Top White House officials have made the same point in recent speeches. Washington is facing a “long-war against a determined enemy,” U.S. president George Bush said in his January 31 State of the Union address.

The course outlined in the Pentagon’s review and the president’s speeches, and indicated in the 2007 military appropriations proposals by the White House, has a long continuity. It goes back to Washington’s response to the 1979 Iranian revolution as stated in the Carter Doctrine in 1980. “Let our position be absolutely clear,” said President James Carter at the time, “an attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”

It has had bipartisan backing through the 1991 Gulf War, the Clinton administration’s embargo and bombing of Iraq, two wars in the Balkans, military assaults on Somalia and Sudan, and the demonizing of North Korea, Iran, Syria, and others as “rogue nations.”

Over the last half decade, however, a historic shift in the global deployment of U.S. imperialism’s armed forces, its military strategy, and its order of battle has been sharply accelerated. Dubbed by the Defense Department as the military’s “transformation,” this shift was outlined to a large degree in the Pentagon’s previous Quadrennial Defense Review. The Pentagon’s current plan expands on those changes.

“Championed by the White House and pushed forward by the Defense Department, this transformation aims at preparing for the character of wars the imperialist rulers know they need to fight—at home as well as abroad,” said a Socialist Workers Party resolution adopted by the SWP convention last year. “No substantial wing of either the Democratic or Republican parties has a strategic alternative to this course. And it is already too far advanced to be reversed.”

The document, titled “Their Transformation and Ours,” was published in issue 12 of the Marxist magazine New International (see ad on page 8.) The resolution analyzes the sharpening interimperialist conflicts fueled both by the opening stages of a world depression and by the most far-reaching shift in Washington’s military policy and organization since the opening stages of World War II.  
 
End of ‘peace dividend’
The 2006 QDR asserts that when Bush took office for his first term, “The country was in many respects still savoring victory in the Cold War.” During the 1990s, Washington had acted as if it had less need for waging wars. It took the U.S. rulers about a decade to figure out that the “peace dividend” from the end of the Cold War, which included scaling back military spending, was over and that it needed to make an adjustment to face the “new enemy”—which includes “terrorist groups” and states that harbor them.

The transformation of the U.S. military that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has pushed the last half decade includes a number of core elements. One is that the U.S. rulers will not conduct a war of the kind they fought in 1990-91 against Iraq, when “it took six months of planning and transport to summon our fleets and divisions and position them in battle,” as Rumsfeld told the U.S. Senate in September 2004. “In the future, we cannot expect to have that kind of time.”

To accomplish this goal, the Pentagon has been organizing smaller, light armored brigades with greater independent powers of command, which can move anywhere in the world within days. These would replace the larger divisions reliant on tanks and other heavy armor that were used in the first U.S.-led war against Iraq. In addition, the Pentagon has been putting in place heavier reliance on Special Operations forces; intermixing of units of the army, navy, and air force in combat; and shutting down some of the U.S. bases in western Europe while shifting more troops to the east and to central Asia.  
 
Military restructuring
The 2006 defense review reaffirms Washington’s accelerated course toward developing lighter, more agile, and expeditionary armed forces. Towards this end, the QDR says that the Army is reorganizing “into modular brigade-based units—including brigade combat teams.” These combat teams are at the heart of the Army’s shift from a “battle-ready force (peace) to battle-hardened forces (war).” This historic change involves “moving away from a static defense in obsolete Cold War garrisons and placing emphasis on the ability to surge quickly to trouble spots across the globe,” the review states.

Rumsfeld explained the financial implications of these moves at the February 16 hearing of the Defense Subcommittee of the House of Representatives Appropriations Committee on the fiscal year 2007 military budget. The Defense Department projects doubling the funding for Special Operations Forces, including for the first time a Marine Corps component, Rumsfeld pointed out. The Defense Department projects the largest growth in Special Operations Forces, increasing them by 50 percent between 2001 and 2011. Four existing ballistic missile submarines are to be refashioned into platforms allowing Special Operations Forces “to penetrate denied areas to locate high-value individuals, designate targets for precision strike or conduct direct action missions.” Each of these submarines will carry 150 Tomahawk missiles.

The Brigade Combat Teams structure represents a 46 percent increase in readily available combat power, says the QDR. It shifts the emphasis from having the bulk of soldiers in the institutional army, the so-called tail, to more powerful operational forces that deploy and fight, the “teeth.” This includes not only improving the combat-readiness of active-duty soldiers but also of the members of the National Guard and Reserves, who were once considered a strategic reserve to be called once in a lifetime for a major war.

Another goal of the Army’s transformation is to move from a “separate military Service concepts of operation—to joint and combined operations.” All related steps must contribute to “joint war-fighting capability,” the defense review says.

Following findings from the 2001 QDR, the current defense review projects increased spending on “intelligence gathering.” This includes use of satellites and other space platforms, aerial vehicles that can “identify and track moving targets in denied areas,” and better human spying—including steps to “improve cultural and linguistic skills.”  
 
Not a ‘broken army’
In the congressional defense budget hearings, Rumsfeld and his top generals stressed maintaining a volunteer army. “We are fighting this long war with an all-volunteer force,” said Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Gen. Peter Schoomaker said he was commissioned 37 years ago in the “post-Vietnam army” that “if it wasn’t broken, it was darn near broken.” Schoomaker said military spending dropped to 4.8 percent of GDP in the “post-Cold War drawdown” and that there was a $58 billion hole in equipment at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

This is the first of three articles. The next installment will describe the drawing of more imperialist governments in Europe into various U.S.-led “coalitions of the willing,” and the U.S. military’s renewed focus on Latin America and Africa outlined in the 2006 defense review.  
 
 
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