Thinking about basing

Naval War College Review, Summer, 2005 by Robert E. Harkavy

Recent U.S. experiences--1990-91 in the Persian Gulf, in Bosnia, Kosovo, and then in Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003)--have highlighted the complexities and uncertainties of basing access in the post-Cold War period. They have involved questions of access to, and overhead transit rights for, a variety of nations: all over Europe, Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Tadzhikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Djibouti, and many others. They have also highlighted the crucial importance of the future of American basing access at a time of shifting alliances, friendships, and enmities amid wholesale changes in the structure of the international system, and of the movement to the forefront of the issues of terrorism, radical Islam, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and a looming hegemonic challenge by China.

There are some initial points to be made regarding definitions. One may speak variously of bases, facilities, host-nation support, installations, strategic access, forward presence, global posture, and FMP (foreign military presence). During the latter part of the Cold War, common usage dictated the use of "facilities" rather than "bases," because the user nation (primarily the United States) had only limited discretion over the use of a "base." The U.S. Defense Department's compilation of domestic and foreign bases is organized according to discrete installations. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute uses the basic concept of "FMP" in a way roughly synonymous with others' use of "base." (1) The concept of "basing access" or "strategic access" is a broader construction, subsuming overflight rights and perhaps access for intelligence operations. During the 1980s and 1990s, the concept of "power projection" came to be seen as an overarching one. (2)

More recently, "global posture" (also "footprint") has become the dominant definitional concept; more theoretically oriented academic studies, working in historical contexts, have begun to focus on "global reach" or, earlier, "sub-global reach." (3) Recent Defense Department publications--for instance, the September 2004 report to Congress on the global defense posture--have taken to defining that posture according to five criteria: relationships (interaction with allies and partners at all levels), activities (training, exercises, and operations), facilities (where forces live, train, and operate, and where they preposition materiel), legal arrangements (the framework of presence, including status-of-forces agreements, both bilateral and multilateral), and global sourcing and surge (a global-force management system for power projection). (4) Thus, although the main focus of this article will be on bases/facilities, "global posture" does have a broader frame of reference.

BASING IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT

In the centuries-long history of the basing systems of the "great powers," or "long-cycle hegemons," several major areas of generalization and trend stand out, each of which is relevant to current problems. These are complex matters, and we can merely summarize them here.

* The role of international system structure (bipolarity, multipolarity, etc.) and the presence or absence of ideological roots of rivalry between contending major powers

* The basis for basing access: conquest or colonization versus formal alliances or alignments versus tangible quid pro quos--that is, security and economic assistance, arms transfers, etc.

* The impact on basing of ever-evolving technological change--for ship propulsion, from sail to oared galleys to sail to coal to oil to nuclear power

* The nexus of security and economic functions of basing and how that has shifted over time

* Heartland versus rimland as a basic pattern of rival basing structures through time.

The relationship of system structure and the ideological basis for conflict over many centuries is a complicated story. The empire of the Mongols, who were predominantly a land power, stretched across most of Eurasia but also exercised maritime and basing dominance in the Far East in the thirteenth century. Subsequently, the Chinese Ming dynasty, a regional hegemon, had uncontested access to bases throughout Southeast Asia and around the Indian Ocean. In the Mediterranean, from the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries first Venice and Genoa, then Venice (latterly Spain) and the Ottoman Empire were locked in regional competition for maritime dominance and basing structures. Their respective bases, especially those of Venice and Genoa, were often cheek by jowl, constituting interpenetrating systems. (The Venice-Ottoman rivalry and that of Spain and the Ottomans was somewhat more demarcated between east and west.)

Portugal and Spain had rival but formally demarcated basing structures, with Portugal acquiring bases all around Africa and the Indian Ocean and in the Far East and Brazil, Spain mostly in Latin America but also in the Philippines and the western Mediterranean. Some scholars do not rate Portugal a great power during the early modern era, as it was a maritime power only, standing on the margins of a Europe then dominated by the Habsburg Empire. If so, we have somewhat of a divorce between great-power status and the facts of semiglobal basing structure. In the seventeenth century, the Netherlands was a commercial and maritime hegemon, with the most elaborate basing structure of its day, but it existed within a multipolar power structure in Europe, and its bases interpenetrated the systems of England and France, particularly in India.