History was made on April 2, 2004, as the three ex-Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania formally joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Almost immediately, much to Moscow’s consternation, four Belgian fighter aircraft were positioned in Lithuania, from where they will patrol the airspace of the new members.
NATO officials insisted the deployment did not foreshadow new bases or a permanent troop presence on Russia’s frontier. But Kremlin concerns were not eased when Ukraine, which lies between other NATO countries and Russia’s Black Sea coast, agreed to allow NATO forces to transit its territory. Left unsaid was “to where?” Given the geography, the obvious answer is “to countries in the lower Caucasus and Central Asia” – Russia’s frontier.
A few days before and half a world away, on March 31, the US Navy made more history as it officially ended a 60-year presence at Puerto Rico’s Roosevelt Roads Naval Station. Envisaged in World War II as the linchpin in the Caribbean Basin defense system, in its last years the station supported naval exercises on nearby Vieques Island, which ended in May 2003.
These are but two of the latest changes in a worldwide reassessment by the Pentagon of where the United States wants air and naval bases and ground-force posts, access or basing rights, and transit agreements. Such reviews and realignments are not new; since 1988, the Pentagon has conducted four major rounds of base closings or restructurings of its domestic installations and will implement a fifth round in 2005. Foreign bases have undergone only one large restructuring round – after the 1991 Gulf War – but smaller adjustments have been made in response to both political-military circumstances (continually rotating a ground-force brigade into Kuwait in the 1990s to deter Saddam Hussein) and demands of host governments (consolidating marine bases on Okinawa and leaving navy facilities at Subic Bay in the Philippines).
The Pentagon hopes that its plan, the Global Posture Review, when fully implemented, will allow for rapid, tailored responses to contingencies that could arise from any one of a number of “vital national-security interests”. However, two of these circumstances are paramount: countering any new outbreaks (and containing existing ones) in the “global war on terror” – with Afghanistan, Iraq and the hunt for Osama bin Laden as subsets – and reliable access to energy resources.
The 2003 Defense Department’s “Base Structure Report” lists 702 foreign bases owned or leased by the Pentagon, with about 6,000 more installations in the US and its possessions. As vast as this network seems, the report inexplicably fails to include any locations in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kuwait, Qatar and Kosovo. And to these must now be added at least 14 garrisons in Iraq.
Then there is “under-reporting”. In Asia, the 10 US Marine Corps facilities on Okinawa, including the sprawling 485-hectare USMC Futenma Air Station, have only one entry. The array of intelligence gathering and other military installations in Britain are nowhere to be found in the report, possibly because they all are technically Royal Air Force facilities. Moreover, while a surface-based “boost-phase” missile defense system to counter North Korean missiles can be deployed on ships in the international waters of the Sea of Japan, effective coverage by a surface-based system to counter Iranian missiles would require launch sites in at least Afghanistan and Iraq (and possibly Turkmenistan), according to a Congressional Budget Office study completed in July.
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