Thanks for coming back. If you missed last weeks you can find it here.

The picture for the US Air Force is probably the most complex among the military services. The first issue is what the US Air Force provides the military as a whole. Most people think of the Air Force purely in terms of fighters and bombers. The fact of the matter is the tactical side of the Air Force, including maintenance and direct support functions, accounts for only about half of the Air Force in terms of personnel and equipment.

The Air Force refers to this other half as “enablers”. This group includes things like two of the three elements of our nuclear triad. It also includes airlift, satellite operations, command/control functions, ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance), and now cyber operations.

The old adage “amateurs study tactics, professionals study logistics” has never been truer than in the modern age where the world is more interconnected and interdependent and thus the US finds itself in far flung places. The airlift required to deploy those very heavy Army vehicles is critical to any ground operation. So is the ability to continuously provide fuel, ammo, and other supplies to countries around the world, many whom are lacking in transportation infrastructure.

If the US military has an Achilles heel it is our dependence on satellites. Planes, ships, tank, and JDAMs (which is the smart-bomb that we use the vast majority of the time) are all reliant on GPS satellites for navigation. As we have been pushing harder and harder for more integrated actions between services and access to better intelligence and control for commanders on the ground, our key communication asset is ever shifting away from the local, service centric radios and more to satellite based communications.

Now to place all of this in the NATO context and then the current force structure. Most European nations run small but advanced, high quality, tactical centric Air Forces. They have flown with American forces time and time again. They have performed very well and have integrated into an American “enabled” force very well.

However, the enabler side of many NATO members is greatly lacking. Many European army units in Afghanistan and both times in Iraq were dependent on the US for delivering not only supplies but also their heavy armored units as well. In the 2011 air campaign against Libya, originally France and the UK attempted to jointly command the operation. After a few day the US, via NATO, took command. European nations still provided the majority of the tactical assets and performed those roles very well. The disjoint command structure mixed with a lack of enablers meant that Europe could not even maintain an operation across the Mediterranean.

Frankly, many European leaders were very embarrassed by this turn of events. The Libya campaign has served as a call to action across Europe to address this question that has been lingering for over a decade. The roots of this problem are as complex as the answers. Although the continent has grown closer together over the years, it has done so in a cross-sectional fashion.

The EU, commonly favored by liberal parties within countries, often sees itself as a friendly counter weight to the US. NATO, commonly favored by conservative parties within countries, see itself as jointed directly with the US in all critical matters of foreign affairs. Given these fundamental differences in views, NATO and the EU don’t work that closely together… if at all. Member states may be highly engaged with both, but they are approached as independent efforts and there are few leaders who do both.

The best way I know to describe this problem is the following: image if the US constitution specified both a Secretary of Defense and Secretary of State but made it illegal for both of them to attend the same meetings. That sounds funny but remember that both NATO and the EU are based in Brussels, are ran completely independently from each other, and don’t engage in either joint planning or joint policy making.

Some efforts have been made in recent years to improve this relationship, mostly via high level members either fostering personal relationships or attending a few key meeting of the other in an informal capacity. However these events are still novel enough that they make the news.

The closeness of modern Europe has largely been accomplished via the EU. Its ability to generate soft power has greatly improved. Unfortunately this new unity is not reflected in an increase in the capacity of the military enablers need for Europe (via NATO or the EU) to project their currently military power. The enablers needed in modern warfare are complex and benefit greatly from economies of scale. This makes it very difficult for a single small nation to provide all the capacities needed.

Merging these complex system across multiple nations has also proven to be difficult and requires a tremendous amount of coordination across NATO. Multiple efforts have been tried to address these issue. In some areas we have had success in standardization across the alliance but thus far the larger enablers fall short. This leaves Europe’s various militarizes dependent on the US and its Air Force enablers for any significant operation. This is recognized on both sides of the Atlantic as a major concern.

Back to the question at hand: the US rebalance to Asia. Much like US Army units, there are many who no longer think Europe needs large numbers of tactical air asset from the US. However professionals in NATO recognizes that US enablers are still needed. The US Air Force’s tactical assets are already split between Europe and the Pacific somewhat evenly.

In the case of the Air Force overall balance is less critical as redeploying aircraft is very simple, deploying support elements is manageable, and both are far simpler tasks than heavy armor lift and other similar difficulties that the US Air Force address daily. It is also worth noting Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan fly (and thus maintain and repair) the same tactical aircraft as the US Air Force.

So now we get to the fundamental question at hand: is the US actually rebalancing to Asia? In terms of our military power the answer is this: “No, we are not rebalancing because we are already there and have been there for some time”. Yes, the previous statement is a bit of an oversimplification given the complications of Air Force enablers in NATO, but on the whole it holds true.

Thanks for reading. Next week we will be talking about the economic and diplomatic issues.

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.