Rethinking military bases.(National Security)

Thomas Donnelly, "Rebasing, Revisited," AEI National Security Outlook, December 2004 (aei.org)

Location, location, location, is the mantra AEI's Thomas Donnelly urges the Pentagon to adopt when it looks at how its forces should be deployed in the future. Since the time of Andrew Jackson, the U.S. has been following the same strategy in expanding military bases. "When one war ends," Donnelly writes, "the United States fortifies the furthest reaches of the final front lines and, when the next war begins, it builds new facilities to support still farther-flung operations." The challenge today is to think more clearly about the relative value of new and old facilities.

The Middle East, the front line in the war on terror, requires a "network or web of mutually supporting facilities that will serve three purposes: express the American long-term commitment to political change in the region, enable the deployment of forces to points of crisis, and sustain an expanding set of partnerships and alliances with friendly--and better yet, free--governments." Middle Eastern bases will effectively replace German bases.

Interestingly, Donnelly thinks the Far East and Indian Ocean represent a greater challenge than the Middle East. The voluntary surrender of our Filipino bases in the early 1990s meant that when China threatened Taiwan in 1995 and '96, it learned that "in a crisis, it would be two weeks before U.S. forces could influence the ...