Overseas Commitments Research Articles

US Air Force Airlift and the Army's Relevance

ABSTRACT: This article advises Army leaders to return to previously successful strategies of influence to articulate a collaborative vision for future of air mobility. By underscoring requirement for multiservice capabilities to deliver personnel and materiel wherever they are needed, US air mobility can once again become a strategic force multiplier. The capability of transporting materiel and personnel remains essential to US Army's effectiveness. (1) Likewise, momentum--mass x speed--remains a relevant element of national defense as Army operators and defense planners make necessary provisions to get land forces where they need to go, when they need to go there, and with necessary momentum. Accordingly, this article addresses two questions regarding American air-mobility forces. First, can present and future US Air Force airlift force structure support existing and emerging US Army movement and requirements? Second, should Army address its mobility concerns passively, by declaring its requirements and hoping Air Force will come up with appropriate forces, or assertively, by involving itself more deeply in all details of airlift force structure planning? The importance of these two questions is obvious given integral role of inter- and intratheater air mobility in most Army warfighting concepts. Ultimately, Army's vision of itself as a global response force, able to conduct rapid and agile expeditionary over strategic and theater distances, is compromised by shortfalls in our nation's airlift program; but Army can do something about that vulnerability. (2) The Army and Airlift Relevance An airlift planning adage states the Army does not have light units; it has heavy and incredibly heavy units. This adage will remain painfully relevant to current global environment of burgeoning strategic complexity, insufficient budgets, continuous (and probably expanding) overseas commitments, a predominantly homeland-based force structure, and diverse enemies employing traditional, unconventional, and hybrid strategies. (3) Enemies such as international criminal gangs, transnational terrorists, and insurgents are growing stronger. Some are approaching point of near-peer status in local areas and in certain realms of combat, gaining a capacity for coordinated or concurrent attacks on United States and its interests. Nuclear proliferation and inexpensive communication networks also increase possible danger, velocity, and complexity of future crises and conflicts. (4) In response, Army leaders and planners are exploring numerous doctrine, training, force structure, and equipment innovations to preserve future readiness. The recently released Army movement and concept, for example, calls for task-organized forces moving in unpredictable ways and maneuvering throughout depth of future battlefields to defeat enemies by forcing them to fight against multiple types of attacks from multiple directions and domains. (5) To survive and fight decisively, these task-organized forces will need to be capable of semi-independent--but mutually supporting--cross-domain land, air, space and cyber operations for at least one week before pausing to rest and refit. (6) In many circumstances, these operations will enable sea and air forces to achieve their missions and support in-theater preparation activities by Joint commands. Agile strategic and logistical support by air and sea will be essential to achieving these effects. (7) The success of these emerging lines of development will depend on support of robust air mobility. Future combat scenarios often will require Army to maneuver over strategic distances along multiple axes of advance by air and sea, without stopping at intermediate staging bases. (8) If enemy anti-access/area denial operations block arrival of sea and air forces in early phases of future campaigns, Army forcible entry operations likely will involve airlifts of assault and then follow-on forces to seize terrain in unpredictable locations and to transition quickly to offensive operations. …

“Screening the Food from the Flies”: Britain, Kuwait, and the Dilemma of Protection, 1961-1971

ABSTRACTThis study looks at how the widening gap between Britain’s available military resources and its remaining overseas commitments in the 1960s affected its ability and willingness to protect Kuwait after the latter elected for independence in June 1961. It provides a fresh account of how successive British governments addressed the dilemma of providing adequate cover for the Kuwaiti commitment. Over the course of the decade, Britain found it increasingly difficult to maintain the minimum forces considered necessary for forestalling an attack from Kuwait’s principal threat – Iraq. The challenge of providing protection became more difficult by political conditions in Kuwait, which prohibited the stationing of troops, and the evolving nature of the Iraqi threat. British decision-makers increasingly saw the Kuwaiti military as a way to make up for the shortfall in cover and eventually replacing British protection altogether. This move towards self-reliance, however, would prove a failed strategy for Kuwait over the long term.

British Overseas Military Commitments 1945–47: Making Painful Choices

In February 1947, the British government made a number of policy decisions which led to withdrawal from India, Palestine and Greece. The paper seeks to demonstrate that although economic constraints highlighted the need to reduce overseas commitments, these pressures did not predetermine the choice or timing of the withdrawal decisions. The consequences of the retreats in terms of reduced military overstretch, balance of payments alleviation and the diminution in Britain's international status are also examined. It is concluded that the Attlee administration shed a range of military burdens as rapidly and in as orderly a fashion as political and strategic circumstances permitted.

