Fwd: the real future

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Interesting account of the new US deployment strategy:

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Hayden, Nancy Kay" <[hidden email]>
Date: Wed May 28, 2003  9:04:17  AM America/Denver
Subject: the real future

Excellent article from WSJ on the real scenario wrt terrorism that seem
likely to play out - all the emphasis in DHS on WMD aside.  I for one am
glad that someone in the military is thinking about the more mundane but
more probable future....which we are very ill-equipped to deal with.  
Seems
like a good problem to evaluate using networks and "complexity" science
-
lots of adapting behaviors, self-organizing in response to that adaptive
behavior, and efforts to shape the hearts and minds of those in the
countries along the 'arc of concern'.

Wall Street Journal
May 27, 2003
Pg. 1
Pentagon Prepares To Scatter Soldiers In Remote Corners
Shift in Strategy Plays Down China, Calls Attention to Fighting Terror
By Greg Jaffe, Staff Reporter Of The Wall Street Journal
MANAS AIR FIELD, Kyrgyzstan -- At this long-abandoned Soviet bomber
base,
the future of the U.S. military is taking shape.
Kyrgyzstan allowed the U.S. and its coalition partners to station jets
here
in December 2001 to fight the Afghanistan war. Even though it has been
more
than two months since the planes dropped a bomb, U.S. forces aren't
preparing to pull out. Last month, the Pentagon leased 750 acres of
land now
populated with shoeless shepherds and curious children who race past on
horses without saddles. Kyrgyz officials calculated the rent based on
the
amount of wheat the land could produce.
This summer the U.S. will begin installing water and sewer lines on the
property, 300 yards from the rows of tents where U.S. troops now live.
Next
year, plans call for erecting mobile homes, temporary offices and maybe
a
swimming pool. No one in the Pentagon can say how long the U.S. will
stay at
this base. But Col. James Forrest, the base's deputy commander,
acknowledges, "this place is so deep into Central Asia you'd hate to
lose
it."
The U.S. presence in Kyrgyzstan reflects a major change over the past 18
months in the U.S. vision of who its enemies are and how to confront
them.
This shift is pushing U.S. forces into far more remote and dangerous
corners
of the world.
At the outset of the Bush administration, Pentagon planners and
national-security thinkers assumed China was the threat the U.S. would
worry
about for years to come, and the military was adjusting accordingly.
Today
that notion has been replaced by a radically different view. The
danger, it
is now assumed, lies in what Pentagon officials call an "arc of
instability"
that runs through the Caribbean Rim, Africa, the Caucasus, Central
Asia, the
Middle East, South Asia and North Korea. Worries about this arc of
countries, largely cut off from economic globalization, increasingly are
influencing how the military trains, what it buys and where it puts
forces.
The new strategy carries risks. The more thinly U.S. forces are spread
around the globe, the less prepared they will be to fight a war against
a
major power. U.S. officials are betting they will have time to react if
a
major power emerges as a threat.
As the military becomes easier to deploy and closer to dangerous
regions of
the world, it's also likely to become far busier. Some military
officials
fret about the U.S. becoming embroiled in several simultaneous
conflicts. In
many of its fights, the U.S. could be reliant on new friends with poor
human-rights records and far-different values.
Pentagon officials, however, insist the military must wade into this new
world. "The unprecedented destructive power of terrorists -- and the
recognition that you will have to deal with them before they deal with
you
-- means that we will have to be out acting in the world in places that
are
very unfamiliar to us. We will have to make them familiar," says Andy
Hoehn,
the deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy.
Military planning for the world as the U.S. now sees it goes on inside a
warren of Pentagon cubicles with views of an alley stacked with trash
and
wooden pallets. A team of 10 analysts, led by Mr. Hoehn, has been
toiling
since last summer on a new posture for U.S. forces. Their work has been
heavily influenced by the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
For the first few months, these planners didn't even think about where
they
wanted to put troops. "We spent a lot of time initially on what's
changed in
the world and what's changing in how we think about warfare," Mr. Hoehn
says.
Their conclusions, which so far have received little attention, amount
to
one of the biggest shifts in U.S. military thinking in the past 50
years.
Since World War II, the Pentagon has focused on preparing for the next
big
war. First it was the big war against the Soviet hordes. In the early
1990s,
the "big one" gave way to two smaller "big ones" that could be waged
simultaneously in Iraq and North Korea. Then, in 2000, Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld was pushing the military to focus more on a
