The U.S. has enjoyed global military dominance for decades. But in the face of emerging threats, some say a new strategy is in order.
Kim Hjelmgaard,
USA TODAY
Feb. 25, 2021
MANAMA, Bahrain – After weeks at sea, hundreds of young Americans shed their military uniforms for baseball caps and T-shirts and poured forth from the main gates of the heavily fortified U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet base, a major hub for U.S. naval forces in the Middle East.
The aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln had just docked in Bahrain, a small Arab island nation on the southwestern coast of the Persian Gulf. The disembarking U.S. service members were intent on cutting loose for a respite from their national security mission patrolling one of the world's busiest and most volatile shipping lanes.
About 200 miles to the east, across a body of water that has seen many tense naval encounters and acts of sabotage, sat America's longtime adversary Iran.
It was November 2019.
A few months later, the U.S. and Iran would nearly enter into an open confrontation after Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps fired ballistic missiles at two Iraqi military bases housing U.S. soldiers. The attack was retaliation for the Pentagon's assassination of senior Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani.
For the sailors, Bahrain's "American Alley" was a taste of home: a thoroughfare of fast-food restaurants and shops catering to Westerners. The sailors clutched iPhones and Starbucks coffee and fended off attempts by locals to sell them watches and other trinkets.
For America's military planners back in Washington, the sailors represented a longstanding bedrock of U.S. national security: one of the Pentagon's hundreds of footholds all over the planet.
MANAMA, Bahrain – After weeks at sea, hundreds of young Americans shed their military uniforms for baseball caps and T-shirts and poured forth from the main gates of the heavily fortified U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet base, a major hub for U.S. naval forces in the Middle East.
The aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln had just docked in Bahrain, a small Arab island nation on the southwestern coast of the Persian Gulf. The disembarking U.S. service members were intent on cutting loose for a respite from their national security mission patrolling one of the world's busiest and most volatile shipping lanes.
About 200 miles to the east, across a body of water that has seen many tense naval encounters and acts of sabotage, sat America's longtime adversary Iran.
It was November 2019.
A few months later, the U.S. and Iran would nearly enter into an open confrontation after Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps fired ballistic missiles at two Iraqi military bases housing U.S. soldiers. The attack was retaliation for the Pentagon's assassination of senior Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani.
For the sailors, Bahrain's "American Alley" was a taste of home: a thoroughfare of fast-food restaurants and shops catering to Westerners. The sailors clutched iPhones and Starbucks coffee and fended off attempts by locals to sell them watches and other trinkets.
For America's military planners back in Washington, the sailors represented a longstanding bedrock of U.S. national security: one of the Pentagon's hundreds of footholds all over the planet.
Sea change in security threats
For decades, the U.S. has enjoyed global military dominance, an achievement that has underpinned its influence, national security and efforts at promoting democracy.
The Department of Defense spends more than $700 billion a year on weaponry and combat preparedness – more than the next 10 countries combined, according to economic think tank the Peter G. Peterson Foundation.
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The U.S. military's reach is vast and empire-like.
In Germany, about 45,000 Americans go to work each day around the Kaiserslautern Military Community, a network of U.S. Army and Air Force bases that accommodates schools, housing complexes, dental clinics, hospitals, community centers, sports clubs, food courts, military police and retail stores. About 60,000 American military and civilian personnel are stationed in Japan; another 30,000 in South Korea. More than 6,000 U.S. military personnel are spread across Africa, according to the Department of Defense.
Yet today, amid a sea change in security threats, America's military might overseas may be less relevant than it once was, say some security analysts, defense officials and former and active U.S. military service members.
The most urgent threats to the U.S., they say, are increasingly nonmilitary in nature. Among them: cyberattacks; disinformation; China's economic dominance; climate change; and disease outbreaks such as COVID-19, which ravaged the U.S. economy like no event since the Great Depression.
Trita Parsi, co-founder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a Washington-based think tank that advocates for U.S. military restraint overseas, said maintaining a large fighting force thousands of miles from U.S. shores is expensive, unwieldy and anachronistic.
"It was designed for a world that still faced another military hegemon," Parsi said. "Now, pandemics, climate chaos, artificial intelligence and 5G are far more important for American national security than having 15 bases in the Indian Ocean."
It may also be counterproductive. Parsi said terrorism recruitment in the Middle East has correlated with U.S. base presence, for example.
Meanwhile, American white supremacists, not foreign terrorists, present the gravest terrorism threat to the U.S., according to a report from the Department of Homeland Security issued in October – three months before a violent mob stormed the Capitol.
Delivering his first major foreign policy speech as commander-in-chief, President Joe Biden said earlier this month that he instructed Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to lead a "Global Posture Review of our forces so that our military footprint is appropriately aligned with our foreign policy and national security priorities."
How big is the US military investment?
At the end of World War II, the U.S. had fewer than 80 overseas military bases, the majority of them in the allies' vanquished foes Germany and Japan.
