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Tangle
over US bases
By David
Isenberg
Earlier this month, the
Commission on Review of Overseas Military Facility
Structure of the United States, more commonly
known as the Overseas Basing Commission (OBC),
released a report to President George W Bush and
the US Congress.
Although this is not the
final report - that is due no later than August 15
- the contents revealed too much for the likings
of the Pentagon, which claimed the report
contained classified information and forced the
commission to pull it off its website.
"I'll be quite honest. I think the
Overseas Basing Commission was unhelpful in many
respects," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said
in testimony before a separate base-closing
commission that is reviewing his recommendations
on closing, consolidating and reorganizing
domestic military bases.
The forced
removal of the report, however, did not accomplish
much as the full report was subsequently posted
online by the Federation of American Scientists'
Project on Government Secrecy.
The OBC
report is the latest in a series of reports over
the past four years looking at the ongoing
reconfiguration of the American military overseas
basing structure in the post-Cold War and
post-September 11 era. Previous reviews included
the 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), the
2004 Global Posture Review, the Integrated Global
Presence and Basing Strategy, as well as the
ongoing QDR.
The commission's task is to
independently assess whether the current overseas
basing structure is adequate to execute current
missions and to assess the feasibility of
closures, realignments or the establishment of new
installations overseas to meet emerging defense
requirements.
While the OBC endorses much
of what the Pentagon is already doing, such as the
movement of a heavy brigade out of South Korea and
the shifting of forces remaining there south of
the Han River, it had reservations on a number of
other issues.
For example, it believes
that a brigade of army heavy forces should be kept
in Central Europe. And it wrote, "Nor are we sure
that current discussions on relocating US forces
on Okinawa [Japan] adequately address strategic
concerns for US security interests in East Asia."
The report also found that much of what
the Pentagon plans to do in the way of
redeployment in the future is overly ambitious. It
found:
Service budgets are not robust
enough to execute the repositioning of forces,
build the facilities necessary to accommodate
the forces, build the expanding facilities at
new locations (FOS [Forward Operating Site] and
CSL [Cooperative Security Location]) overseas,
not even considering the budget demands for the
other simultaneous actions being undertaken by
the services. Although the estimates for
rebasing are lacking in specificity, this
commission estimate of between $9 billion to $20
billion, when all is said and done, may not be
executable without an increase in the DOD
[Department of Defense] top line well beyond
what is currently anticipated in the out-year
budgets. According to Larry Korb, a
former assistant secretary of defense in the
Ronald Reagan administration and now a senior
fellow at the Center for American Progress, a
liberal think-tank in Washington, DC, the real
reason the Pentagon was upset is that the
commission's report undermined the rationale for
removing troops from Europe, as recommended in
last year's Global Posture Review. Reached by
phone by Asia Times Online, Korb noted that two of
the units recommended for redeployment from Europe
back to the US, the 1st Armored and the 1st
Infantry, had already been to Iraq twice.
Undoubtedly, one of the commission's
points that irks the Pentagon is its criticism
that it is redeploying forces without considering
all the relevant factors. In a May 9 press
conference, Al Cornella, OBC chairman, said:
On geopolitical consideration, the
commission has determined that the DOD's IGPBS
[integrated global presence and basing strategy]
does not adequately address current and future
political, geopolitical and strategic needs, for
two reasons. First, it is the view of the
commission that IGPBS is too narrowly based on
military concerns. While the commission wishes
to commend the Department of Defense on the
design of IGPBS, which is a strategy directly
aimed at addressing the matrix of existing and
emerging threats, it is clear that IGPBS has
been almost exclusively designed by and for the
military. In this present era of a global war on
terror, the indisputable global competition in
defense, intelligence, diplomacy, commerce and
energy matters, the commission feels that it
would be wise to broaden the underlying
assumptions, scope and participation in the
IGPBS process to include vital players involved
in other areas of our national security.
In regard to timing and synchronization,
the commission feels that the IGPBS should be
modified as it relates to more particular
matters of the proposed timing and
synchronization. The commission has concluded
that while IGPBS is an ambitious plan to
restructure our global presence and posture, it
does so without fully taking into account other
dynamic, ongoing and in some cases unpredictable
changes. If the IGPBS is based on the 2001
Quadrennial Defense Review, or the QDR, why
would you not wait for the results of the 2005
QDR, scheduled to be completed this fall, or the
2005 Mobility Capabilities Study, which is to be
completed in June, before announcing the
movement of forces. According to Chuck
Pena, director of defense policy studies at the
Cato Institute in Washington, "The QDR should have
been the first step. There is some validity to the
viewpoint that these are taking place in the wrong
order."
John Pike, director of
globalsecurity.org, a research group on military
affairs in Alexandria, Virginia, said, "It's about
as explicit a rebuke of the DOD as you can get and
still be printed. It had a level of candor that
you seldom find coming out of the Government
Printing Office."
He noted that the
commission report "is basically beating nothing
with something", meaning that its detailed report
exposes many vague, uncorroborated assertions that
were in the Global Posture Review report issued
last year by the Pentagon.
Indeed, much of
the planning for redeployments is taking place in
a vacuum. For example, the 2005 Base Realignment
and Closure (BRAC) Commission process will help
realign the domestic US infrastructure for forces
that are returning to or departing from US
territory. But the initial recommendations were
not released until May 16, and the commission's
recommendations to the president will not be
prepared until September 8. Depending on whether
the president approves or disapproves and
subsequently, when Congress approves, the process
could extend until December this year.
David Isenberg, a senior analyst
with the Washington-based British American
Security Information Council (BASIC), has a wide
background in arms control and national security
issues. The views expressed are his own.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact us for information
on sales, syndication and republishing.) |
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