Changing DOD's global posture an 'enormous undertaking'

  • Published
  • By Army Sgt. 1st Class Doug Sample
  • American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON (AFPN) --  Pentagon officials’ move to change their global footprint will be an “enormous undertaking” that will be “unprecedented,” the Defense Department’s director of strategy on global posture said here March 17.

Barry Pavel said this could well be the first time that any country has purposely designed a new arrangement of its overseas forces and capabilities on a global basis.

“So the impact will be felt across the defense establishment, and in some cases across our country and across other countries,” he said.

The repositioning of the U.S. military worldwide is part of DOD’s transformation into a lighter, more agile force, Mr. Pavel said. Pentagon officials want to station these forces in places where they will be rapidly deployable to potential worldwide hotspots.

By repositioning the overseas force, Mr. Pavel said, officials are looking “10 to 20 years ahead” to the challenges they may encounter while trying to design military capabilities to accommodate the new world they face. That new world, he said, emerged after the Sept.-11 attacks and called for a U.S. military force different from the one built by Cold War-era thinking.

During the Cold War, the military inherited a global posture, where, in some cases, the United States had forces in a particular region or country that were “tied to operate in that country, or in that region, and in some cases for one particular mission,” he said.

Those forces were heavily concentrated in Europe and northeast Asia, and “those concentrations were tied to the contingencies we fully expected,” Mr. Pavel said. But in the post-9-11 world, “we can’t afford one force for one country and the rest of our forces for the rest of the world,” he said.

U.S. forces have to be “flexible,” Mr. Pavel said, and able to act on a global basis.

“We don’t know where we are going to be attacked, (and) we don’t know where we will want to protect our interest,” he said.

Mr. Pavel said North Korea’s announcement that it has nuclear weapons reaffirms the direction DOD officials are taking with changing their global posture.

“In this case, the announcement isn’t really a surprise, but it is a very important factor that I think our new global posture helps us to address better,” he said. “We are now in a new era where we don’t know where we will (need) to deploy our forces, so we can’t afford to tie into (or) overconcentrate our forces for particular scenarios. We need to broaden our coverage; we need to diversify our access so that we can go anywhere with any forces we need, to deal with whatever circumstances we face.”

Mr. Pavel said the new global posture will affect some military facilities overseas. Much like the Base Realignment and Closure process stateside, the repositioning of forces will mean that some overseas military bases and facilities will close.

The military likely will keep many of its large main operating bases, and may consolidate others. Forward-deployed locations and central service locations also are a military priority. He also suggested that military facilities with advanced training and logistical capabilities such as Ramstein Air Base, Germany, and the Army’s training complex in Graffenweir, Germany, also are high on the Pentagon’s list of facilities it will continue to need.

But the repositioning of forces could mean that about 70,000 servicemembers and more than 100,000 family members will be brought home from overseas locations, Mr. Pavel said.

He said that changes already have begun. The United States has scaled back its presence in Saudi Arabia, which he said has “helped U.S.-Saudi relations,” and in South Korea, U.S. forces are moving further south and out of Seoul.

“We have to have a global force,” Mr. Pavel said. “We can’t afford to ‘wall off’ or tie our forces down to a particular scenario or particular missions.”