The Origins of the British Commonwealth Strategic Reserve: The UK Proposal to Revitalise ANZAM and the increased Australian Defence Commitment to Malaya

At the end of 1952 the UK proposed to revitalise the ANZAM arrangement by concentrating it more closely on the defence of British interests in Malaya. Hitherto ANZAM had focused almost completely upon planning for the wartime defence of sea communications in the Southwest Pacific. This article explains why the UK sought to revitalise ANZAM, and why Australia accepted the British proposal. The British proposal arose from the adoption by the UK of a strategy of nuclear deterrence which led it to project both a future reduction of British conventional forces available for overseas commitments, and a greater reliance upon Commonwealth partners for the protection of British interests in Malaya. It also represented an attempt to reduce the value of the ANZUS security treaty, signed in early September 1951. Australia accepted the British proposal that Commonwealth partners should shoulder a heavier burden in Malaya as a way of preserving the value of ANZUS and of adjusting to the future reduction of the British military presence in Asia.

Addicted to Security: Globalized Terrorism and the Inevitability of American Unilateralism

MAJOR EVENTS SUCH AS THE END OF THE COLD WAR, the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001, the US war in Afghanistan (2001) and the Iraq war led by the US and the UK (2003) provide excellent opportunities to re-evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of competing theories of international relations, the accuracy of different predictions about the future derived from these theories and the utility of alternative policy recommendations derived from these predictions. The errors that plagued optimistic expectations about the emergence of global stability after the Cold War, for example, were based in part on questionable assumptions about the emerging power and influence of democratic values, international institutions and global liberal regimes. These regimes were expected to impose sufficient discipline on state actors to prevent repeated defections from collective action and ultimately to control international violence.(1) It was apparent to many others, however, that the decline of bipolar strategic rivalry was not sufficient to provide multilateral institutions with the coercive power they needed to compel states and other actors to co-operate consistently.(2) Both optimists and pessimists agreed that the system had undergone fundamental change, but their predictions were often mutually exclusive.Perhaps the clearest illustration of premature closure of inquiry is Charles Kupchan's prediction that unipolar moment not last... The rise of other powers and waning and unilateralist internationalism will combine to make unipolar moment a fleeting one. The rise of Europe and, Kupchan argues, America's diminishing appetite for global engagement will compel the US to fortify the homeland and rein in overseas commitments in an attempt to cordon itself off from such threats.(3) Far from turning inward, however, ongoing deployments to Bosnia, Kosovo and Liberia, major wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and related financial and military commitments to post-war reconstruction in these countries confirm that Washington is not only increasing its overseas commitments but is willing to engage in the most sweeping and expansive intervention, democratization and reconstruction projects since 1945. Moreover, the splits in Europe resulting from divisions over the Iraq war, in which 14 of 19 NATO members ultimately supported the American position, do not bode well for Kupchan's predictions about the emergence of a sufficiently unified and powerful Europe to replace US hegemony.If erroneous predictions about the demise of unipolarity and the emergence of multilateralism as a staple of American foreign and security policy are wrong, then by extension the theories put forward to account for these predictions are equally suspect.The purpose of this article is to provide a more realistic account of US responses to emerging threats of terrorism and proliferation in the aftermath of 11 September, and a more accurate set of predictions about the future of American foreign and security policies in the decades to come. Sections 1 through 4 will develop the article's primary thesis: namely, that the domestic and international forces at play today are creating a security environment in which American officials will become increasingly committed to (and politically dependent on) a set of priorities in which security trumps everything. Critics of US foreign policy should therefore move beyond the simplistic (and excessively optimistic) assumption that these American security imperatives are only temporal in nature, simply a product of a conservative-hawkish White House and Cabinet led by a Republican president who just managed a victory in the 2000 election. That assumption is dangerously superficial; terrorism and proliferation have become facts of life for American citizens and by extension for any current or future US government. The US will continue to be threatened by and to experience the devastating physical and psychological consequences of globalized terrorism. …

Who Needs Diplomats?

