It is surprising how little debate there has been on the US rebalance to Asia proposed by President Obama. Despite the partisan nature in Washington today many Republicans have backed the President on the shift. For the Democrats, this rebalance is a moment of insightful leadership from a transformational figure. For the business wing of the Republican Party, it is our foreign policy catching up to our current economic realities. For the more hawkish elements of the Republican Party, it is the US finally addressing the rise of China head on.

But as an avid watcher of foreign affairs I have to ask myself: is this really a rebalance? That is not a simple question to ask. Anyone familiar with the operations of the Departments of State and Defense knows this is a large systematic question that will yield a tangled answer.

I will be defining American power along three lines: military, economic, and diplomatic. Remember that all of these are somewhat fluid. Military assets are designed to be redeployed, however some assets are far more difficult to redeploy than others. Markets and competitive advantage can shift between nations and subsections of economies fairly quickly, but long term investments and establishing new markets is key to any modern global business. Diplomacy is partially about treaties/organizations but also partially about personal relationships between heads of state and other officials. There is no perfect balance or optimal results in these kinds of shifting environments paired with long-term plans, just best guesstimates.

The most direct way to discuss military power is to do it by each service. Although the US military operates jointly most of the planning, positioning, and tactical developments are still done within each service. It is also important to note the different footings and interactions the services take in the world.

The US Navy and Marine Core are forward deployed. They are everywhere, all the time, and commonly are the first called on during quickly developing situations. If you take a hard look at their tool kits (weapons, forces, command structure) you will see that across the board they are general purpose, highly rugged, and self-sufficient. These forces are deployed first and then respond to whatever situation arises with what they have on hand.

For the US Navy the need for a shift to the Pacific was determined and achieved back in 1922. Since then the US Navy has maintained both a Pacific and Atlantic fleet with the Pacific being the larger of the two. For the Marines, the story is similar. The Marine Core didn’t really leave the Pacific Theater after WWII. Marines are forward deployed all over the world, at every embassy, and across the US Navy as a whole. They hold a major bases in Japan and Guam and are developing one in Australia. Like their parent navy, they are also already biased heavily to East Asia.

The Army and the tactical side of the Air Force operate large, complex, multifaceted forces. Some forces are forward deployed to a few key places but as a whole the bulk are based back in the US. Both have a number of specialized systems/forces to deal with specific threats. They tend to deploy what they need when they need it.

While the Navy/Marines deploy then react, the Army/Air Force determines how they want to address a situation, select specialized assets, and then deploys those assets with a specific mission in mind. Given how task specific the Army and Air Force can be we have to place them in their larger context within NATO and with other allies.

The Army has had two divisions in Europe (1^st Armored and 1^st Infantry) and one division in South Korea (2^nd Infantry); however, remember that the Marines are also heavily deployed in the Pacific. In terms of total ground forces, Europe and East Asia have been on roughly equal footing during the Cold War and that is when you remove the Korean War and Vietnam War from the equation.

It is also important to note the effects of Desert Storm on NATO. The Iraqis were equipped with large amounts of Soviet armor, the very same Soviet armor that concerned Europe so much. Here in America the war was seen as a major success. This view is also shared by many in European about their own armed forces, both air and army, and rightfully so. Place this new European confidence in the context of the fall of the USSR and it is easy to see why many no longer saw a need for large numbers of US Army units in Europe. Europe felt secure dealing with Soviet armor on the plains of Europe because of how successfully they dealt with Soviet armor in the sands of Iraq and the transition from USSR to Russia led to a smaller sized army.

Since the end of the Cold War, the US Army has moved from a Division System to a Brigade System, i.e. a single large unit with centralized command/logistics into multiple medium-sized units that can now act independent of each other. A number of European based brigades were already being move back to the US by the late 90’s.

While gathering up the forces needed for Iraq and Afghanistan, US commanders worked to maintaining a strong force in South Korea due to the provocative actions of North Korea. These factors lead to a situation where Europe was already diminishing in terms of US Army numbers and Asia was already receiving priority in term of maintaining forward deployed brigades.

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Thanks you for reading my blog. Next week we will continue with a discussion of the US Air Force as well as NATO.