« Full Disclosure | Main | Hypocracy, Thy Name is Drum »

August 17, 2004

Transforming the Force

File this report under About Time: President Bush is planning to bring some 70,000 American troops home from overseas. Sadly for the antiwar bunch, the President is talking about troops in Europe and East Asia, not Iraq or Afghanistan. But for the rest of us, this is very good news. The military has remained in its Cold War positions for over a decade due only to inertia. While the troops in Germany were of some use for our missions in the Balkans, the focus has now moved to Southwest Asia, and that means troops in Germany and Korea are well out of position to support that fight. Of course, that could raise the question: why are we bringing the troops home, rather than moving them to bases closer to Southwest Asia?

The U.S. military doesn't just need to redeploy; it needs to transform. During the Cold War, we just needed to be able to get to Europe and fight the red menace. Thanks to already-deployed forces and POMCUS, all we really needed to do to get to the fight was fly personnel to Europe. That led to machines like the Abrams, the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, and the Crusader. All good vehicles, but all very heavy. Since we didn't need to ship them anywhere, that really wasn't an issue. They provided the capabilities we needed for the European battlefield. Those capabilities, while still valuable, are of far less utility when dealing with low intensity conflict. (Which is why SecDef Rumsfeld cancelled the Crusader.) For our current war, deployability is the sine qua non of successful operations.

The enemy we currently fight does not possess great firepower, but he can crop up virtually anywhere, anytime. It is therefore imperative that the U.S. military be able to get to the battlefield quickly. If a terrorist network crops up in Sudan, it is far more important that we can put an effective force on the ground quickly than that we have a heavy combat force available that we can eventually move into position. By the time we get heavy forces into position, the enemy may not be there any longer. Strategic agility must now be our watchword.

Moving troops back to the United States can help with this mission. The act of moving the troops doesn't help, but if our troops are almost solely located in CONUS, we will have little alternative but to redesign the force for greater strategic mobility. Not to do so would be to accept our decline as a world power and would cede the initiative to our enemy. And the Bush administration has already recognized this requirement, having made military transformation a cornerstone of its defense platform. They still need to prove they can do it wisely and well, but this decision is a good first step towards building a post-Cold War military.