What or who does the post-cold war diplomat represent? Two trends are evident: increasing institutionalized multilateralism aimed at a stronger international order, either by improving co-operation between states or transcending the need for it; and the tendency to see diplomats in terms of the skills they possess and the jobs they do, rather than whom they represent. Because both developments seem to move diplomats further away from the sovereign state, their traditional source of authority and raison d'etre, a number of writers have raised the possibility that diplomacy's identity as a discrete practice may be subsumed under broader notions of conflict resolution and bargaing.(f.1)This neither is nor ought to be the case. Diplomats and the diplomatic system continue to derive their authority from the claim that they represent sovereign states in their relations with one another and not from some wider notion of international community, of which states are but one expression. Failures of diplomacy in places as different as Maastricht, Mostar, and Mogadishu involved over-ambitious attempts at international management for which no consensus existed in the great powers expected to supply the resources. Either this consensus has to be strengthened, a labour of Sisyphus given recent disappointments, or the ambitions of those who wish to manage the international system have to be scaled back. Otherwise we face more muddle, a further weakening of the trail consensus for maintaining overseas commitments, and even, although this remains a remote prospect as yet, a falling out among the great powers.The paradox of our times is that in international politics, as in domestic politics, there is a high expectation that governments can and should solve problems and a widespread reluctance to pay the price. The result is a dangerous cycle in which governments embark on difficult international projects with inadequate resources because a major mobilization of them cannot be justified. To ease the resource problem, governments collaborate with other governments, adding a host of complications and dangers to already difficult tasks. Failure further weakens the potential for future consensus and co-operation, but the expectations that someone ought to do something are not reduced.To explain this disjuncture between champagne tastes and beer budgets, we must look in part to the need for political leaders to sound optimistic above all else if they are to be elected. They, however, are swift to retreat to mere appearances as soon as their electorates chafe at the costs of an ill-founded international policy. A few dead rangers, disgraced paratroopers, or negative percentage points on the stock market will quickly pull them back. Not so the policy experts. One of the most striking features of the present wave of internationalist ambition is the extent to which it is embraced by the experts who advocate the policies of international order-building and by the professional diplomats whose task it is to carry them out. While diplomats are not immune to the temper of the times, they contribute to the present state of affairs because they have temporarily lost sight of what they represent - sovereign states and the people who live within them as independent political communities existing as ends in themselves. This is a sweeping claim which I hope to substantiate in this article.THE IDEA OF DIPLOMATIC REPRESENTATIONThe idea of diplomatic representation has had problems throughout the life of the modern diplomatic system. If Michel Foucault was right, medieval thought accepted the idea of direct correspondence, one-for-one, far more readily than we do today.(f.2) The medieval ambassador represented his sovereign in the sense that he was him or embodied him (literally in some readings) when he presented himself at court. Since then, however, representation has come to involve at least three elements: the sovereign; the ambassador as a person; and the ambassador in his representative capacity as the 'sovereign. …

France's African aid policy: the end of an Era?

Unlike the other OECD countries, France has increased its overseas development aid in recent years. This is explained by the importance it accords its overseas commitments, particularly in Africa, which has remained a priority arena for French foreign policy. Most French aid is bilateral (and highly conditional), although France's contribution to the multilateral agencies is disproportional to its GDP share in the OECD. But increasingly, pressures re mounting for a re‐assessment of aid policy, with cost‐effectiveness as a central concern.

The transformation of France's armed forces

National service and the idea of a conscript army has been a key‐stone of French national identity and a firmly political issue since the Revolution of 1789. Even then, the advantages and disad‐vantages of mass conscription were recognised, with the debated of conscript vs. professional forces couched in terms of the domestic political agenda. Presi‐dent Chirac has now taken a fundamental step away from the citizen army in announcing the end_of compulsory military service by 2002 as part of the overall restructuring of France's defence planning. Beatrice Heuser presents a discussion of this transformation of France's armed forces within its historical context, discussing the impact of this dramatic change, including the reduction of bases both at home and abroad, the issue of overseas commitments, and the power levels will fluctuate, they, overall quality of a full time pro‐grammes to introduce new forms of national service ensure the maintenance of the idea of civic involvement and the political function played by the concept of military services.

The End of the Cold War: A Skeptical View

Less than two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which led almost automatically to the reunification of Germany, one thing is certain: The division of Europe, for forty-five years the symbol of the Cold War, has come to an end. Beyond this not much can be said. Because of the swift succession of events, the most enticing assumptions about the future very quickly lose their credibility. This has been true of recent predictions by Paul Kennedy and Francis Fukuyama. Kennedy argues that “imperial overstretch” has led to a relative decline of American power and hence to a shift in the balance of global economic power. To his way of thinking, the United States should seek to redress the balance by reducing its excessive overseas commitments, spending less on defense, and devoting more of its resources to social and educational programs and to industrial investments.1 In an essay published in June 1990, Fukuyama presented an even bolder assessment of the past and prescription for the future. He asserted that the demise of fascism and Marxism-Leninism had brought about “the end of history,” a growing “Common Marketization” of international relations, and a diminution of the likelihood of large-scale conflict between states.2 Subsequent developments have not been kind to these prescriptions.

