Washington Rules_ America's Path to Permanent War - Andrew J. Bacevich [63]
The significance of the shift in military posture that Carter set in motion can hardly be overstated. Inured to reports of U.S. forces operating out of or moving through places like Bahrain, Egypt, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, not to mention Iraq and Afghanistan, Americans have forgotten how recently all of this activity began. Until 1980, the U.S. military footprint in what is today commonly called the Greater Middle East was so light as to be almost invisible. Thirty years later it is massive, seemingly permanent, and overshadows in importance the American military presence anywhere else in the world.
Indeed, after 9/11, the Pentagon dropped the pretense that the United States kept forces forward deployed simply so that others could bear witness to the power, professionalism, and patriotism of the American military. Activism now became the watchword. Forces were positioned abroad not to be “seen” but to expedite their future commitment to potential hot spots. A new term of art emerged: Overseas garrisons now became forward operating bases—springboards from which air, ground, and naval units could launch into zones of conflict.
Vice Adm. Arthur Cebrowski, an influential military thinker, described these facilities as “nodes or hubs in a worldwide system of moving U.S. military forces anywhere we need them to go.” The “main purpose” of that system, explained one analyst, was “to facilitate the rapid deployment of U.S. forces throughout the world.” Rather than “deterring undesired operations by another nation’s traditional military forces,” global presence provided “a means to move preemptively against non-national groups for whom traditional deterrence has little meaning.”3
The activities of the navy to which Cebrowski devoted his life exemplified this shift in purpose. The modern U.S. Navy, created in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, was designed to take on opposing battlefleets. By 1945 it had fought its way to a position of dominance, securing what the naval theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan had once called “command of the seas.” During the Cold War, maintaining command of the seas in the face of Soviet submarines had at least nominally been the navy’s primary mission. In practice, however, its purpose was evolving: Beginning with the Korean War, its ships—above all its aircraft carriers—were employed as floating fire support platforms used to strike targets far inland.
As the Soviet threat faded, the fleet no longer held itself in readiness to do battle at sea. Instead, it went into the business of raining bombs and missiles on places like Tripoli, Beirut, Baghdad, Belgrade, and Kandahar. Taking command of the seas for granted—perhaps too quickly, as the emergence of twenty-first-century piracy might suggest—the navy employed its eleven massive aircraft carriers as mobile components within the system of nodes and hubs that Cebrowski described. Terminology lagged behind actual practice. Eventually, however, the traditional term carrier battle group disappeared—after all, no U.S. carrier has engaged in battle since World War II—to be replaced by the more aptly descriptive carrier strike group. This defines the navy’s core function today. It has become a strike force, delivering ordnance against land targets wherever Washington wants to send a signal, reduce a potential threat, or retaliate against some real or fancied insult.
Overall, America’s far-flung empire of bases prospered during the decades following Vietnam, adapting itself to a notable reshuffling of U.S. strategic priorities.