the 1990s, when the first major reduction in European troop assignments commenced.
At that time, resistance to redeployment of Army units from Germany back to CONUS came from those who believed that such withdrawals would send a negative image to the world of a new American isolationism. Today, the opposite is true as those who fault the plan predict that it will lead to new American unilateralism, as the United States, less restricted by the need to confer with allies, intervenes in more and more trouble spots.
Some critics of the plan have offered views that include election-year cynicism, stating that the announcement was timed to salve the anger of the families of National Guard and Reserve members who had been deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan for what have now become multi-year recalls to active duty.
Regardless of one’s place on the political spectrum, the announcement, which interestingly has not raised the ire of western European leaders, drew most of its critics here at home. Perhaps most vocal was that of Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John F. Kerry (D-MA), who concluded that the re-location of U.S. troops and units at this time sent the wrong message to both allies and adversaries alike.
Setting aside the inevitable political rhetoric, the redeployment plan deserves a careful assessment based on its overall impact of U.S. combat readiness in the new geostrategic era. In an article on the subject earlier this year (“Time to Reassess Overseas Basing,” DefenseWatch, Jan. 16, 2004), I noted a number of obvious cases where the United States would be justified in removing units that had long been stationed overseas. They included the two heavy divisions and their combat support units based in Germany, and the South Korean-based 2nd Infantry Division. (I also concluded that the Pentagon would opt to keep a selected number of units in Europe, including the Southern European Task Force and the 173rd Airborne Brigade based in Italy.)
The Pentagon plan announced by President Bush last week confirms that the rationale remains unchanged from the aftermath of our invasion of Iraq. It essentially calls for those units to return to bases in the continental United States.
What has been obvious in the current debate – as well as the previous force drawdown in the early 1990s – is that in too many cases, our overseas basing system is a relic of the aftermath of the immediate post-World War II era, when U.S. forces occupied Germany and Japan as conditions of the surrender agreements that ended the war. After the occupations ended and our forces remained in Germany and Japan, they were configured and re-configured to reflect the then-new realities of Cold War force needs.
Sadly, and despite the 40-percent reduction in overall U.S. military strength since the early 1990s, troop locations and basing were still holdovers from a time when our main enemy was the Soviet Union. With that threat long since supplanted by terrorist groups and operatives operating outside the boundaries of recognized state control, it makes sense to re-align American forces where their utilization is in the best interests of the United States.
In another region, critics of the Bush plan have pointed to the recommended reduction of U.S. military forces in South Korea as particularly harmful. While the Korean peninsula remains a potential flashpoint, opponents of the pullback have once again forgotten that U.S. troop levels have already been reduced from a Cold War level of 55,000 to the current 37,000.
The recent announcements that the Pentagon was redeploying a brigade of the 2nd Infantry Division to Iraq, followed by a re-assignment to a CONUS location, sent two very loud messages apart from the need to reconfigure our forces for a more agile deployment capability.
First, the active Army is too small, resulting in the need to levy troops from another hot spot to allow relief for units in Iraq. Second, the United States, which had already re-located the 2nd ID from its former home along the Korean DMZ, wanted to minimize tensions by removing its trip-wire force from the “battle line,” thereby allowing Republic of Korea (ROK) Army troops to assume more of the defense responsibility for their own territory.
What this proposed new realignment also recognizes, but in a very superficial way, is that the current force level is too scattered, requires too lengthy a supply line and costs too much to maintain.
While it is easy to look at the announcement as an election-year ploy, this plan had been on the DoD schedule since the Bush administration first took office in January 2001. Critics of this plan – which targets only 25 percent of the current U.S. military force based overseas – seem to be forgetting (or ignoring) the fact that prior to 9/11, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld planned to reduce the Army from 10 to 8 divisions and to force senior Army leaders to accept his vision for a lighter, more mobile force.
In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks and the invasion of Iraq, Rumsfeld and his aides quietly shelved the division cuts. But overall, Rumsfeld has continued to move forward with his military transformation plan, which includes bringing home a substantial number of troops from overseas assignments.
Another issue that seems to complicate the redeployment of overseas forces– is the upcoming military Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) round scheduled for 2005. The announcement by the administration seemed to leave another major question up in the air: With troops and units permanently rotating home, where will they be stationed?
Facing strong opposition from powerful members of Congress who fear the loss of local military bases, BRAC 2005 remains under fire. Citing the redeployment plan, critics of BRAC have argued, essentially, “This is not the time to go through another painful base closure process.” The news that 70,000 troops would eventually be relocated to CONUS would seem to support that position since, after all, where will these troops be assigned?
However, the critics’ logic is wrong: With the Pentagon identifying specific units earmarked for redeployment to CONUS well prior to next year’s hearings, the BRAC commission will be able to make informed decisions as to what bases – particularly U.S. Army maneuver bases – should be exempt from closure.
In the end, the announcement that the United States plans to realign its forces back to CONUS is a confirmation of the new national security realities facing the country. While many think the planned realignments do much to reflect what they believe is the unilateralist nature of our foreign policy, the plan actually makes sense in both political and economic terms.