Democracy & Foreign Policy

Democracy & Foreign Policy Michael Pinto-Duschinsky (bio) Exporting Democracy: Fulfilling America's Destiny by Joshua Muravchik. The AEI Press, 1991. 259 pp. Exporting Democracy: The United States and Latin America edited by Abraham F. Lowenthal. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. 422 pp. The "end of the Cold War" has led to a reevaluation of U.S. foreign policy as fundamental as those that occurred after each of the world wars. Two recent books, both of them titled Exporting Democracy, make significant contributions to the current debates in Washington. They present widely differing interpretations, yet their policy prescriptions are surprisingly similar. To Joshua Muravchik, the exportation of democracy is the way of "fulfilling America's destiny" now that the Cold War against the Soviet Union and its communist allies has been won. If the U.S. succeeds in spreading the ideal of democracy to countries such as Russia and China, Muravchik writes, "we would stand triumphant for achieving by our model and our influence the visionary goal stamped by the founding fathers on the seal of the United States: novus ordo saeculorum, a new order of the ages" (p. 227). His argument consists of two parts. First, be stresses that the United States needs to remain an active player in world affairs. Second, he maintains that the promotion of democracy should be the main objective and that active programs of educational exchange, foreign broadcasting services ("telling democracy's story"), and political aid should be developed as basic instruments of U.S. foreign policy. The opening part of Muravchik's book consists of a vigorous rejoinder to a variety of U.S. commentators who have resurrected the old case for [End Page 127] isolationism. The importance of this section lies not only in the arguments themselves, but also in the need to raise them at all. Muravchik, a resident scholar at one of Washington's most influential think tanks (the American Enterprise Institute), has been hailed by the Wall Street Journal as "the most cogent and careful of the neoconservative writers on foreign policy." Yet much of his fire is directed not against American liberals but against isolationist conservatives. Muravchik notes that conservative commentator Patrick Buchanan's essay in The National Interest titled "America First-and Second, and Third" not only evoked the name of the neutralist organization that sought to keep America out of the war against Hitler's Germany, it also reflected the substance of those America First arguments of the early 1940s. Buchanan called for America to withdraw from Europe and Asia, arguing that "the Monroe Doctrine should be made again the cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy." The reduction in tension between the superpowers obviously has made it possible and desirable to cut arms budgets and reduce some of America's overseas commitments. But as Muravchik warns, it is impractical as well as undesirable for America to return to its pre-World War II isolationism. In an age of nuclear missiles, fax machines, and jet travel, America cannot remain unaffected by events beyond the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. It is in America's interests to act as a stabilizing force. The decline of Soviet power has created new sources of uncertainty that America cannot afford to ignore. In Central Europe, for example, small and weak countries are once again riven by ethnic conflicts and vulnerable to the larger powers on their eastern and western flanks. In the past, waves of American isolationism have all too often been followed by crises and subsequently by hectic, exaggerated interventions. One of the main architects of the CIA's unsuccessful effort to overthrow Fidel Castro's regime in Cuba by the operation at the Bay of Pigs had, early in his career, been a supporter of the America First movement. Steady, long-term international commitments are more effective than oscillations between neglect and interference in foreign countries' affairs. While the case against isolationism is timely and important, the second part of Muravchik's argument is subject to criticism. He weakens the case for "exporting democracy" by overstating it. He contrasts the foreign affairs school that stresses "realism" and deals in concepts such as "balance of power" (a school associated with Walter...

The Strategic Implications of Relative Economic Decline

The debate over decline is about to enter a new, more complex, and perhaps more interesting phase. In the initial stage, as so often happens when a large and important subject first emerges, the participants divided into two opposing camps. On the one hand there were those who pointed with alarm to fragmentary evidence of U.S. economic decline and argued that the erosion in its relative strength would soon require a substantial diminution in America's world role. Responding to this view were critics who denied that the indications of decline were as compelling or as worrisome as was being claimed and who maintained that no drastic changes in American foreign policy and military strategy were either necessary or desirable. It now seems clear that each side in the early debate was roughly one-half right. The United States no longer dominates the world economy as completely as it once did, and in some important ways it has indeed been passing through a period of relative decline. The changes that have become evident in recent years will have an impact on U.S. strategy. Nevertheless, the precise nature of that impact is likely to be less direct and less immediate than is often claimed. In particular, the trends now visible do not compel the United States to withdraw from its overseas commitments, nor are they sweeping the world quickly and inevitably into an era of genuine multipolarity. Over the next ten or twenty years, however, an increased American reliance on foreign goods, technology, and capital and the increased

