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Transforming the U.S. global defense posture
Naval War College Review, Spring, 2006 by Ryan Henry
We also will need access to a broader range of facilities with little or no permanent American presence. Relying instead on periodic service, contractor, or host-nation support, cooperative security locations provide contingency access and serve as focal points for security cooperation activities. A good example is Dakar, Senegal, where the Air Force has negotiated contingency landing, logistics, and fuel contracting arrangements, and which served as a staging area for the 2003 peace operation in Liberia. A June 2005 Atlantic Monthly article by Robert Kaplan discusses presence in the Pacific in a way that captures the idea behind CSLs:
We will want unobtrusive bases that benefit the host country much more obviously than they benefit us. Allowing us the use of such a base would ramp up power from a country rather than humiliating it.... Often the key role in managing a CSL is played by a private contractor[,] ... [u]sually a retired American noncom.... He rents his facilities at the base from the host country military, and then charges a fee to the U.S. Air Force pilots transiting the base. Officially he is in business for himself, which the host country likes because it can then claim it is not really working with the American military.... [T]he very fact that a relationship with the U.S. armed forces is indirect rather than direct eases tensions.
Operational Access
Finally, operational access comprises the presence, global management, and surging of our forces overseas, all enabled by the political and geographic access we enjoy with host-nation partners. Presence is defined by the permanent and rotational forces that conduct military activities (training, exercises, and operations) worldwide, from security cooperation to crisis response. That presence consists of both small units working together in a wide range of capacities and major formations conducting elaborate exercises to achieve proficiency in multinational operations. Second, our posture supports our new approach to force management, which seeks both to relieve stresses on our military forces and their families and to manage our forces on a global, rather than regional, basis. Combatant commanders no longer "own" forces in their theaters; rather, forces are managed according to global priorities. Third, managing our military forces globally also allows us to surge a greater percentage of the force wherever and whenever necessary.
Tempo of Global Posture Changes
There is another dimension of global posture that underscores its multidimensional nature: the cycle of interdependent processes at work in the Defense Department--a cycle that sets the pace for posture changes, including institutional transformation within the services, the U.S. government's deliberations with host-nation partners, and the Base Closure and Realignment (known as BRAC) process. Global posture's flexible, rolling decision-making process must ebb and flow with these three processes.
