Central Asia bases are long-term Defense Week
August 19, 2002
By Nathan HodgeA Pentagon strategist last week offered a startling prediction about the United States' presence in the former Soviet republics in Central Asia: We are in for the long haul.
While the United States has established bases in countries like Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan to support Operation Enduring Freedom, administration officials have insisted they have no plans to maintain a permanent presence there.
But at an industry conference last week, Thomas Barnett, assistant for strategic futures at the Defense Department's Office of Force Transformation, suggested that those bases will become long-term outposts like the United States' European air bases.
Barnett said the Central Asian bases are called temporary, "But I believe 50 years from now, [they] will be as familiar to us as Ramstein Air Force Base" in Germany.
That is an interesting prediction, particularly considering the Pentagon's efforts to portray the bases as a temporary necessity for the war on terror.
In a media availability en route to Central Asia in April, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said: "Our basic interest is to have the ability to go into a country and have a relationship and have understandings about our ability to land or overfly and to do things that are of mutual benefit to each of us. But we don't have any particular plans for permanent bases."
Perhaps also to assuage concerns about the U.S. presence, Central Asian governments have also emphasized the temporary nature of the deployment. The Kyrgyz parliament, for instance, initially voted to allow U.S. and coalition troops to stay for a year, although that term can be extended.
China re-think
Barnett's remarks about Central Asia were part of a wide-ranging PowerPoint presentation that touched on a host of topics including defense transformation, globalization theory and 20th-century history. Like many of the ideas that emanate from the Office of Force Transformation, his speech was short on policy specifics.In essence, Barnett argued that the Pentagon needs to seek a new "ordering principle" that focuses on non-state adversaries as well as threats from rival countries.
"In effect, we're a military that's built to fight other nation-states, other militaries," he said. "The market, the security market, has fractured dramatically over time."
In particular, Barnett disparaged efforts to reorient the Department of Defense around a great-power struggle between United States and China, much as the Cold War focused its attention on fighting the Soviets in Europe.
"China and the United States going at it, out of the blue, is a load of crap in my mind," he said.
Barnett did not rule out the possibility that the United States and China could go to war; he said he could foresee "China and the United States stumbling into a war after India and Pakistan try to light it up," i.e., becoming entangled in a conflict as a knock-on effect of another regional war.
That view, however, is a departure from the focus on China as a potential "peer competitor" in Asia that the United States needs to counterbalance.
The Quadrennial Defense Review released last year coded the threat from China this way: "Although the United States will not face a peer competitor in the near future, the potential exists for regional powers to develop sufficient capabilities to threaten stability in regions critical to U.S. interests. In particular, Asia is gradually emerging as a region susceptible to large-scale military competition."
Traditionally, the task of long-term strategic thinking at the Pentagon has resided in the Office of Net Assessment headed by Andrew Marshall. But late last year, Rumsfeld appointed Barnett's former boss at the Naval War College, Arthur Cebrowski, to head the Office of Force Transformation.
Cebrowski said the creation of the office would elevate transformationpreviously seen as a procurement issue "to the level of strategy."