Places Not Bases

Langley SG

A Pentagon Plan Would Cut Back G.I.'s in Germany
By MICHAEL R. GORDON

Published: June 4, 2004

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/04/politics/04MILI.html

WASHINGTON, June 3 The Pentagon has proposed a plan to withdraw its two Army divisions from Germany and undertake an array of other changes in its European-based forces, in the most significant rearrangement of the American military around the world since the beginning of the cold war, according to American and allied officials.

Pentagon policy makers said the aim is to afford maximum flexibility in sending forces to the Middle East, Central Asia and other potential battlegrounds. But some experts and allied officials are concerned that the shift will reduce Washington's influence in NATO and weaken its diplomatic links with its allies, all at a time of rising anti-American sentiment around the world.

The proposal to withdraw the divisions comes at a time when the Army is stretched thin by deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. But Pentagon officials said the move, which has been under consideration for some time and involves forces in Asia as well as in Europe, is unrelated to the current fighting.

Under the Pentagon plan, the Germany-based First Armored Division and First Infantry Division would be returned to the United States. A brigade equipped with Stryker light armored vehicles would be deployed in Germany. A typical division consists of three brigades and can number 20,000 troops if logistical units are included, though these two divisions have only two brigades each in Germany, with the other brigade in the United States.

In addition, a wing of F-16 fighters may be shifted from their base in Spangdahlem, Germany, to the Incirlik base in Turkey, which would move the aircraft closer to the volatile Middle East; a wing generally consists of 72 aircraft. Under the Pentagon plan, the shift would be carried out only if the Turks gave the United States broad latitude for using them, something that some officials see as unlikely.

The Navy's headquarters in Europe would be transferred from Britain to Italy. Administration officials are also discussing plans to remove some F-15 fighters from Britain and to withdraw the handful of F-15 fighters that are normally deployed in Iceland, though final decisions have not been made.

Administration officials said Douglas Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy, recently briefed German officials on the plan. The Germans were told that the withdrawal plan had yet to be formally approved by President Bush and that the United States would listen to their concerns, an American official said.

Officials said they expected the major decisions on the rearrangement to be made in a month or two. But the main direction of the Pentagon plan appears to be set.

"Everything is going to move everywhere," Mr. Feith said a year ago, as the Bush administration was beginning to develop the details of its plan. "There is not going to be a place in the world where it's going to be the same as it used to be."

For Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the reasons for the reshuffling seem clear and compelling: that the purpose of military units is to fight and win the nation's wars, and they should be stationed in locations that enable the United States to use them most efficiently and with minimal political restrictions.

"It's time to adjust those locations from static defense to a more agile and a more capable and a more 21st-century posture," Mr. Rumsfeld told reporters on Thursday on a flight to Singapore.

Proponents of Mr. Rumsfeld's plan see little merit in keeping a large number of forces in Germany now that the cold war is over. They argue that the United States would be better off withdrawing most of them and establishing new bases in Southeastern Europe, from which forces could be rushed if there was a crisis in the Caucasus or the Middle East.

"From a strategic point of view, there is more sense in moving things out of Germany and having something in Bulgaria and Romania," said Joseph Ralston, a retired general and a former NATO commander.

But some experts and allied officials are concerned that a substantial reduction in the United States military presence in Europe would reduce American influence there, reinforce the notion that the Bush administration prefers to act unilaterally and inadvertently lend support to the French contention that Europe must rely on itself for its security.

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Montgomery Meigs, a retired general and the former head of Army forces in Europe, said substantial reductions in American troops in Europe could limit the opportunities to train with NATO's new East European members and other allies. While American forces can still be sent for exercises from the United States, he said, it will be more difficult and costly to do so.

"You will never sustain the level of engagement from the United States that you can from Europe," he said. "We will not go to as many NATO exercises or have as many training events."

Other specialists have warned that the greatest risk is the possible damage to allied relations.

"The most serious potential consequences of the contemplated shifts would not be military but political and diplomatic," Kurt Campbell and Celeste Johnson Ward of the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies wrote in an article published last year in the journal Foreign Affairs, well before the extent of the changes now planned became known."Unless the changes are paired with a sustained and effective diplomatic campaign, therefore, they could well increase foreign anxiety about and distrust of the United States."