The Bear in the Back Yard: Moscow's Caribbean Strategy (review)

232 SAIS REVIEW The Bear in the Back Yard: Moscow's Caribbean Strategy. By Timothy Ashby. Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1987. 240 pp. $22.95/cloth. Reviewed by Thomas Mahnken, M. A. candidate, SAIS. As Timothy Ashby amply demonstrates, since 1960 Soviet influence has increased in Latin America and the Caribbean. According to Ashby, Soviet strategy aims to use this influence to apply geopolitical pressure on the United States pressure that the Soviets hope will lead to a retraction of U.S. overseas commitments and to a shift in the global balance of power. The policy is vulnerable, however, because Latin America is distant from the Soviet Union, while literally in the back yard of the United States. Hence, the strategy is not only extremely costly to the USSR but also dependent on proxies, which are themselves vulnerable to internal and external pressures (and which, though Ashby rarely mentions it, have their own interests). Ashby's thesis, that the USSR has a systematic plan for the penetration of Latin America, is itself arguable. Still, his enumeration of Soviet activities in the region is impressive. The linchpin of the strategy is Cuba, the USSR's "unsinkable aircraft carrier." Despite the fact that Fidel Castro's relationship with the Cuban Communist party began as one of mutual mistrust and hostility, Soviet assistance to Castro escalated rapidly after he seized power. Cuba's dependence on the USSR grew throughout the 1960s, climaxing in Castro's 1968 decision essentially to trade Cuban sovereignty for steady aid. Since then Cuba has become a major Soviet surrogate for spying, power projection, and support of revolutionary movements. Unfortunately, the book lacks sufficient consideration of the effect of domestic politics on Cuban foreign policy. While Ashby sees Havana's policies as a function of subservience to Moscow, Castro's own aspirations to grandeur may be equally important. A similar transformation occurred on Grenada following the 1979 coup that brought Maurice Bishop and his NewJewel movement to power. Evidence of the Soviet- and Cuban-sponsored covert buildup, which made the island an epicenter of regional revolutionary activity, is compelling and is corroborated by documents captured during the 1983 U.S. invasion. Grenada was anxious to be a Soviet proxy, probably as much for national prestige as for socialist internationalism . While Grenada was no doubt valuable to the Soviets as a rallying point for regional destabilization, its strategic significance is debatable. Ashby's exploration of the origins of the Sandinista National Liberation Front in Nicaragua is insightful, although here, too, the analysis suffers from ignoring Nicaraguan society as a variable. In contrast with its initially cautious attitude following the Cuban revolution and its covert assistance to the Bishop regime, Moscow heralded the Sandinistas with immediate and substantial aid. Cuban and Soviet sponsorship of the massive Nicaraguan buildup is incontrovertible , as is the Nicaraguan role in exporting revolution through such groups as the Faribundo Marti National Liberation Front in El Salvador and the M- 19 faction in Colombia. BOOK REVIEWS 233 Ashby uses a wide range of sources to back his assertions, including captured Cuban, Grenadan, and Nicaraguan documents; interviews with government leaders and defectors; congressional testimony; and memoirs. The author's reliance on details, however, often obscures the larger picture in which regional events occur and which would provide a more useful context for studying Soviet strategy in the Caribbean. Life and Death in Shanghai. By Nien Cheng. New York: Grove Press, 1987. 496 pp. $19.95/cloth. Reviewed by Linda S. Crowl, SAIS M.A. 1987. Life and Death in Shanghaiis a highly readable account of one woman's disenchantment with the People's Republic of China. Nien Cheng relates the story of her imprisonment during the Cultural Revolution and her subsequent years of "freedom" and "rehabilitation" before her emigration to the West. The tale flows so well that the reader has difficulty setting the book aside. One wonders how Cheng could recount the dialogue with such precision so many years after the events. But prison is a lonely place; she had many solitary days to reflect on her captors' words. Cheng writes fluently and for the most part chronologically of the strugglemeeting leading to her arrest, her stay...

Letter from Washington:New Strategy, New Threats—The Fiscal 1972 Military Budget

Arguments justifying the 1972 Military Budget break down into five major categories: the increased Soviet threat; high unemployment in the aerospace community; our overseas commitments; the SALT talks; and the so-called triple deterrent—land-based missiles, bombers and submarines. Ronald Tammen looks closely at the Budget with the expert's eye: He spent several years with the Central Intelligence Agency in a weapons-related field and is now consultant on military affairs to a bipartisan group of 105 Senators and Congressmen, affiliated under the name of Members of Congress for Peace through Law. He is advisor to the Military Spending Committee, headed by Senator William Proxmire.