confrontation
with a resurgent and technologically advanced China.
Smaller Fights
Now Mr. Rumsfeld, chastened by the unprecedented power of terrorists
and the
threat of weapons of mass destruction falling into the wrong hands, is
preparing U.S. forces for a future that could involve lots of small,
dirty
fights in remote and dangerous places. The new strategy assumes that the
U.S. is far more likely to send troops into countries that are
disconnected
from the global economy, either because they reject the whole concept or
because they lack the resources to compete, says Thomas Barnett, a
Defense
Department analyst. "Disconnectedness defines danger," he says.
To strike faster at these remote hotspots -- or prevent them from
becoming
hotspots -- Mr. Rumsfeld is pushing U.S. forces out of their big
garrison
bases in the U.S., Germany and South Korea, three countries that
typically
host more than 80% of the 1.4 million U.S. troops. Instead, he
envisions a
force that will rotate through a large number of bases scattered
throughout
the world in places including Kyrgyzstan, the Philippines, Singapore,
the
Horn of Africa and Eastern Europe.
In some of these places, the U.S. might post a few dozen troops who
would
keep the base in good condition and maintain equipment for use by troops
that occasionally arrive for training. In case of war, these forward
bases
could be used as launching pads for strikes elsewhere. Current bases in
Romania, the Philippines or Kyrgyzstan might fall into this category.
Other bases will be far more austere. The U.S. might rotate through
these
facilities once every year or two for training or for attacking
terrorists.
Such bases might be in places such as Azerbaijan, Mali, Kenya or the
Horn of
Africa.
The goal is to cut the time it takes the U.S. to respond with an air,
ground
and naval force from months to days or even hours.
Already the new strategy is driving the military to invest in new types
of
equipment. In the war with Iraq the U.S. used high-speed, 100-foot
catamaran
ships to ferry Army tanks and ammunition from Qatar to Kuwait. The
ships can
travel 2,000 miles in less than 48 hours, twice the speed of the
Pentagon's
regular cargo ships, and carry enough equipment to support about 5,000
soldiers. Because they have a shallow draft, the boats can unload in
rudimentary ports, allowing troops to land closer to the fight.
The Pentagon has only three of these ships, made by Bollinger/Incat USA
LLC,
based in Louisiana. But it expects to order as many as a dozen more
starting
in the 2005-06 budget, and it is pushing allies to buy similar vessels.
"These ships are really redefining how we look at the world," says one
senior military official working with Mr. Hoehn's team of analysts.
The most pronounced changes are in the Army. For years the Army's annual
computer-simulated war game has focused on fighting a major war. This
year,
however, the forces didn't face any single simulated enemy. Instead,
they
juggled military actions in the Middle East, Southeast Asia and the
Caucasus, while monitoring unrest in Latin America and Africa.
In the simulated Southeast Asia conflict, set in 2015, a radical Islamic
separatist group, supported by funds from the Middle East and the drug
trade, seized large parts of a country allied with the U.S. Those parts
of
the country became breeding grounds for terrorists. U.S. forces swooped
in
quickly. They appeared to drive the enemy from the capital within days
and
then mounted attacks on rebel strongholds elsewhere.
As soon as U.S. troops left the capital, however, the rebels there --
many
of whom had simply taken off their uniforms and melded into the city of
five
million -- re-emerged to storm the parliament, the government television
station and the airport. When U.S. forces counterattacked, these
guerrillas
once again slipped into the shadows.
"We were never able to set up the conditions to make these disaffected
people fewer in number. We won and then we found we owned this
nightmarish
place," says retired Vice Adm. Lyle Bien, who played commander of U.S.
forces in Asia.
The experience left a few, such as Adm. Bien, believing that the best
course
of action would have been not intervening at all. "We're developing a
force
that makes it almost too easy to intervene," says Adm. Bien. "I am
concerned
about America pounding herself out."
Other participants insisted the military needed to develop a broader
array
of policing and nation-building skills to deal with turmoil both before
a
conflict begins and after it ends.
No Game
In Kyrgyzstan, many problems that commanders wrestled with in the
simulated
war game -- troubles with partners' differing values, corruption,
Islamic
extremism and poverty -- are playing out in real life.
The country boasts the largest number of U.S. and coalition troops,
about
1,500, of any nation in Central Asia outside Afghanistan. It's probably
the
most progressive of the five former Soviet states in Central Asia. It
was
the first among them to join the World Trade Organization, and it has a
