The U.S. military’s current structure and organization “still reflect in many ways the mentality and reality of the Cold War era,” said Feith. He noted that during the Cold War period, U.S. forces deployed in forward bases were defensive, tripwire units that were expected to fight near where they were based. “The kind of forces used for that mission are not the agile, fast, lean forces we need for the future,” the U.S. official stressed.

“Our forces overseas should not remain positioned to fight the Cold War. In the immediate aftermath of the Soviet Union’s demise, we reduced the numbers of U.S. troops deployed forward. But they remained concentrated in their Cold War locations, from which they have had to be deployed to deal with crises elsewhere—in the Balkans, the Persian Gulf, Central Asia and other locations,” said Feith. “We no longer expect our forces to fight in place; rather, their purpose is to project power into theaters that may be distant from where they are based.”

U.S. president George Bush and other top U.S. officials justify this new strategy by what they describe as the need to wage a “global war on terrorism” for the foreseeable future. This objective enjoys broad bipartisan support in Washington, with disputes mostly of a tactical nature.

The “war against terrorism” is the banner under which Washington has carried out military operations targeting bourgeois governments and political forces—primarily in the Middle East—including the regimes headed by the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the governments of Iran and Syria, and groups like Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, which are backed by Tehran and Damascus.

In the vacuum of political leadership created by the counterrevolutionary betrayals of working people by the world Stalinist movement, such regimes and political formations rose to prominence in the Mideast and south Asia. Their use of methods such as suicide bombings and blowing up commercial airliners, coupled with their reactionary political views, have made them relatively isolated and easy targets for imperialism.

U.S. defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and others in the administration have spoken out clearly and forcefully about this new U.S. military posture over the last two years. The quick and decisive Anglo-American takeover of Iraq, however—with relatively small and faster-moving military units, low casualties, and spearheaded by special forces troops—was a turning point in this process.

As Rumsfeld put it, for example, in a Jan. 31, 2002, speech to the War College (also known as the National Defense University) in Washington, D.C., “During the Cold War, we faced a fairly predictable set of threats. We came to know a great deal about our adversary, because it was the same one for a long period…. But the Cold War is over. The Soviet Union is gone, and with it, the familiar security environment to which our nation had grown accustomed.” Washington no longer needs “a massive, heavy force designed to repel a Soviet tank invasion,” Rumsfeld said.

“Today our adversaries have changed,” the U.S. defense secretary said. “In the 21st century…we need rapidly deployable, fully integrated joint forces capable of reaching distant theaters quickly and working with our air and sea forces to strike adversaries swiftly, successfully, and with devastating effect.”

The way in which the U.S. military carried out its assault on Iraq was brought about partly by the unanticipated decision of the government of Turkey not to allow U.S. armored divisions to use Turkish soil to move against Baghdad. But the rapid invasion and ensuing occupation of Iraq enabled Rumsfeld and other proponents of the new military strategy to leave in the dust many retired generals and other liberal critics of the White House approach, and to set out to implement their strategy swiftly and thoroughly.  
 
Special Operations, officer corps purge
This most radical shift in the organization of the U.S. military since World War II includes a purging of the top officer corps of the U.S. armed forces; increased reliance on Special Operations troops, weapons technology, and more agile units; combination of commands of various branches of the military; dismantling many U.S. bases in Europe and moving them farther to the east; and expansion of NATO’s jurisdiction beyond Europe, first to Afghanistan, and most likely elsewhere in the world.

A central part of this transformation of the U.S. military is a major shake-up in the military brass. The most prominent among these moves was the appointment of Gen. Peter Shoomaker, a former head of Special Operations Forces, as the new chief of the army last August. Shoomaker was called out of retirement for the post, as the White House skipped over several ranking active-duty generals to bring him in.

This and other new military appointments are directly related to the promotion of elite military units to a central role in U.S. military operations worldwide. President Bush singled out the Special Operations Command for praise following the U.S. war on Iraq this year. Shoomaker headed this command for three years beginning in 1997. He was stationed in Korea in the mid-1970s. Rumsfeld has been among the most outspoken champions of the enhanced role of the Green Berets, Delta Force, and Navy Seals in the U.S. armed forces.