Army units based at home cost less money to maintain than those at the end of a lengthy supply line. Bases in the United States do much to support the local economies in the regions in which they are located. The other side of that coin is that the closure of longstanding overseas bases hurt those foreign economies. But then again, why should American taxpayers be forced to subsidize the residents of countries who have been critical of our policies and which in some cases, actively worked to defeat them?
Another group of opponents of the plan are dissidents within the Army itself. They see the announcement, as well as the administration’s refusal to consider a delay of the 2005 BRAC, as just another phase in Rumsfeld’s plan to transform the nation’s land-fighting force.
While the mercurial Rumsfeld continues to believe that lighter and faster is better, critics like retired Army Gen. (and failed Democratic presidential candidate) Wesley Clark argue that the United States will always need an Army that is composed of both heavy and light forces. While that is a simplification of the real needs of the Army, there are those inside it who believe that the realignment to CONUS may be just another scheme that will lead to further downsizing in the regular Army’s force structure.
At this stage, the fine details of the redeployment plan and the ultimate composition of the Army remain unclear, as does the disposition of the existing 425 military installations in the continental United States.
What Americans should focus on as the debate continues is that we need to do what is in our nation’s own self-interest. And we need to have a military structure capable of doing all that we ask of it. If we are going to ask our sons and daughters to go in harm’s way in our behalf, then we need to provide them with the best facilities and resources available.
What we should not be doing, is using a large redeployment home as a precursor to mask another force reduction. If the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have proven anything, it is that the United States Army is far too small.
Any plan to further reduce the size of the United States Army will only exacerbate an already volatile personnel situation, one where the government fights wars on the cheap by using Guard and Reserve units while failing to bring Army force levels back to where they should have been all along.
If anything, it is not a redeployment back to CONUS that sends the wrong message to friends and foes. Another round of force cuts would send that message loud and clear.
The really distressing thing is that is exactly what Rumsfeld wanted to do in 2001. It was the wrong direction then, just as it is wrong now and in the future.
Paul Connors is a Senior Editor of DefenseWatch. He can be reached at paulconnors@hotmail.com. © 2004 Paul Connors. Please send Feedback responses to dwfeedback@yahoo.com.
http://www.sftt.org/cgi-bin/csNews/csNews.cgi?database=DefenseWatch.db&command=viewone&op=t&id=612&rnd=658.065642316433
Ellie
Redeployment Is a Good Start
By Paul Connors
The announcement last week by the Bush administration that it planned to redeploy 70,000 of the 267,000 American troops currently stationed overseas drew a firestorm of criticism from the very people who not so long ago, advocated the very same policies.
Interestingly, the responses across the spectrum are almost the reverse of what they were at the end of the Cold War in the 1990s, when the first major reduction in European troop assignments commenced.
At that time, resistance to redeployment of Army units from Germany back to CONUS came from those who believed that such withdrawals would send a negative image to the world of a new American isolationism. Today, the opposite is true as those who fault the plan predict that it will lead to new American unilateralism, as the United States, less restricted by the need to confer with allies, intervenes in more and more trouble spots.
Some critics of the plan have offered views that include election-year cynicism, stating that the announcement was timed to salve the anger of the families of National Guard and Reserve members who had been deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan for what have now become multi-year recalls to active duty.
Regardless of one’s place on the political spectrum, the announcement, which interestingly has not raised the ire of western European leaders, drew most of its critics here at home. Perhaps most vocal was that of Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John F. Kerry (D-MA), who concluded that the re-location of U.S. troops and units at this time sent the wrong message to both allies and adversaries alike.
Setting aside the inevitable political rhetoric, the redeployment plan deserves a careful assessment based on its overall impact of U.S. combat readiness in the new geostrategic era. In an article on the subject earlier this year (“Time to Reassess Overseas Basing,” DefenseWatch, Jan. 16, 2004), I noted a number of obvious cases where the United States would be justified in removing units that had long been stationed overseas. They included the two heavy divisions and their combat support units based in Germany, and the South Korean-based 2nd Infantry Division. (I also concluded that the Pentagon would opt to keep a selected number of units in Europe, including the Southern European Task Force and the 173rd Airborne Brigade based in Italy.)
The Pentagon plan announced by President Bush last week confirms that the rationale remains unchanged from the aftermath of our invasion of Iraq. It essentially calls for those units to return to bases in the continental United States.
What has been obvious in the current debate – as well as the previous force drawdown in the early 1990s – is that in too many cases, our overseas basing system is a relic of the aftermath of the immediate post-World War II era, when U.S. forces occupied Germany and Japan as conditions of the surrender agreements that ended the war. After the occupations ended and our forces remained in Germany and Japan, they were configured and re-configured to reflect the then-new realities of Cold War force needs.
Sadly, and despite the 40-percent reduction in overall U.S. military strength since the early 1990s, troop locations and basing were still holdovers from a time when our main enemy was the Soviet Union. With that threat long since supplanted by terrorist groups and operatives operating outside the boundaries of recognized state control, it makes sense to re-align American forces where their utilization is in the best interests of the United States.