Today there are up to 800, according to data from the Pentagon and an outside expert, David Vine, an anthropology professor at American University in Washington. About 220,000 U.S. military and civilian personnel serve in more than 150 countries, the Defense Department says.
China, by contrast, the world's second-largest economy and by all accounts the United States' biggest competitor, has just a single official overseas military base, in Djibouti, on the Horn of Africa. (Camp Lemonnier, the largest U.S. base in Africa, is just miles away.) Britain, France and Russia have up to 60 overseas bases combined, according to Vine. At sea, the U.S. has 11 aircraft carriers. China has two. Russia has one.
The exact number of American bases is difficult to determine due to secrecy, bureaucracy and mixed definitions. The 800 bases figure is inflated, some argue, by the Pentagon's treatment of multiple base sites near one another as separate installations. USA TODAY has determined the dates for when more than 350 of these bases opened. It's not clear how many of the rest are actively used.
"They're counting every little patch, every antenna on the top of a mountain with an 8-foot fence around it," said Philip M. Breedlove, a retired four-star general in the U.S. Air Force who also served as NATO's Supreme Allied Commander for Europe. Breedlove estimated there are a few dozen "major" U.S. overseas bases indispensable to U.S. national security.
Yet there's no question that the U.S. investment in defense and its international military footprint has been expanding for decades.
When the Korean War came to an end in 1953, eight years before President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned in his farewell address of a growing military-industrial complex, the Pentagon was spending about 11% of GDP, or $300 billion, on the military, according to the Defense Department and a manual calculation by USA TODAY. Today the Pentagon easily allocates more than twice as much on defense spending each year, adjusted for inflation, even if the overall budgetary figure represents a far lower percentage of U.S. GDP at just 3%.
At the end of World War II, the U.S. had fewer than 80 overseas military bases, the majority of them in the allies' vanquished foes Germany and Japan.
Today there are up to 800, according to data from the Pentagon and an outside expert, David Vine, an anthropology professor at American University in Washington. About 220,000 U.S. military and civilian personnel serve in more than 150 countries, the Defense Department says.
China, by contrast, the world's second-largest economy and by all accounts the United States' biggest competitor, has just a single official overseas military base, in Djibouti, on the Horn of Africa. (Camp Lemonnier, the largest U.S. base in Africa, is just miles away.) Britain, France and Russia have up to 60 overseas bases combined, according to Vine. At sea, the U.S. has 11 aircraft carriers. China has two. Russia has one.
The exact number of American bases is difficult to determine due to secrecy, bureaucracy and mixed definitions. The 800 bases figure is inflated, some argue, by the Pentagon's treatment of multiple base sites near one another as separate installations. USA TODAY has determined the dates for when more than 350 of these bases opened. It's not clear how many of the rest are actively used.
"They're counting every little patch, every antenna on the top of a mountain with an 8-foot fence around it," said Philip M. Breedlove, a retired four-star general in the U.S. Air Force who also served as NATO's Supreme Allied Commander for Europe. Breedlove estimated there are a few dozen "major" U.S. overseas bases indispensable to U.S. national security.
Yet there's no question that the U.S. investment in defense and its international military footprint has been expanding for decades.
When the Korean War came to an end in 1953, eight years before President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned in his farewell address of a growing military-industrial complex, the Pentagon was spending about 11% of GDP, or $300 billion, on the military, according to the Defense Department and a manual calculation by USA TODAY. Today the Pentagon easily allocates more than twice as much on defense spending each year, adjusted for inflation, even if the overall budgetary figure represents a far lower percentage of U.S. GDP at just 3%.
COVID-19 kills and costs more
Even as the U.S. spends more on defense, some experts say the U.S. military has been operating under a national security strategy that is remarkably unchanged since World War II and thus is ill-suited to newer, more dynamic threats.
"A lot of our military presence around the world is now really just out of habit," said Benjamin H. Friedman, policy director of Defense Priorities, a Washington think tank that advocates for a smaller world role for the U.S. military. "If at one point there was a strategic justification for it, often it no longer has it."
Benjamin H. Friedman, policy director of Defense Priorities
A lot of our military presence around the world is now really just out of habit. If at one point there was a strategic justification for it, often it no longer has it.
Retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. David Barno and political scientist Nora Bensahel recently suggested the Defense Department should prepare for smaller budgets as money is shifted to other priorities.
"The pandemic has suddenly and vividly demonstrated that a large, forward deployed military cannot effectively protect Americans from non-traditional threats to their personal security and the American way of life," they wrote on the foreign policy website War on the Rocks. "In a deeply interconnected world, geography matters far less, and the security afforded by America's far-flung military forces has been entirely irrelevant in this disastrous crisis."
One stark illustration of how U.S. national security priorities may be out of sync with the times: Since 9/11, wars and various American anti-terrorism raids and military activity around the world have taken the lives of more than 7,000 U.S. troops and cost the federal government $6.4 trillion, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project.
