This long post recounts an informal discussion among 11 AEI Foreign and Defense Policy fellows about the deterrent value of American military forces operating forward, conducting operations that prevented specific outcomes invidious to US interests. Because it moves the debate about ‘offshore balancing’ beyond more general effects, and gives concrete examples, we thought it would be of wider interest. With the consent of us all, here are excerpted the ideas, giving a window into our internal conversation.

Mackenzie Eaglen: Are there ways to measure the deterrent value of presence, including how to capture what our being forward has prevented and its overall return on investment?

A few years back, I wrote in a
report:

“America’s naval presence in the [MidEast] region is especially important during times of crisis. When President Obama decided to begin operations against ISIS in August 2014, the USS George H. W. Bush strike group moved from the Arabian Sea to the North Arabian Gulf within 30 hours to conduct combat operations against the group—launching 20–30 combat sorties per day.

Yet, in many ways, the carrier’s greatest contribution to the fight against ISIS was not necessarily its striking power but its proximity to the conflict. If the strike group had been based in the United States, the president’s options would have been much more limited. As it was, the carrier’s routine forward-deployment meant that it was available for use where and when it was most needed.”

It is examples like
this that I’m seeking — along with your general thoughts and counsel on a tough
question defense planners have long sought to better answer for eager
policymakers.

Kenneth Pollack:
There are
any number of points to be made on this topic, but I can give you a few of the
more salient ones now.

• First, there are a number of good academic studies on extended deterrence demonstrating that the key to extended deterrence is the local balance of forces, NOT the global balance. You can start with Paul Huth and Bruce Russett’s work in the 1980s and ‘90s and work your way forward. Huth and Russett found that when the protector does not have military forces in proximity to the target country, the aggressor (and often the target itself) believes that (A) the aggressor can pull off a fait accompli before the protector’s forces can arrive and/or (B) they see the absence of the protector’s forces as proof that the protector really doesn’t care about the target and won’t fight for it.
• Second, in 1987, the Iranians tried an amphibious assault against Saudi Arabia. We don’t know what they were really up to, but we think they wanted to destroy Saudi oil facilities around Dhahran. A couple of US surface ships just happened to be in the area (as part of the Tanker War and Operation EARNEST WILL) and kind of “bumped into” the southern part of the Iranian fleet. That caused the Iranians to call off the entire operation. We did not even know it was happening, but our presence prevented it.
• Next, when Saddam attacked Kuwait in 1990, he was wondering if the US would intervene. He may have believed that we would not because we had reduced our forces in the region after 1988 and he saw that as a lessening of our interest. However, the evidence is quite a bit stronger that he believed that the US would intervene to stop him, but that we would send small, rapidly-deployable forces (a carrier battle group (CVBG), a Marine expeditionary unit, the ready brigade of the 82nd Airborne) immediately, and his massive Republican Guard (120,000 troops, 1,000 T-72s, 750 BMPs) would crush those forces. As he warned Ambassador Glaspie, he assumed that the casualties we would take from that would be more than we could bear, and so we would accede to his annexation of Kuwait. Regardless of whether we agreed with his thinking, he convinced himself that he could deal with us either because we did not care OR because he could defeat whatever forces we could move there quickly. Both assumptions were based on the absence of strong US forces already present in the region.
• Fast forward to 1994, and Saddam again threatened Kuwait. As best we understand it, he really did intend to attack Kuwait to force the UN to lift the sanctions. This time, we initiated Operation VIGILANT WARRIOR, and because we already had a CVBG nearby, a heavy brigade in Kuwait, Prepositioning of Materiel Configured in Unit Sets (POMCUS) in Qatar and Diego Garcia, plus US Air Force aircraft already in the Gulf to enforce the No-Fly Zones, we were able to build up a Marine expeditionary force and the 24th Infantry Division plus supporting air and naval forces faster than he could mass the Republican Guards down there. So he was forced to call off the operation and even makes some humiliating concessions to us to get us to not attack him.

John Maurer: RAND did a big statistical study on “US Presence and the Incidence of Conflict” a few years back which showed (tentatively) that the presence of American forces drives down the incidence of high-intensity interstate conflicts, though they also claimed to show that American forces can increase the incidence of lower-level interstate “militarized activities.” (The second claim is less well-operationalized; while the presence or absence of war is pretty easy to code, there is a lot more judgment that goes into what counts as a militarized activity). Low on anecdotes, but some of the graphs on pages 44-53 might be illustrative of larger trends.

Michael Mazza: From what I remember, a key (if entirely unsurprising) finding of those exercises was that forward-deployed naval forces (FDNF) were a game-changer when it came to US ability to generate forces in a crisis. Both military and political leaders were always hesitant to surge forces from the continental United States (CONUS) because we risked “breaking” the force — a “proper” response to even relatively minor crises would have led to sinking (pun intended) the optimized fleet response plan, so decision-makers were constantly putting off making that decision for fear that they’d *really* need to later on.

