'Four years to downsize the core of U.S. presence in the heart of the GCC to a peripheral position in Jordan and Oman is a relatively short period of time. Yet it could extricate 50,000 U.S. personnel from the region and fundamentally realign U.S. global military posture. It would also set the stage for additional withdrawals and a permanent departure of U.S. military forces from the Middle East. The relief such changes might provide to the U.S. force structure and budget could be critical as defense planners attempt to balance responsibly against challenges in other regions of the world, like East Asia.''..dramatically reducing U.S. force commitments in the Middle East could significantly ease the burden currently placed on the military services in meeting the operational demands of the various combatant commanders around the globe.
..
If the premise for a withdrawal of U.S. forces is that the Middle East is of much diminished strategic importance than why keep equipment to support a return? The United States does not preposition a brigade’s worth of equipment in Brazil because no one thinks there is anything worth fighting a major war over in South America. Part of acknowledging that the Middle East’s status has changed is accepting that it is okay for U.S. forces to leave in a manner that is both definitive and unconditional.
This possibility is in keeping with a sober understanding of the limits on the United States force structure and economic resources. The United States can ill-afford to fight another protracted ground war in Southwest Asia. So why prepare for one with prepositioned equipment and munition stocks? Why leave behind residual counterterrorism forces that have the potential to suck America back into a larger conflict?
Prepositioned stockpiles and CT forces carry smaller footprints than large-scale troop deployments but produce similar political entanglements. They make the United States beholden to the host regime and both constrain the United States in its interactions with that state and risk ensnaring it in conflicts it could otherwise avoid. It is not clear that 1,000 troops cannot involve the United States in a war any less easily than 10,000. It is the ties to the regional regimes that any commitment of troops entail that are the problem. If the United States leaves the Middle East, gone should mean gone.
..Leaving the Middle East will constitute a fundamental shift in not only the United States global military posture, but also its strategic thinking .. The main justification for leaving the Middle East is its decreased strategic importance. Yet a close second could be the likelihood that additional widespread instability is almost certainly in the region’s future. The social and economic strains that led to the 2011 uprisings known as the Arab Spring have never been adequately addressed .. The continued dependence of the region on the rentier model—by which states essentially bribe their population into accepting authoritarianism with the fruits of energy profits—is unsustainable.. it is simply worth acknowledging that regimes that function like nineteenth-century monarchies (at best) are increasingly untenable in the twenty-first century. Sooner or later, lasting change will come to Middle Eastern society and it might be best if the United States observed it from afar. The experience of Bahrain in 2011—where the U.S. government first warned Manama against overt repression of protesters and then had to stand by while precisely that occurred—is a cautionary tale, one that could conceivably be played out on larger stage at some point in the future.
.."Pulling the band-aid off quickly"—relatively speaking—might therefore be the better strategy.
With all of those variables as background, it is possible to posit what a potential withdrawal would look like. Such a plan’s focus would be liquating U.S. bases in the quartet of small GCC states along the western Persian Gulf coast. Its goal would be a complete severing of U.S. military presence, without the deployment of residual CT forces or leaving behind prepositioned stockpiles. As for timing, four years seems like a reasonable period to significantly downsize U.S. presence from the current footprint back into a posture closer to its historical two-base footprint. In general, the flow of forces would be out of the Gulf region and to the south and west, with Jordan and Oman serving as waystations while sufficient consensus is developed in the U.S. policy community to leave the region entirely.''Thinking through the process of transiting U.S. forces completely out of the Middle East .. It will leave the region without a primary external balancer for the first time in over a century .. significantly reduce U.S. presence—both in total number of forces and bases—in as little as four years. .. dramatically reducing U.S. force commitments in the Middle East could significantly ease the burden currently placed on the military services in meeting the operational demands of the various combatant commanders around the globe. In fact, freeing up forces and funds from the outsized Middle East force posture could be essential to meeting future requirements in East Asia, particularly if U.S. resources are further constrained post-COVID.
A necessary prerequisite for discussing withdrawal from the Middle East is obviously to understand the scope of the "footprint" the United States needs to divest. It might surprise most Americans that the United States now has almost as many forces in the Middle East as it does in Europe, where it stations approximately 70,000 troops. In the Middle East, a detailed count reveals the United States currently has about 42,000 troops on the ground, but regular rotational deployments by air units and large naval forces like carrier battle groups (CVBGs) mean that as many as 65,000 U.S. personnel can be in the Middle East at any time.
..
In considering a plan for withdrawal from the Middle East, it is an obvious point, but one nonetheless worth making, that there are no legal impediments to the United States leaving .. Leaving is a matter of policy choice and, more importantly, the political will to implement it .. At the end of the Iraq War, the United States went from approximately 96,000 troops in-country to zero in the span of two years. A withdrawal of 42,000 troops from the broader Middle East could therefore conceivably be done in a year..
Additional force levels would be reduced simply by stopping rotational deployments, in particular altering requirements ending the presence of carrier battle groups, each of which has roughly 7,500 personnel in its complement. Over the years, CENTCOM and the Navy have had a tortured relationship over demand for carriers and the availability of these platforms..
..The symbolism of abandoning one of its oldest bases—and the lynchpin of its naval presence in the region—would be the clearest indicator of the changed importance of the Middle East in U.S. strategic thinking.
..
.. "offshore balancing" best describes the U.S. approach for most of the Cold War, when it maintained only two bases in the Middle East and relied on an array of other instruments of national power—including economic power, diplomacy, covert action, and security assistance—to exert its influence .. without permanent standing forces or numerous bases.
The position of this paper is to move beyond both of these concepts to a full and complete divestiture of a role for U.S. military force in the region. In doing so, it might be necessary to again adopt a posture that would resemble offshore balancing during an interregnum period before the United States has completely left the region. But the final end state should not include leaving behind either prepositioned equipment or residual CT forces.