In another region, critics of the Bush plan have pointed to the recommended reduction of U.S. military forces in South Korea as particularly harmful. While the Korean peninsula remains a potential flashpoint, opponents of the pullback have once again forgotten that U.S. troop levels have already been reduced from a Cold War level of 55,000 to the current 37,000.
The recent announcements that the Pentagon was redeploying a brigade of the 2nd Infantry Division to Iraq, followed by a re-assignment to a CONUS location, sent two very loud messages apart from the need to reconfigure our forces for a more agile deployment capability.
First, the active Army is too small, resulting in the need to levy troops from another hot spot to allow relief for units in Iraq. Second, the United States, which had already re-located the 2nd ID from its former home along the Korean DMZ, wanted to minimize tensions by removing its trip-wire force from the “battle line,” thereby allowing Republic of Korea (ROK) Army troops to assume more of the defense responsibility for their own territory.
What this proposed new realignment also recognizes, but in a very superficial way, is that the current force level is too scattered, requires too lengthy a supply line and costs too much to maintain.
While it is easy to look at the announcement as an election-year ploy, this plan had been on the DoD schedule since the Bush administration first took office in January 2001. Critics of this plan – which targets only 25 percent of the current U.S. military force based overseas – seem to be forgetting (or ignoring) the fact that prior to 9/11, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld planned to reduce the Army from 10 to 8 divisions and to force senior Army leaders to accept his vision for a lighter, more mobile force.
In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks and the invasion of Iraq, Rumsfeld and his aides quietly shelved the division cuts. But overall, Rumsfeld has continued to move forward with his military transformation plan, which includes bringing home a substantial number of troops from overseas assignments.
Another issue that seems to complicate the redeployment of overseas forces– is the upcoming military Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) round scheduled for 2005. The announcement by the administration seemed to leave another major question up in the air: With troops and units permanently rotating home, where will they be stationed?
Facing strong opposition from powerful members of Congress who fear the loss of local military bases, BRAC 2005 remains under fire. Citing the redeployment plan, critics of BRAC have argued, essentially, “This is not the time to go through another painful base closure process.” The news that 70,000 troops would eventually be relocated to CONUS would seem to support that position since, after all, where will these troops be assigned?
However, the critics’ logic is wrong: With the Pentagon identifying specific units earmarked for redeployment to CONUS well prior to next year’s hearings, the BRAC commission will be able to make informed decisions as to what bases – particularly U.S. Army maneuver bases – should be exempt from closure.
In the end, the announcement that the United States plans to realign its forces back to CONUS is a confirmation of the new national security realities facing the country. While many think the planned realignments do much to reflect what they believe is the unilateralist nature of our foreign policy, the plan actually makes sense in both political and economic terms.
Army units based at home cost less money to maintain than those at the end of a lengthy supply line. Bases in the United States do much to support the local economies in the regions in which they are located. The other side of that coin is that the closure of longstanding overseas bases hurt those foreign economies. But then again, why should American taxpayers be forced to subsidize the residents of countries who have been critical of our policies and which in some cases, actively worked to defeat them?
Another group of opponents of the plan are dissidents within the Army itself. They see the announcement, as well as the administration’s refusal to consider a delay of the 2005 BRAC, as just another phase in Rumsfeld’s plan to transform the nation’s land-fighting force.
While the mercurial Rumsfeld continues to believe that lighter and faster is better, critics like retired Army Gen. (and failed Democratic presidential candidate) Wesley Clark argue that the United States will always need an Army that is composed of both heavy and light forces. While that is a simplification of the real needs of the Army, there are those inside it who believe that the realignment to CONUS may be just another scheme that will lead to further downsizing in the regular Army’s force structure.
At this stage, the fine details of the redeployment plan and the ultimate composition of the Army remain unclear, as does the disposition of the existing 425 military installations in the continental United States.
What Americans should focus on as the debate continues is that we need to do what is in our nation’s own self-interest. And we need to have a military structure capable of doing all that we ask of it. If we are going to ask our sons and daughters to go in harm’s way in our behalf, then we need to provide them with the best facilities and resources available.
What we should not be doing, is using a large redeployment home as a precursor to mask another force reduction. If the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have proven anything, it is that the United States Army is far too small.
Any plan to further reduce the size of the United States Army will only exacerbate an already volatile personnel situation, one where the government fights wars on the cheap by using Guard and Reserve units while failing to bring Army force levels back to where they should have been all along.
If anything, it is not a redeployment back to CONUS that sends the wrong message to friends and foes. Another round of force cuts would send that message loud and clear.
The really distressing thing is that is exactly what Rumsfeld wanted to do in 2001. It was the wrong direction then, just as it is wrong now and in the future.
Paul Connors is a Senior Editor of DefenseWatch. He can be reached at paulconnors@hotmail.com. © 2004 Paul Connors. Please send Feedback responses to dwfeedback@yahoo.com.
http://www.sftt.org/cgi-bin/csNews/csNews.cgi?database=DefenseWatch.db&command=viewone&op=t&id=612&rnd=658.065642316433
Ellie