We
were dealing with imaginary (though realistic) scenarios, so can’t speak
directly to Mackenzie’s question. But the observation that FDNF are, in
important ways, cost-savers would seem to be relevant here.

Take,
for example, the 95/96 Taiwan Strait Crisis. The USS Independence was
homeported in Japan and deployed to waters not too distant from Taiwan as
tensions escalated. And the USS Nimitz was on a Pacific/ME deployment from
Bremerton and available to be sent to waters around Taiwan. Their initial proximity didn’t
prevent China’s initial missile firings, but their dispatch to the immediate
vicinity arguably stopped Chinese malfeasance in its tracks.

Zack Cooper: One challenge with measuring the value of presence is that it has a number of different benefits and costs, which are not easily comparable. Presence is useful for both deterrence and defense against adversaries. It can also decrease the size of the force needed to support warplans, since present forces have more dwell time, and can also hasten response timelines and thereby prevent faits accomplis. Just as important, presence is critical to reassure allies and partners of US commitment and capability. Furthermore, forward-deployed forces typically gain greater familiarity with regional geography and are more easily available to train and exercise with allies and partners, thereby increasing interoperability. Finally, presence can give Washington greater leverage in difficult discussions with allies and partners. So the benefits of presence are many and hard to both quantify and compare.

But
the costs of presence are also difficult to measure. There is the strategic
risk that forward-based or forward-posture forces might be attacked in a
conflict or could incentivize risky moves by US allies or partners, thereby
entrapping the United States in a conflict. And then there are the financial
costs, which are complex since many of our forward-based forces are supported
by complicated cost-sharing arrangements with local governments (we
often also have limited infrastructure to support redeployment of
large units to the United States). For all these reasons, measuring the
value of forward presence is more an art than a science. The value placed on
these different priorities matters just as much, if not more than, the actual
costs and benefits of various presence models.

John Ferrari: It depends by what you mean by the terms — “forward stationed” vs “presence” and “heel-to-toe rotational” vs. “intermittent.” These terms are often used interchangeably, but they are very important to the debate:

• Someone once said you only need one person forward stationed
  but they certainly must be bloodied at the first battle; allies may want
  forward stationed US forces because it automatically generates a US response.
• Many may prefer families that come with permanently stationed-forward
  forces because the US will go to no extreme to protect our families, in effect
  making them potential human shields.
• Combatant commands (COCOMS) hate rotational forces because it
  gives the SecDef power to take and give; COCOMS, all else being equal,
  want to “own” forces because it is harder to take them away;
  intermittent rotational forces are the least preferred by COCOMs.
• As we look at the recent Indo-Pacific Command funding initiative,
  they clearly prefer permanently forward station forces; in effect, they are
  trying to avoid a repeat where the SecDef can easily move forces to US Central
  Command or US European Command.

So, forward stationed with families, forward stationed without families, rotational heel-to-toe, and rotational intermittent are all different, and people view the Army as more permanent than the Marines, which are more permanent than the Navy.

Fred Kagan: One might compare the cost of forward deployments against the cost of wars. Like all insurance policies, forward deployments look expensive and optional until they’re not there and something bad happens.

More
concretely, I think 1994 was a fascinating case study. We had two crises that
year simultaneously — the Iraq crisis already mentioned, but also a North Korea
crisis that nearly led to a reinforcement of US troops on the peninsula. It is vitally important
to recall that neither reinforcement to Kuwait nor to South Korea would have
been possible in any meaningful time without the forward deployed forces
already there.

A
big part of the cost of forward deployment, after all, is in the infrastructure
required to house and support the forces and to get people, equipment, and
supplies to and from it. There are two ways to look at that cost. One is that
it is the price of forward deployment and needed only for that purpose (and
therefore unnecessary if we do not have forward deployments). Another is to see
it as the core requirement for rapid reinforcement of a theater (that is,
critically important also for offshore balancing). Strip away all that
infrastructure, and you are left with only expeditionary forces operating from
sparse and primitive bases. Not what you need to fight a major war. So a large
part of the cost of forward deployment is actually investment in having the
ability to surge in response to a crisis, and therefore potentially to meet the
crisis with less force than you would need if you had to start from scratch. The tens of
thousands of troops we sent to the Gulf in 1994 were sufficient because we had
the infrastructure there to start with. If we’d had nothing there at all, we
would have had to send a lot more than we did and spend a lot more money — and take
a much longer time — to achieve any effect, which would likely have been the
effect of launching a massive counter-offensive à la 1991 to undo a war whose
first phase was already lost.

Kenneth Pollack: If American forces are not already present in theater, there is no reason to believe that they will be allowed in at a time of crisis. 

