http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/17/opinion/17tue2.html Misconceived Military Shuffle
Published: August 17, 2004
The troop redeployment plan announced yesterday by President Bush makes little long-term strategic sense. It is certain to strain crucial alliances, increase overall costs and dangerously weaken deterrence on the Korean peninsula at the worst possible moment. Meanwhile, it will do nothing to address the military's most pressing current need: relieving the chronic strain on ground forces that has resulted from failing to anticipate the long, and largely unilateral, American occupation of Iraq.
Mr. Bush provided few new details yesterday, confirming only that over the next 10 years, about 60,000 to 70,000 uniformed troops, along with some 100,000 family members and civilian employees, would be transferred from bases and other military installations in Europe and Asia to the United States.
It has been known for some time that the Pentagon wants to pull back perhaps half of the roughly 70,000 soldiers now in Germany and a third of the nearly 40,000 troops in South Korea. Further cuts in Europe and Asia will be needed to reach Mr. Bush's totals, especially since some of those withdrawn from South Korea may be headed toward other parts of Asia. <snip>
Despite the Pentagon's denials, it seems deliberate that the two largest withdrawals have been proposed for countries that the Bush administration has had serious differences with in recent years, over Iraq in the German case, and over negotiating strategy with North Korea in the case of Seoul. Both countries have been working hard to patch up relations - South Korea is one of the few American allies with troops in Iraq - but the Pentagon does not seem interested in reciprocating.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6699-2004Aug16.html Wartime Withdrawal
Tuesday, August 17, 2004; Page A14
"IT'S IMPORTANT we send the right signals when we speak here in America," President Bush said yesterday during a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Cincinnati. He was admonishing his Democratic opponent, Sen. John F. Kerry, for saying that he would seek to reduce troop levels in Iraq within six months of taking office. "I think that sends the wrong signal," Mr. Bush said. That's a reasonable caution, in our view, though it blurs Mr. Kerry's proper caveat that his standards would be "the stability of Iraq, the ability to have the elections, and the training and transformation of the Iraqi security force itself."
What is strange, though, is that Mr. Bush delivered his warning and then, in the same speech, chose to advertise a new global troop deployment plan as a way to "bring home about 60,000 to 70,000 uniformed personnel." Once again Mr. Bush seeks to convince Americans that they can fight a global war on terrorism without the sacrifices that war normally entails. Already he has refused to shoulder fiscal responsibility for the military decisions he has made, sentencing the nation to growing deficits and punishing interest costs (see below). As the war in Iraq turned nastier and lasted longer than he predicted, Mr. Bush refused to support a needed increase in the size of the Army, ensuring that the pain of his miscalculations would increasingly fall on active-duty, National Guard and reserve soldiers sent into combat for more and longer stretches than expected. Now, even as he warns of an unending battle against terrorists, he promises that "our service members will have more time on the home front."
Mr. Bush's campaign speech yesterday in some ways sold short the results of a serious, years-long Pentagon review of military posture. The Pentagon says that Cold War structures must give way to a 21st-century force, and we agree. The armed forces should become more agile and deployable, as Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has been arguing from the beginning of this term. It may well make sense for troops to spend more time training in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, closer to today's battlegrounds, rather than in Germany. Some redeployments no doubt also make sense, to respond to changing threats, reduce fixed-base vulnerabilities or political irritants (as in Seoul), and take advantage of new technologies.
But in substance as well as rhetoric, the Bush plan raises questions. The military already has shrunk substantially in size and in its presence in Western Europe since the end of the Cold War. About 400,000 uniformed personnel out of 1.5 million serve abroad, but about half of those are in or around the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq. Now the administration would pull out about one-third of the 37,500 troops stationed in South Korea and about half of the 100,000 based in Europe.
This is a particularly bad idea in Asia. North Korea has pressed for U.S. troop withdrawals for years; now that it is misbehaving in the nuclear field, it receives a reward, and for no concessions. China is increasingly throwing its weight around Southeast Asia; countries there that want a U.S. counterbalance, even if they do not always dare say so, will become less confident. Whoever is president in the next four years will be challenged by China's anger at an increasingly assertive Taiwan; reducing U.S. troop strength in the neighborhood cannot help him cope with that challenge. <snip>
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