Gen. James Jones, the American commander of NATO, has supported the withdrawal of the two divisions from Europe on the understanding that American ground units would rotate regularly through Europe, allied officials say. But some allied officials believe it is less clear that the Pentagon will finance and organize the regular rotation of forces that are central to General Jones's vision, especially since so much of the United States' energy and effort is focused on Iraq.

Already, administration officials have said a brigade of troops is to be shifted from Korea to Iraq. That reflects both the demand for additional forces in Iraq and the new thinking about positioning forces in Asia.

Pentagon officials insist they are effectively managing relations with key allies. "What we have been hearing from the allies privately and publicly is that they understand the U.S. is changing and want to stay connected," said Andy Hoehn, deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy. "The real message is that we have been consulting with the allies and the result has been pretty positive."

The Pentagon plan was discussed at a May 20 meeting of top United States officials. Administration officials declined to comment on the record about the session. A State Department official said that the meeting was a "snapshot at a given time," and that some ideas have continued to be refined since then. In the meeting, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who was once the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he thought it was unlikely that the Turks would agree to allow the United States to operate freely from Turkish bases. Gen. Richard B. Myers, the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also said securing Turkey's agreement was a long shot and indicated that he favored keeping the F-16's in Germany, according to an account of the session that was provided.

No United States forces are to be removed from Italy. The Navy's European headquarters, however, is scheduled to move from London to Naples.

Earlier plans to move that headquarters to Spain have been dropped. While skeptics have wondered if the switch from Spain to Italy is related to the decision by Spain's new Socialist government to withdraw its troops from Iraq, Defense Department officials insist that it is being made on cost grounds.

Regarding Britain, administration officials are discussing a plan to remove some F-15 fighters. Some Defense Department officials have suggested moving an air command center to Britain from Germany as compensation if F-15's are removed. But General Myers indicated that he thought the F-15's should remain in Britain, according to an account of the meeting.

Iceland has long been a sensitive matter, with civilian officials at the Pentagon pushing to remove the small number of F-15's that are regularly rotated through Iceland under a bilateral agreement reached during the cold war. That could upset a government that has been generally supportive of American policy and which relies on the F-15's for its air defense.

Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, said at the May 20 meeting that Mr. Bush would not support the withdrawal of the aircraft until a way was found to mollify the Icelanders. One possibility is to make Iceland a "cooperative security location," Defense Department jargon for a base to which forces could rapidly deploy in a crisis.

The Caucasus has also figured into the Pentagon's calculations. Here the issue is not about moving out, but whether to move in. At the May 20 meeting, senior officials agreed that stationing troops in Georgia could be destabilizing, especially since Russia still has not withdrawn all its forces from that country, a former republic of the Soviet Union. The idea was dropped.

Civilian officials at the Defense Department have pressed for a presidential speech or announcement in mid-June about the new military posture. But State Department officials have argued that this would not leave sufficient time for consultations with the allies and would make the new policy appear to be a fait accompli.

Some officials have noted that the stationing of forces in past decades has entailed more flexibility on all sides than many people realize.

During the May 20 meeting, Mr. Powell is reported to have observed that Army troops like being stationed in Europe and noted that the Germans had never stood in the way when the United States wanted to send its German-based forces on other missions. The United States sent Army units in Germany to fight in the Persian Gulf conflict in 1991 and in the Iraq war in 2003.

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Expansion of military bases overseas fuels suspicions of U.S. motives

BY MICHAEL KILIAN

Chicago Tribune
Posted on Tue, Mar. 23, 2004

http://www.sunherald.com/mld/sunherald/news/politics/8258973.htm

WASHINGTON - (KRT) - In the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States has dramatically expanded its military presence in the Middle East and Central Asia, building a vast network of bases designed to counter what military officials call an "arc of instability."

U.S. military installations in the region extend from Turkey to near the Chinese border, and from former Soviet republics in the north to the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean. The facilities surround Iran; are situated in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and are close to Syria and Lebanon. Several were created to address the confrontation with Iraq, and continue to support operations there.

"No one could have anticipated in the summer of 2001 that the United States would be basing forces at Karshi Khanabad, Uzbekistan, or conducting a major military operation in Afghanistan," Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told Congress last year.