One
of the problems with the offshore balancing theory is that it assumes that
balancing behavior is more common than bandwagoning. So even in the absence of
American military forces, our regional allies will band together against any
power that becomes threatening, and welcome American military forces back into
the region to help them if we chose to intervene — or so the theory goes. 

What
this omits is that countries typically only balance if they think they can. Absent
the United States, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states do not believe
they can balance against Iran. Witness Abu Dhabi’s abject concessions to Iran
in 2019 after the Iranian attacks on their oil exports and the complete
lack of an American response. (The Abraham Accords are the GCC states trying to
figure out if Israel can be a substitute for the US in the future, but it is
not at all clear that it can be). I will defer to our Asia hands, but what I
have consistently heard from South Koreans and Southeast Asians is that if the
US were not willing to back them up, they would have no choice but to
accommodate Chinese demands. 

So,
if we are not present — or worse, if we leave because we no longer feel it is
as important to us as it once was, as those explicitly arguing for abandoning
the Gulf are saying — there is a very high likelihood that the states left
behind will kowtow to Iran/China/Russia. And if there ever is a crisis (much
less likely since they will already be under their domination), it is highly
unlikely that they agree to let us back in. The Iranians/Chinese/Russians will
doubtless tell them not to, and they would have to be willing to revolt against
the local hegemon in the hope that the US would be willing to fight for their independence.
At least in my part of the world, that’s not very likely.

Fred Kagan: In the world of real anti-access/area denial challenges, being in theater means not having to shoot your way in from the get-go. If we pull out of the Middle East entirely or even largely, going back will likely mean going back in under fire. Just to note — the US has NEVER had to do that, as I recall. That is, I cannot offhand think of an occasion in which we had to conduct a forced-entry operation into a theater. The Pacific in WWII maybe? Depends how you define the theater, I think. There are a lot of implications for our whole approach to strategy in there, let alone for the importance of forward deployments.

Giselle Donnelly: Even in the 1980s, in addition to maintaining 400K forces in Europe, we were building toward six armored divisions’ worth of POMCUS in Europe. Additionally, the gear itself had to be upgraded — in those days, we thought the first-to-fight forces had to be the best.

A key element in Reagan-era
conventional deterrence and AirLand Battle doctrine was that our posture was
moving to build a thinly-veiled counteroffensive capability that threatened the
Soviets with the loss of their East European satellites and strategic glacis. That
is, we weren’t just trying to keep our status quo but to take theirs away if it
came to it, to really threaten something they valued. A CONUS-centric posture
would not have sufficed for that.

Michael Mazza: That observation has relevance in Asia today. If we limit ourselves to a “local war” in the waters around Taiwan should China opt for force, Beijing might be happy to see that war geographically bounded, but from Beijing’s perspective, a war over Taiwan is a war for all the marbles. We should expect them to fight like it is — which means that limited naval engagements are likely to be insufficient.

Kori Schake: Constraining ourselves to ‘local’ waters telegraphs the limits of our interest, which is exactly the wrong message. Signalling a willingness to escalate is really important for deterrence.

John Maurer: In the 1980s, the Soviets had a belt of Warsaw Pact satellites that could be targeted or taken away without escalating directly against the Soviet homeland. At that point, we could have at least imagined (however unrealistically) a conflict in which we only shot at our respective European clients, without a total superpower homeland exchange.

While the United States still has many
allies and clients in Asia, China doesn’t. That’s generally to our advantage,
but one potential shortfall is that it gives the Chinese a lot more
“graduated” escalatory options than the United States has prior to a
homeland exchange. I think that drives many analysts to look for non-escalatory
options for fighting (again, however unrealistically).

I think the lack of non-escalatory
options is a strong argument in favor of retaining as much nuclear counterforce
capability against China as possible.

Fred Kagan: This is true in a sense, but I don’t think it really captures the dynamic, although I think you’re on to something important. I do not think that the Soviets thought we could stop their conventional invasion of Western Europe. I do not think we could have, in fact. I’m not sure they would have made the Channel in 30 days, which was their plan, but I think they would have overrun Germany and driven into France before we could do much.

…and then the French and possibly
British nuke them.

I strongly suspect there were times the
Soviets were far from sure that we would nuke them if they were overrunning
Europe. I don’t think they were ever confident that the Force de Frappe would
not, well, frappe.

I’m flagging this because I think we
can draw partial conclusions from the Cold War model that are problematic (not
to say that you are doing that, John). The bar for conventional deterrence is
potentially much higher than for conventional deterrence backed by credible
threat of nuclear escalation. And I think that may be key in a theater in which
our adversary has nukes and our allies do not.

All of which brings me to a discussion
a lot of people in town seem to be very allergic to. If we pull back in Asia or
behave in a way that undercuts the credibility of our conventional deterrent,
our allies certainly could decide to start sending tribute to the Middle
Kingdom again. Or they could field a nuclear arsenal. Do we not need to
consider the risk of triggering a nuclear arms race in Asia by pulling back
from forward deployments and so on? 

