Pentagon Prepares to Scatter Soldiers

["Walter Lippmann" <walterlx@xxxxxxx>]

(New names, new places, new human
rights abuses you won't be hearing of
at the UN Human Rights Commission.)
=============================

PAGE ONE
WAR ON TERROR
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
May 27, 2003

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been replaced by a radically different view.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 guerril
las 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.

Write to Greg Jaffe at greg.jaffe@xxxxxxx

Updated May 27, 2003