relatively free press.
U.S. officials note that Kyrgyz President Askar Akayev keeps a bust of
Thomas Jefferson in his office and quotes him frequently when talking to
foreigners. Unfortunately, he is still struggling with some of the basic
tenets of Jeffersonian democracy. In 2001, Mr. Akayev jailed his chief
political rival, Feliks Kulov, for 10 years on corruption charges. In
March
2002, Kyrgyz forces opened fire on demonstrators near Osh, in southern
Kyrgyzstan, killing five. The shootings set off protests that virtually
shut
down the capital.
"We are facing some problems with democracy and human rights," says
Foreign
Minister Askar Aitmatov. "But our country is evolving. Institutions are
changing."
The U.S. military has tried to wall itself off from its messy
surroundings.
At first, American military police ran regular patrols through the
nearby
city of Marble, handing out candy to kids in the street. But the patrols
were canceled when the Americans stopped bringing sweets and the
children
began throwing stones at them. Today, U.S. troops are allowed off the
base
only on infrequent "cultural tours" or for organized community service,
such
as a recent effort to refurbish a school near the base.
Still, U.S. commanders can't keep the less attractive aspects of the
outside
world from intruding. Drunk townsmen and impoverished children approach
the
guards at the base's gate begging for money or food. "They hide their
shoes
in the woods," complains Airman First Class Kyle Richards, who stands
guard.
U.S. base commanders had to begin dumping their garbage far from town
after
local papers printed embarrassing pictures of townspeople hoisting
discarded
packages of hot dogs and Aunt Jemima maple syrup like trophies.
Corruption also is a problem. On any given day someone from the airport
authority might stride up to the U.S. or coalition commanders and demand
more airport fees, says U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Tommy Goode, the base's
coalition coordinator.
Kyrgyz opposition leaders complain that fuel for the coalition planes,
which
costs more than $25 million a year, is provided by a company owned by
President Akayev's son-in-law. The contract was put out for competitive
bids, say U.S. and Kyrgyz officials. But Lt. Col. Goode concedes that
all of
the airport contractors have some connection to senior government
officials
or the president. "We have to work within that system," he says.
For Pentagon officials back in Washington, the critical question is
whether
the U.S. military presence here will lead to a more stable and
democratic
Central Asia.
It's too early to tell. Like many of its neighbors, Kyrgyzstan worries
about
Islamic fundamentalists. In 1999, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, or
IMU, launched an incursion into the country from neighboring
Tajikistan. The
Kyrgyz military repelled the attack only after taking heavy casualties.
"If
we had this air base in 1999, the IMU would have thought twice before
indulging in our territory," says Mr. Aitmatov, the foreign minister.
More recently, Kyrgyz and U.S. officials have been concerned about
Hizb-ut-Tahrir, an Islamic separatist group, which has taken root in
southern Kyrgyzstan. If the group becomes a threat, the Kyrgyz won't
need to
rely solely on the Americans. Last month, the Russians, driven by
concerns
about Islamic extremists and the growing influence of the U.S. in the
region, moved into an air base about 15 miles from the U.S. base.
Critics of U.S. policy on Kyrgyzstan worry the military presence makes
it
less likely that the Bush administration will lean on the Kyrgyz
government
to become more open and democratic. "Recognizing a country with
governance
problems as a strategic ally means you'll press less hard because you
need
something from them," says Anthony Richter, director of the Central
Eurasia
Project of the Open Society Institute, an organization funded by George
Soros that promotes democracy.
Kyrgyzstan probably needs some pushing. President Akayev has promised he
will step down in 2005 -- an important milestone in a region where
rulers
have refused to cede power. But it isn't clear whether Mr. Akayev will
follow through with that pledge. A recent constitutional referendum
could
give him the right to run for another term.
What is clear is that the U.S. military doesn't plan to leave
Kyrgyzstan any
time soon. On a warm May afternoon the base held a ceremony to welcome
a new
general. Before the ceremony, the old commander, Brig. Gen. Jared
Kennish,
spoke of the expanding U.S. presence in the region. "Here I am in a
nation I
had never heard of, couldn't pronounce and couldn't find on a map six
months
ago, and my remarks are being broadcast on television throughout the
country," the general marveled. Later, he handed the ceremonial guidon
to
his successor. Half a dozen Kyrgyz generals, wearing Soviet Army-style
uniforms, saluted


Nancy Hayden
Advanced Concepts Group
Sandia National Laboratories
http://www.sandia.gov/agc/
[hidden email]
505-845-9634



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