The Pioneer (India) April 11, 2004
Americans going the Roman way
By Tatiana Shaumian
Washington-based think-tanks and Russian military experts suggest that the strains of the floundering year-old US occupation in Iraq may have altered global strategic realities more profoundly than most people realise.
The problem is stated eloquently in an essay by American historian Paul Kennedy whose ground-breaking book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers foretold the collapse of the Soviet Union and the imminent decline of US global influence.
He pointed out that the American military power has been overstretched like the Roman Empire, and the US may not be able to sustain the physical strains or the political costs for long. The growing American deployments around the word are indeed jolting. The US Army has 31 combat brigades, and before the 9/11 attacks, only four were deployed overseas; today the number is 22.
Statistics compiled by Washington-based non-governmental Global Security Network (www.globalsecurity.org) say around 2,50,000 American soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines are serving in combat, peacekeeping or deterrence operations outside the US. The figure excludes their huge, permanent presence in western Europe, South Korea and Japan. Over 1,55,000 National Guard personnel have been sent overseas, with more to follow soon. With 16 combat brigades serving in Iraq, and some American allies threatening to drop out, the US is already overstretched. The question is: Where will the replacements come from?
The Bush administration has been acting on the assumption that things will calm down in Iraq after the scheduled June hand-over of sovereignty to Iraqi authorities, leading to a withdrawal of US troops. But what if, as appears to be happening already, the political plan for Iraq goes pear-shaped? One sign of the personnel shortage afflicting the US forces is the Pentagon's growing reliance on military outsourcing - mercenaries in common parlance - to meet its security needs. This new phenomenon was dramatised last week when crowds in the Iraqi town Falluja killed and mutilated the bodies of four former US special forces troopers, earning huge salaries to protect US Army food convoys. News reports say many jobs like guarding US viceroy Paul Bremmer - generally done by military servicemen - are being handled by private security companies.
This is a relevant issue for Russia, India, the European Union and other global powers.
A Russian expert I recently chatted with suggested that US strategic doctrine may already be in deep crisis. Since World War II, Pentagon has based all its military planning on the capability to deal with two big wars simultaneously. But this analyst said the US cannot fight North Korea or Iran, and simultaneously maintain its grip on Iraq under present circumstances. As this shift becomes widely known, it is bound to change the balance-of-power, and, perhaps, lead to significant behavioural changes in many countries.
Everyone in the world thinks America is invincible. What if that comes to be viewed as a bluster? I don't know how that would affect the relations between China and Taiwan, North and South Korea, India and Pakistan or, Russia and other former Soviet Union states.
Pentagon planners are aware of the problem. They have initiated long-term force reductions in the old Cold War centres of western Europe, and will relocate many bases eastward - with lighter, more mobile troop complements - to places like Bulgaria, Romania and former Soviet Central Asia. At the same time, US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld recently authorised an 'emergency' increase of 30,000 combat personnel. However, considering that the cost of training and maintaining one US soldier is around $300,000 per year, large-scale recruitment would be painful, given the deficit-ridden American economy.
You have to wonder how could a superpower like the US break its teeth on such a tiny morsel as Iraq? The answer may be that the Americans are not politically or psychologically prepared to shoulder the burden of imperialism as that would involve accepting endless deployments of American men to fight colonial wars, paying for greatly expanded armed forces, agreeing to the return of military conscripts and tolerating the brutal democracy-smashing tactics necessary to maintain long-term control in places like Iraq.
But, as Kennedy points out, all that may be coming whether the American people are ready for it or not. "Washington denies that it has imperial ambitions, and I believe those denials to be sincere," he writes. "But if the US increasingly looks like an empire, walks like an empire and quacks like an empire, perhaps,it is becoming one."
(Dr Shaumian is Director, Centre for Indian Studies, Moscow)
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