GlobalSecurity.org In the News

Paul Kennedy

There is a very cunning after-dinner board game called SPQR that involves the defense of the Roman Empire at its height. The board itself is a map of Europe and the Mediterranean, showing Roman cities and ports and the military roads and sealanes that connect them. The game involves the "senators and populace" moving selected Roman legions (there were 27 of them in, say, 80 A.D.) along those internal lines in response to new threats, whether they arise from Syria, Scotland or across the River Danube. There were few places along the borders of the empire where one legion was further than a 10-day march from reinforcing another--which was just as well, since Rome's expansion had given it many enemies and a legion that was based in Sicily one year might find itself in the north of England, guarding Hadrian's Wall, the next.

I thought of SPQR while reading "Where Are the Legions? Global Deployments of U.S. Forces," published by Global Security, a nonprofit, nonpartisan policy research group based outside Washington, (http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/global-deployments.htm). The message of the article is clear, and very disturbing: There may not be many U.S. troops coming home soon, perhaps not for a long time.

Currently, the United States has stationed military forces in about 130 countries, fighting in some of them, peacekeeping in others and training foreign militaries in yet others. One can hear former U.S. President George Washington spinning in his grave.

To be sure, the United States has had standing military commitments abroad since the end of World War II--the occupations of Germany and Japan, the Korean War and the global rivalry with the Soviet Union made sure of that. But when the Warsaw Pact collapsed, it was generally assumed that things would be different. Alas, that simply is not so. The fight against Al-Qaida, the war and guerrilla resistance in Iraq, the implosion of Liberia, the continued unrest in Afghanistan, instability on the Korean Peninsula and the need to reassure Japan of a strong U.S. presence in the western Pacific have all conspired against a drawdown of U.S. forces in the far corners of the globe. On the contrary, they have very much been "drawn up."

Using official statistics, the editors at Global Security report that there are 155 combat battalions in the U.S. Army. Before October 2001, only 17 of these were deployed on active combat service, presumably in Kosovo and a few other hot spots (garrison deployment in Germany and Japan is not regarded as active combat service). Today that figure stands at 98 combat battalions deployed in active areas. Even a nonmilitary expert can see that this is an impossibly high number to sustain over the longer term, which is why, in addition to the 255,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines and coast guard forces deployed in combat and peacekeeping missions abroad, we have sent an additional 136,000 troops from the national guard and reserves. Most of the ships belonging to U.S. carrier fleets are now back at their bases being refitted after the defeat of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, but we still have 40,000 sailors afloat and on mission. Meanwhile, U.S. Army generals are asking for more troops to be deployed to Iraq, and the Pentagon has just diverted three warships to the coast of Liberia. The U.S. Defense Department now has to play the game of SPQR.

These are not comfortable facts, and they should surely be giving our congressional representatives cause for thought. It is true that the Pentagon is putting immense pressure on any government that counts itself as a friend of the United States to send forces to Iraq, Afghanistan and Liberia, but the results so far are unspectacular. Really, the only ground troops with heft and logistical capacity are the British, and, given all their other peacekeeping commitments (from the Balkans to Sierra Leone), they are probably more overstretched than the United States. Poland has assumed responsibility for running a relatively quiet (so far) zone in Iraq, but as the Wall Street Journal reported July 28, had to go to 22 countries to drum up the 9,000 troops for that zone and will rely heavily on U.S. technical support to function there at all. One wonders what utility U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz really accord a battalion of Latvian grenadiers in central Iraq. And what happens when they become the targets of grenade attacks?

Militarily--and let's forget for a moment the political debate about whether we should have gone into these countries in the first place--these awkward facts point to two equally awkward conclusions:

First, given the military overstretch, the United States needs a few more heavy hitters, along with the British. It needs armies with substantial punch that could send 25,000 troops to southwest Asia. But of the 190 national armies of the world, you can count the substantial ones on the fingers of one hand. Israel cannot play; China and Taiwan won't play. South Korea is pinned down at home and remains a drain on U.S. troop deployments. Japan is too psychologically and constitutionally restricted. A Pakistani presence alongside the United States in Iraq might lead to massive internal convulsions. A large Turkish contingent would see a retaliatory Kurdish uprising. This leaves India, Russia, France and Germany, and perhaps Italy, but four of those five opposed the Iraq war in the first place, and if we need them now, there will be a price to pay. This is as obvious today as it should have been in September. Of course, the United States can always "go it alone," but it does so at some cost. Only U.S. Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., seems to have realized that.

Second, the U.S. services, and the U.S. Army in particular, must come up with some long-term rotation scheme. They may have to move to a sort of Cardwell System, which was devised in the late 19th century by then British War Secretary Edward Cardwell to deal with the constant calls upon troops to serve abroad. One battalion of the British regiment was rotated out, perhaps to Afghanistan or Mesopotamia, for two or three years; the second battalion stayed home in the regimental barracks, recruiting fresh volunteers until its turn came to go abroad. The system worked, just as the SPQR system worked, because both combined regular rotation (helping troop morale) and strategic flexibility. Occasionally, there were horrible reverses: for the Romans in the German forests or the British in the Khyber Pass. But the structure was strong enough to allow for recovery, often for further advances. These were empires that were in it for the long haul.

Is that the U.S. democracy's future, to have its troops stationed for an undefined time on the Northwest Frontier or in a disease-ridden port in West Africa? We frantically deny that we have imperial ambitions, and I believe those denials to be sincere. But if we increasingly look like an empire and walk like an empire and quack like an empire, perhaps we are becoming one just the same.

Kennedy is the Dilworth professor of history at Yale University and the author or editor of about 16 books, including "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers."

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