Planting "lily pads" in the "gap".(American military deployment strategy)(Brief Article)

In his influential tome The Pentagon's New Map, Defense Department Futurist Thomas P.M. Barnett divides the globe between the "Functioning Core"--nations plugged into the emerging "global governance" network--and the "Non-integrating Gap"--nations yet to be absorbed into that network. The future mission of the military, Barnett insists, will be to expand the "core" by assimilating presently non-integrated nations into that global architecture. To carry out that strategy, the U.S. military is presently implementing what the Los Angeles Times calls "the greatest shake-up in America's overseas military deployment since the end of World War II."

"The days of the massive 'small-town U.S.A.' bases in Germany, Japan and South Korea are over," continues the Times. "Replacing them will be a global network of what Pentagon planners have dubbed 'lily pads'--small, no-frills bases in remote and dangerous corners of the world that can act as jumping-off points when crises arise." One of the first of those "lily pads" is ...