Pentagon study recommends smaller, more mobile US forces for Europe

27/03/2001| IslamWeb

[Bush shakes hands after speaking to a Business Roundtable Meeting in the East Room of the White House on June 20. Read photo caption below]. 

WASHINGTON, (AFP) - A Pentagon study made public Friday recommends the US military move away from a large, fixed presence in Europe and Japan and instead use its bases there as staging areas for smaller, more mobile forces capable of responding quickly to crisis in other places.
In Europe, that could mean replacing the two heavy divisions there now with two or three deployable brigades -- a smaller force but one better suited for the kind of operations US forces are likely to be involved in, said David Gompert, who led the review of US conventional forces.
"I think we'd be fools to pull our forces out of Europe, since Europe is the place where we're most likely to find allies who are willing to deploy with us to contingencies in Europe or elsewhere, and that's more likely to happen if we have forces preparing with them," he said.
"But the forces we have in Europe ought to be forces that are deployable, and today's forces in Europe really aren't," he said. "They are heavier, slower, less-deployable forces of the sort that were there at the end of the Cold War."
In Asia, US forces will need to gain access to more and larger bases in southeast and southwest Asia to project power in the region, he said.
Gompert's study -- the latest to be unveiled of a series of reviews ordered by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld -- recommends new ways to arm, structure and deploy US forces in a changing world.
The changes are coming from three directions, the study concluded: the spread of missiles and other advanced technolgies that can be used to deny US forces access to bases, a "perhaps substantially larger adversary" like China, and a growing range of challenges below the level of full-scale war.
"We certainly have to plan our forces against the possibility that our hopes and our policies aimed at keeping China from becoming an adversary might fail, in which case China could become an adversary," said Gompert.
So, the study advocates the use of long-range precision weapons and smaller, rapidly deployable ground forces capable of gain access to a region quickly while defending themselves against missile attack.
With the large fixed overseas military presence vulnerable to missile attack, the study suggests a more fluid presence with forces flowing in and out when and where they are needed.
"If I look at the bases in Japan and Europe, I see them as having most value not for the protection of Japan and the protection of Europe, but for staging to the other areas where we're more likely to have to use force," Gompert said.
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PHOTO CAPTION:

A Pentagon-commissioned study released June 22, 2001 recommended that the U.S. military boost research and arms spending by 45 billion over six years to build long-range strike forces while cutting Cold War armor in Europe. Bush shakes hands after speaking to a Business Roundtable Meeting in the East Room of the White House on June 20. (Larry Downing/Reuters)
- Jun 22 7:59 PM ET
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