As bad as that is, in less than 5% of that time, the coronavirus pandemic has accounted for more than 70 times the human toll as the U.S. exceeds 500,000 dead – also with at least a $6 trillion price tag, according to an analysis of Congress and Federal Reserve allocations. (The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has estimated that the pandemic has cost the U.S. at least $8 trillion.)
But preventing such deaths may not simply be a matter of taking money away from the Pentagon but shifting focus within it.
For instance, White House senior COVID-19 adviser Andy Slavitt announced Feb. 5 that more than 1,000 active-duty troops would begin supporting vaccination sites around the U.S.
Tom Spoehr, a retired Army lieutenant general and defense expert at The Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank, notes that the U.S. military has helped with international disease outbreaks in the past.
After an Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014, the Pentagon sent troops, supplies and contractors to help stem a disease that killed more than 11,000 people and cost the economies of Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia an estimated $53 billion.
"We don't have the luxury of just saying, 'OK, the military wasn't that useful last year so we're going to turn it in and get an army of doctors instead," Spoehr said.
Spoehr said it's important the U.S. takes a wide view of national security that encompasses conflict and terrorism as well as pandemics, climate change and cybersecurity and overseas bases and troops have a role to play.
Climate chaos leading to social chaos
Even as the U.S. spends more on defense, some experts say the U.S. military has been operating under a national security strategy that is remarkably unchanged since World War II and thus is ill-suited to newer, more dynamic threats.
"A lot of our military presence around the world is now really just out of habit," said Benjamin H. Friedman, policy director of Defense Priorities, a Washington think tank that advocates for a smaller world role for the U.S. military. "If at one point there was a strategic justification for it, often it no longer has it."
Benjamin H. Friedman, policy director of Defense Priorities
A lot of our military presence around the world is now really just out of habit. If at one point there was a strategic justification for it, often it no longer has it.
Retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. David Barno and political scientist Nora Bensahel recently suggested the Defense Department should prepare for smaller budgets as money is shifted to other priorities.
"The pandemic has suddenly and vividly demonstrated that a large, forward deployed military cannot effectively protect Americans from non-traditional threats to their personal security and the American way of life," they wrote on the foreign policy website War on the Rocks. "In a deeply interconnected world, geography matters far less, and the security afforded by America's far-flung military forces has been entirely irrelevant in this disastrous crisis."
One stark illustration of how U.S. national security priorities may be out of sync with the times: Since 9/11, wars and various American anti-terrorism raids and military activity around the world have taken the lives of more than 7,000 U.S. troops and cost the federal government $6.4 trillion, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project.
As bad as that is, in less than 5% of that time, the coronavirus pandemic has accounted for more than 70 times the human toll as the U.S. exceeds 500,000 dead – also with at least a $6 trillion price tag, according to an analysis of Congress and Federal Reserve allocations. (The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has estimated that the pandemic has cost the U.S. at least $8 trillion.)
But preventing such deaths may not simply be a matter of taking money away from the Pentagon but shifting focus within it.
For instance, White House senior COVID-19 adviser Andy Slavitt announced Feb. 5 that more than 1,000 active-duty troops would begin supporting vaccination sites around the U.S.
Tom Spoehr, a retired Army lieutenant general and defense expert at The Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank, notes that the U.S. military has helped with international disease outbreaks in the past.
After an Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014, the Pentagon sent troops, supplies and contractors to help stem a disease that killed more than 11,000 people and cost the economies of Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia an estimated $53 billion.
"We don't have the luxury of just saying, 'OK, the military wasn't that useful last year so we're going to turn it in and get an army of doctors instead," Spoehr said.
Spoehr said it's important the U.S. takes a wide view of national security that encompasses conflict and terrorism as well as pandemics, climate change and cybersecurity and overseas bases and troops have a role to play.
Climate chaos leading to social chaos
In 2017, the Trump administration dropped the Obama administration's designation of climate change as a national security threat. The omission came even though many members of Congress, U.N. Security Council principals, U.S. allies and dozens of security think tanks and research institutes say climate poses a potentially "catastrophic" threat to national and global security. (In one of his first executive orders, Biden re-elevated climate change as a national security priority.)
The World Health Organization estimates that climate change – ranging from insidious heat to flooding – already contributes to about 150,000 global deaths each year. Mark Carney, United Nations envoy for climate action and finance, has warned that the world is heading for death rates equivalent to the COVID-19 pandemic every year by the middle of this century unless drastic action is taken.
Along with wildfires, hurricanes and droughts, these natural disasters destabilize countries, including the U.S., by causing disease, food shortages, social and political
The World Health Organization estimates that climate change – ranging from insidious heat to flooding – already contributes to about 150,000 global deaths each year. Mark Carney, United Nations envoy for climate action and finance, has warned that the world is heading for death rates equivalent to the COVID-19 pandemic every year by the middle of this century unless drastic action is taken.
Along with wildfires, hurricanes and droughts, these natural disasters destabilize countries, including the U.S., by causing disease, food shortages, social and political
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