Similarly, Gen. Thomas Franks, head of the U.S. Central Command, which was overall in charge of Washington’s assaults on Afghanistan and Iraq, was replaced July 7 by Gen. John Abizaid, who played a major role in carrying out Washington’s new military strategy in the conquest of Iraq. Franks, who began his career as an artillery officer, commanded the U.S. assault on Iraq but took early retirement rather than promotion. Abizaid, dubbed the “Mad Arab” by his fellow military brass, began his career by heading a Ranger battalion during the U.S. invasion of Grenada in 1983. He was second in command to Franks during the war on Iraq.

On September 2, at a ceremony at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, Gen. Charles Holland, commander of U.S. Special Operations Forces—the first Air Force officer to command the elite division—was replaced by Gen. Douglas Brown. After describing the pivotal role of Special Operations in overthrowing the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, Rumsfeld said in his speech there: “You brought a similar spirit of innovation to the battle of Iraq. Special Operations Forces slipped quietly into the country while Saddam waited for the air war to begin. You hunted Scuds, pinpointed high-value targets, secured oil fields, and established landing strips in the desert to expedite the flow of coalition forces.

“When we were unable to get our forces into Iraq from the north, Special Operations Forces mobilized the Kurdish Peshmerga and not only tied down Saddam Hussein’s northern units, but captured Mosul and helped unravel the northern front with amazing speed.”

Praising General Brown, Rumsfeld pointed out that he is a 37-year veteran of the Special Operations Forces, having served as an assault pilot in the U.S. war against the Vietnamese people, and “has probably participated in one way or another in every SOF combat campaign since Vietnam.”  
 
More civilian control of Pentagon
Part of this process is sticking with the volunteer character of the U.S. armed forces, transferring control of a range of Pentagon operations to civilians—particularly big business, and consolidating the command structure of the military.

On several occasions U.S. officials have rebuffed critics of a volunteer army. These include Democratic congressmen Charles Rangel of New York and John Conyers of Michigan, who introduced legislation for reinstituting the draft leading up to the Iraq war last December, on the justification that “a disproportionate number of the poor and members of minority groups” are enlisted, as Rangel put it.

“Attracting and keeping quality people in the military is the highest priority” of the 2004 U.S. defense budget, reported the February 3 American Forces Information Service, a Defense Department publication. It announced that military pay raises would average between 2 and 6.25 percent. In order to retain experienced personnel, the highest raises would go to mid-level grades.

The U.S. defense secretary has also indicated that civilians—that is, private companies with fat contracts to gain—will be taking control of a number of Pentagon operations now run by the military. “We must transform not only our armed forces, but also the Department that serves them by encouraging a culture of creativity and intelligent risk taking,” Rumsfeld stated in his Jan. 31, 2002, War College speech. “We must promote a more entrepreneurial approach to developing military capabilities, one that encourages people, all people, to be proactive and not reactive, to behave somewhat less like bureaucrats and more like venture capitalists; one that does not wait for threats to emerge.”

Rumsfeld has also criticized past army practices of doing many jobs within the military, such as construction or running of prisons and hospitals used by the armed forces. “So we end up today with what the experts say may be as many as 300,000 uniformed military personnel doing tasks that could be done by nonmilitary personnel—civil service or contractors,” he said in an Aug. 25, 2003, address at Lackland Air Force Base. “Now I don’t think of running a prison as a core competency of the United States military,” he argued during a Pentagon meeting earlier that month.

The Pentagon is taking steps to simplify its command structure as well. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz asserted in a June 20 speech to the Naval War College’s 2003 class that joint operations by the various branches of the armed forces are aimed at developing the “kind of confidence needed to sustain us in the extreme stress of combat.” The Pentagon is trying to create a U.S. global military capability in which “individuals and units will receive training and experience in joint operations at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels,” he stated. The goal is for the military “to train as we fight—as a coherently integrated team.”

