A day earlier, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) agreed to deploy 300 officers to train the Iraqi military, overcoming resistance from a few members, particularly the French government. NATO will set up its military academy in Rustamaniya, outside Baghdad. Forty NATO officers who have been in Iraq for weeks have already started this process.

“Today’s decision by NATO to establish a major collective training program marks a major step by the alliance,” said Nicholas Burns, the U.S. ambassador to NATO.

The move expands the world reach of the imperialist military alliance. It coincides with efforts led by Washington to transform NATO’s forces into rapid reaction units that can be deployed quickly around the globe. It also jibes with the transformation of the U.S. military.

“We have entered an era where enemies are in small cells scattered across the globe,” said Rumsfeld in his September 23 testimony. “Yet America’s forces continue to be arranged especially to fight large armies, navies, and air forces, and in support of an approach—static deterrence—that does not apply to enemies who have no territories to defend and no treaties to honor.

“We are still situated in a large part as if little has changed for the last 50 years—as if, for example, Germany is still bracing for a Soviet tank invasion across the northern plain. In South Korea, our troops were virtually frozen in place from where they were when the Korean War ended in 1953.”

For these reasons, Washington has developed a new strategy for redeploying its forces, Rumsfeld said, which is centered around four main points.

“A first notion is that our troops should be located in places where they are wanted, welcomed, and needed,” Rumsfeld said. “In some cases, the presence and activities of our forces grate on local populations and have become an irritant for host governments. The best example is our massive headquarters in some of the most valuable real estate in Seoul—Korea’s capital city—long a sore point for many South Koreans. Under our proposed changes, that headquarters will be moved to a location well south of the capital.”

Answering critics of the Bush administration who have charged that it has weakened Washington’s military capabilities by moving U.S. troops away from the so-called Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) that has divided the Korean peninsula since the 1950s, and reducing the overall number of U.S. troops stationed there, Rumsfeld said: “In fact, our partnership with the Republic of Korea is a good example of what we hope to accomplish. The Defense Department has been investing in and making arrangements for improved capabilities—such as long range precision weaponry—to be available on the Korean peninsula.… We know that sheer numbers of people are no longer appropriate measures of commitment or capabilities.”

To back up his point, Rumsfeld quoted a statement that Democratic senator Joseph Lieberman had made weeks earlier. Lieberman said Kim Jong Il, the president of north Korea, “is not under any misconceptions. We have enormous power at sea, in the air, on the ground, in the Asian-Pacific region, and on the Korean peninsula. And if he tries to take aggressive action against the South Koreans, he will pay a very, very heavy price.”

The second thrust along which the U.S. military’s global posture is changing, the secretary of defense said, is the “concept that American troops should be located in environments that are hospitable to their movements. Because U.S. soldiers may be called to a variety of locations to engage extremists at short notice, we need to be able to deploy them to trouble spots quickly. Yet over time, some host countries and or their neighbors have imposed restrictions on the movement and use of our forces. So it makes sense to place a premium on developing more flexible legal and support arrangements with our allies and partners where we might choose to locate, deploy or exercise our troops.”

The Turkish government, for example, a NATO member, did not allow its soil to be used for the U.S. armed forces to transport troops for launching a northern front in their invasion of Iraq last year.

Thirdly, Rumsfeld said, “we need to be in places that allow our troops to be useable and flexible. As the President has noted, the 1991 Gulf War was a stunning victory. But it took six months of planning and transport to summon our fleets and divisions and position them for battle. In the future, we cannot expect to have that kind of time.”

To accomplish this goal, the Pentagon is planning 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 to amass more than 530,000 troops for the 1991 imperialist assault on Iraq.

After succeeding quickly in expelling the Iraqi army from its expansionist invasion of Kuwait then, U.S. troops stopped short of marching toward Baghdad because of strong opposition from members of the U.S.-led coalition—especially Paris, Berlin, Moscow, and Beijing. To avoid repetition of that eventuality, the U.S. rulers have now shifted to the concept of the “coalition of the willing.” This implies no permanent alliances tied to treaties that impose constraints on Washington, and a varying set of allied regimes from task to task—as, for example, has been the case in the recent imperialist wars on Afghanistan and Iraq.

“In the last few years, we have built new relationships with countries that are central to the fight against extremists—in places such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Uzbekistan,” Rumsfeld said. “We also have strong partnerships with the newly liberated nations of Eastern Europe. We believe it makes sense to try to work out arrangements with countries that are interested in the presence of the U.S. and which are in closer proximity to the regions of the world where our troops are more likely to be needed in the future.”

The fourth and final point, Rumsfeld said, is that “we should take advantage of advanced capabilities that allow us to do more with less. The old reliance on presence and mass reflects the last century’s industrial-age thinking.”

The defense secretary outlined some of the advanced technology armaments the Pentagon is developing to meet these goals. These include, he said, “three new state-of-the-art guided missile destroyers to patrol the seas; 42 new F/A-18 fighter aircraft to guard the skies; and new C-17 strategic air lifters, which will improve our ability to move forces quickly over long distances.” New advanced spy satellites, which will be deployed “deep behind enemy lines,” will speed image transmission from the current 12 minutes to less than a second, he stated.

Rumsfeld also repeated other aspects of the transformation and redeployment of the U.S. armed forces. These include more reliance on elite Special Operations units; 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. Another goal of the Pentagon, he said, is shifting non-military jobs, such as cooking and medical care, to civilian contractors as the military focuses more on upgrading its “warrior ethos.”

In previous public presentations, Rumsfeld and other Pentagon officials have stressed that the ruling class does not need now, or in the foreseeable future, a draftee army and must maintain the volunteer character of the military—offering hefty pay increases to enhance recruitment.

To accomplish all this, of course, requires a substantial boost in military spending, which has been moving steadily upwards the last three years. U.S. total military expenditures reached an all-time high of nearly $405 billion last year in constant 2000 U.S. dollars, about $100 billion higher than when Bush took office. This represents 54 percent of the world’s total military spending, with China a distant second at $60 billion a year.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home