If the premise for a withdrawal of U.S. forces is that the Middle East is of much diminished strategic importance than why keep equipment to support a return? The United States does not preposition a brigade’s worth of equipment in Brazil because no one thinks there is anything worth fighting a major war over in South America. Part of acknowledging that the Middle East’s status has changed is accepting that it is okay for U.S. forces to leave in a manner that is both definitive and unconditional.
This possibility is in keeping with a sober understanding of the limits on the United States force structure and economic resources. The United States can ill-afford to fight another protracted ground war in Southwest Asia. So why prepare for one with prepositioned equipment and munition stocks? Why leave behind residual counterterrorism forces that have the potential to suck America back into a larger conflict?
Prepositioned stockpiles and CT forces carry smaller footprints than large-scale troop deployments but produce similar political entanglements. They make the United States beholden to the host regime and both constrain the United States in its interactions with that state and risk ensnaring it in conflicts it could otherwise avoid. It is not clear that 1,000 troops cannot involve the United States in a war any less easily than 10,000. It is the ties to the regional regimes that any commitment of troops entail that are the problem. If the United States leaves the Middle East, gone should mean gone.
..Leaving the Middle East will constitute a fundamental shift in not only the United States global military posture, but also its strategic thinking .. The main justification for leaving the Middle East is its decreased strategic importance. Yet a close second could be the likelihood that additional widespread instability is almost certainly in the region’s future. The social and economic strains that led to the 2011 uprisings known as the Arab Spring have never been adequately addressed .. The continued dependence of the region on the rentier model—by which states essentially bribe their population into accepting authoritarianism with the fruits of energy profits—is unsustainable.. it is simply worth acknowledging that regimes that function like nineteenth-century monarchies (at best) are increasingly untenable in the twenty-first century. Sooner or later, lasting change will come to Middle Eastern society and it might be best if the United States observed it from afar. The experience of Bahrain in 2011—where the U.S. government first warned Manama against overt repression of protesters and then had to stand by while precisely that occurred—is a cautionary tale, one that could conceivably be played out on larger stage at some point in the future.
With all of those variables as background, it is possible to posit what a potential withdrawal would look like. Such a plan’s focus would be liquating U.S. bases in the quartet of small GCC states along the western Persian Gulf coast. Its goal would be a complete severing of U.S. military presence, without the deployment of residual CT forces or leaving behind prepositioned stockpiles. As for timing, four years seems like a reasonable period to significantly downsize U.S. presence from the current footprint back into a posture closer to its historical two-base footprint. In general, the flow of forces would be out of the Gulf region and to the south and west, with Jordan and Oman serving as waystations while sufficient consensus is developed in the U.S. policy community to leave the region entirely.
The first year of the plan would address those deployments where withdrawal is most immediately needed: the active combat zones. This would entail removing the remaining forces from Iraq and Syria and, if they are still there, any U.S. forces on Yemeni soil. At the same time, the United States would announce its broader intentions to withdraw from the region as a whole and specifically from the "core four" of bases on the western Persian Gulf shore.
There should not be any subterfuge here. As the British were, Americans should be open about their intention. First, for those states that want to see the United States leave, like Iran, an open declaration of U.S. intent will decrease the incentive to undertake any action to sabotage the withdrawal. Violence is only likely to slow the U.S. exit, not expedite it. Second, for those states—such as the GCC members—who will be dismayed by the departure of U.S. forces, a public statement will force them to understand—and hopefully accept—the changed strategic setting. And with respect to Iran, it could encourage states like Saudi Arabia to reconsider the need for diplomacy, instead of relying solely on the backing of U.S. muscle. Finally, it could create opportunities for Israel to solidify support among some Arab states, who will be seeking all possible support against Iran in a post-U.S. environment.
The United States would, at the same time, enunciate a specific schedule for pulling out of the GCC countries. To put a marker down, it would remove its remaining forces in Saudi Arabia at the same time as its withdrawal from Iraq and Syria, while starting the early work of reducing forces at the two heaviest lifts—from a logistical standpoint—Bahrain and Kuwait.
In the second year of the plan, forces would be withdrawn from Al Dhafra in the UAE. It is the smallest of the "core four" and its capabilities for hosting U.S. aircraft are largely redundant to those at Al Udeid in Qatar. Taking another GCC country off the board would sustain momentum for withdrawal while work continues on the larger formations at Bahrain and Kuwait. At some point during the first or second year, the small CT advising mission in Lebanon would also be concluded. In the first two years, the United States would divest itself of deployments in six countries, totaling just under 9,000 troops.
..
Four years to downsize the core of U.S. presence in the heart of the GCC to a peripheral position in Jordan and Oman is a relatively short period of time. Yet it could extricate 50,000 U.S. personnel from the region and fundamentally realign U.S. global military posture. It would also set the stage for additional withdrawals and a permanent departure of U.S. military forces from the Middle East. The relief such changes might provide to the U.S. force structure and budget could be critical as defense planners attempt to balance responsibly against challenges in other regions of the world, like East Asia.'
-
..U.S. Withdrawal from the Middle East, December, 2020
Context Veterans groups .. in favor of winding down American military involvement in the Middle EastSenior US general warns .. US is hampered by 'brutal' bureaucracy'..We spent four or five trillion dollars on the war on terrorism and two invasions of two countries.'Middle East prepares for the US to exit Syria(To learn to train for peace - Train for Peace) - '..the United States has no compelling military need to keep a permanent troop presence in the Middle East.'(The U.S. out of the Middle East) - '..the US Military .. Leaves the Middle East..''..not through endless military deployments..' - Biden