As part of this process, the army and air units of the National Guard will consolidate separate state headquarters into a joint command by October 1. “Homeland defense is the National Guard’s most important priority,” said the Guard’s new bureau chief, Lt. Gen. Steven Blum. “Make no mistake about that.” This is aimed at bringing the National Guard’s structure more in line with the active-duty military, which is being remade, and facilitating its mobilization. “We don’t need to be double checked and triple checked every time our troops get activated,” stated Maj. Gen. Robert Lee, the Guard’s headquarters chief in Hawaii.  
 
Move beyond Europe to the east
The U.S. government has also begun implementing plans to change the military’s “footprint”—Pentagon jargon for the stationing of U.S. forces and military bases worldwide.

“In the most sweeping realignment of American military power since World War II, the United States is planning to shift most of its forces from Germany, South Korea, and the Japanese island of Okinawa,” said a June 2 MSNBC news report. “The plans, still the focus of intense negotiations and debate among America’s allies and inside the Bush administration, would reorient America’s presence in Europe eastward to Poland, Romania and Bulgaria, and shift U.S. power in the Far East toward southeast Asia, with options for new bases in northern Australia, the Philippines and even Vietnam being explored.”

Washington has also made progress in—and continues to press for—the expansion of the use of North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops. NATO is a U.S.-dominated military alliance that includes imperialist powers primarily in Europe, set up with the goal of containing the Soviet Union. On August 11 NATO took command of the 5,000-strong U.S.-led force occupying Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. “NATO’s new role removes the uncertainty of finding a new country to lead the mission every six months,” said Philip Reeker, U.S. State Department deputy spokesman that day. This was NATO’s first ground mission outside Europe since the alliance was established 54 years ago, consolidating at that time Washington’s dominance as the number one military power in Europe.

In mid-October NATO inaugurated its rapid-reaction force of 20,000 well-trained and equipped troops that it says can be deployed anywhere is the world within five days. The NATO Response Force, as it is known, was formed a few days after a meeting of defense ministers of 19 NATO member countries and seven prospective members. Almost half the gathering, hosted by U.S. defense secretary Rumsfeld, was devoted to playing a war game at the Schriever Air Force Base in which NATO troops responded to a “terrorist” threat of a missile-borne chemical attack on a European country.

Following World War II, the international balance of class forces imposed limitations on U.S. imperialism and its allies, forcing Washington to adopt the strategic military course commonly termed the “Cold War.” These limitations made impossible for the foreseeable future the use of massive armed forces to accomplish Washington’s strategic goal—overturning the Soviet Union and Eastern European workers states and reestablishing capitalism there. Washington was restricted during the Cold War to using its military power to attempt to contain the extension of the socialist revolution. Its strategic effort to weaken those countries where capitalism had been overthrown became one of applying pressure on the ruling bureaucratic castes to police the working class, squelch all political initiatives, and keep working people isolated from the struggles of workers and farmers around the world, with all the depoliticizing and demoralizing consequences that flow from such a separation.

With the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in 1989-91 and the prospect for a military assault against those countries less feasible than ever before, imperialism still confronts the same strategic goal but from a weakened position. Instead of waging a “Cold War,” it now has to take on and defeat the working class directly to reestablish capitalism in those countries. As a result of losing the Cold War, Washington can no longer rely on Moscow to bring pressure to bear to its advantage anywhere in the world, including Korea.

That is why U.S. troops in south Korea are being redeployed from their main bases in and around Seoul southward, away from the reach of Pyongyang’s artillery. Washington is also developing new “low-yield” nuclear weapons, known also as “bunker-busters,” for possible strikes in the future to destroy north Korea’s nuclear missile capacity.

As Washington has made clear, it intends to go after any government that attempts to develop “weapons of mass destruction.” For the same reason, Tokyo is rearming, with U.S. blessing, and building a U.S.-designed “missile-defense shield,” to serve as the first line of imperialist assaults in the region, particularly any directed against north Korea and China.

At the same time, the U.S. rulers are deploying forces in Africa to deepen their penetration of the continent, eyeing particularly its oil resources, and negotiating the use of a “family” of military bases across African lands. Likewise, Washington is strengthening its military presence in Latin America.

Along this road, the U.S. ruling billionaire class will come into more and more direct conflict with its capitalist rivals and, above all, with the working class and its allies around the world.  
 
 
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