Experts fear the ubiquity of U.S. forces may fuel belief in radical Islamic claims that America is bent on controlling the oil and politics of the Islamic world. A poll that the nonpartisan Pew Research Center conducted in Muslim nations in the region found significant portions of their populations believed just that.

Experts believe the threat implicit in a nearby American military presence - especially after the Iraq invasion - could inflame Islamic nations such as Iran.

"The first thing to recognize is that other countries will view this in different ways than we do," said Marcus Corbin, senior analyst for the Washington-based Center for Defense Information. "They will view this sometimes as an aggressive, hostile encirclement. Iran is probably the best example. It is almost literally surrounded. A huge chunk of its borders are with countries where the U.S. has vastly increased its presence or become a close ally.

"The point is to realize how threatening this is to other people," he added. "This is hard to do, because we don't necessarily think of ourselves as a crusading people invading other countries willy-nilly."

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has rejected the notion that the United States is interested in a permanent, large-scale presence in the Middle East and Central Asia and has stated that once the Taliban and al-Qaida have been defeated, the United States will have no bases in Afghanistan.

But the United States now has bases or shares military installations in Turkey, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, as well as on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

Rumsfeld and Pentagon officials are soon expected to unveil plans for a new U.S. military "footprint" on the rest of the world. The plan is expected to include a shift of resources from the huge Cold War-era bases in Western Europe to new and smaller ones in Poland and other Eastern Europe nations as well as a relocation of U.S. troops in South Korea.

The planners are also surveying American facilities in the Middle East and Central Asia, but changes there are more likely to deal with the size and impact of the U.S. profile there than with the number of facilities.

The U.S. military's defense strategy, officials say, is focused on asymmetric threats, and on the need to respond quickly anywhere in the world.

Pursuing a strategy of "places, not bases," the administration wants to strengthen its alliances with friendly countries in the region - and its access to their military facilities. But it doesn't want to engage in extensive base building, as it did in Western Europe after World War II and in northeast Asia after the Korean War.

"What's unlikely is to have permanently stationed U.S. forces in all these places," said Michelle Flournoy, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and threat reduction. "We're more likely to see a situation where we periodically go into a base and do exercises and build up the infrastructure to make it more usable in the future. Then we leave again or rotate forces in and out."

In keeping with Rumsfeld's "transformation" policy of converting the U.S. military from its heavy, largely static Cold War mode to smaller, lighter, more flexible and more rapidly deployed units, these forward outposts would be lightly garrisoned but capable of accommodating a large surge of American military power.

"That's what we did in (Operation) Iraqi Freedom," said retired Vice Adm. Arthur Cebrowski, Defense Department director of force transformation. "We had (a) garrison in Kuwait. We enormously strengthened that garrison and then we stepped off from that garrison against objectives (in Iraq)."

The U.S. military presence in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and the new location at Manas, Kyrgyzstan, near the Chinese border, for example, involves garrisons of about 3,000 troops each.

"We have no plans to put permanent bases in this part of the world," Rumsfeld said at a news conference in Uzbekistan last month.

But some big, permanent bases in the region 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.

Key to continued American involvement in the region would be not only the Camp Doha troop base and two air bases in Kuwait, but also the big Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, which has a 15,000-foot runway needed for air refueling tankers, and the U.S. Navy base at Juffair in Bahrain, headquarters for the fleets patrolling the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea.

According to Campbell, the viability of such U.S. outposts depends on whether the host country is a stable democracy and is willing to provide support and security.

"One of the problems we see with a variety of these bare-bones military facilities in the Central Asian republics and elsewhere in the Middle East is that some of those conditions do not exist," Campbell said. "Local populations, if not hostile, are uncomfortable with the implications of an American presence."

He predicted that some of these U.S. outposts "may be short-lived."

"The initial rationale for some of this global pre-positioning is to get closer to the flame - to be able to act, vis-a-vis Iraq and elsewhere," he said. "What's unclear to me is do we really want to get a lot closer? I think there are some very real hesitations associated with what happens when you put U.S. forces together in an environment. It can actually spur exactly the kinds of political consequences that you want to avoid."