John Maurer: I, too, doubt that NATO would have fared well in a conventional conflict with the Soviets. I know that on the American side there were long discussions about where to launch nuclear attacks in a “flexible response” or “limited strategic nuclear” approach. I think it was in those discussions that the question of whether to target the Soviet homeland vs. Soviet clients and bases in Eastern Europe came to the fore. Those sorts of discussions would be harder to have today, because the Chinese have so few clients and bases outside mainland China.

One of the most important missions of
forward-deployed forces is to reassure our allies. That feeds back into
deterrence insofar as adversaries have to calculate the political willingness
of their neighbors to resist them into their decisions for aggression. But it
also helps restrain (deter?) our allies from doing things we don’t want, like
acquiring their own nuclear weapons. So, very important all around.

Giselle Donnelly: I think perhaps the onset of the Soviet hordes might have proved a mixed bag: greater success in the north, and a decent chance the Germans would have sued for peace, splitting NATO. On the other hand, the south might have been better than a stalemate, with a US-led “left hook” through Czechoslovakia (and perhaps trapping the Soviet armies in the north).

If we’re defending Taiwan seriously, we
have to be able to operate out of Japan, at bare minimum; if the Japanese nix
that, it’s over. If they allow, will Beijing strike targets in Japan (if they
don’t do so from the start)? At any rate, it’s a slippery slope, and keeping it
narrowly local is difficult. But we would be well advised to work harder at
giving ourselves some “Hanover options,” figuring out how to annoy the Chinese
on other fronts as well as defending the Electorate itself, and thinking about
the postwar negotiations

Reassurance: That the Japanese and
others haven’t gone nuclear — that we know of — is a pretty good metric.

Paul Wolfowitz: I believe that Saddam’s miscalculation in 1990 had less to do with lack of American presence than with: 

• the mixed signals coming from Washington, and
  particularly the State Department testimony that the US took no position on the
  border dispute between Iraq and Kuwait; 
• the eagerness of Egypt and other Arab countries to
  reach a negotiated outcome (while we were debating in Washington whether to
  send an aircraft carrier to the Gulf, a message came from Mubarak that
  Americans needed to stay out and let the Arabs settle this among themselves —
  which was music to the ears of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who also opposed the
  idea!);
• Saddam’s belief, as he stated to Ambassador April
  Glaspie, that the US could not stand to suffer casualties, whereas “he” had
  taken as many as 10,000 in a single day during the Iran–Iraq War;
• A widely held belief — shared not only by Saddam,
  but also by Henry Kissinger, who expressed it publicly even as Cheney was
  flying to Saudi Arabia to meet with King Fahd — that the Saudis would never
  accept any large American military deployment on their territory.

Securing that Saudi agreement was one
of President Bush‘s great diplomatic achievements during that historic crisis.

What Saddam failed to anticipate, in
addition to the Saudi decision, was the speed with which the United States
could deploy a formidable initial force to Saudi Arabia in a very short time
thanks to two developments which had flown largely under the radar:

• the use by the Saudis of the Airborne Warning And
  Control System decision and deployment, to build a very large base structure
  that could accommodate a much larger Air Force than their own in the event that
  they someday needed to call for American aid;
• the deployment of Marine prepositioning ships (MPS)
  to Diego Garcia, an idea that the Army had initially turned down when it was
  proposed to them in 1979, but which we were fortunately able to persuade the US
  Marine Corps Commandant — General Bob Barrow and his programmer then‑MG PX
  Kelley — to take the MPS on for the Marine Corps.

Of course, the Army has since
embraced the idea of afloat prepositioning (naturally with their own acronym). I
believe that both of the above concepts could be of value today for crisis
situations in places where it may be difficult for various reasons to maintain
a peacetime presence.

However, lest I be misunderstood, I
agree emphatically that it would be a terrible mistake to abandon the presence
in the Gulf that we have acquired with so much effort and sacrifice over the
past three decades, believing that we could somehow fight or negotiate our way
back in the event that we someday need to.

I also think that so much of the Obama administration’s talk about “pivoting” — which ignored the critical importance of Persian Gulf energy supplies for both China and Japan — was, and remains, strategic foolishness, as I explained somewhat diplomatically in my essay for Hoover last fall. Trump’s aversion to “endless wars” risked a similar result, but fortunately was somewhat restrained by the confrontation with Iran.

China may be our biggest challenge, but
the PRC is acutely aware of its dependence on the Persian Gulf, while we smugly
talk about being energy independent. There’s a world of difference between
“self-sufficient” and “independent” when the rest of the world, including our
most important allies and adversaries, are still so dependent on this one
troubled and difficult region, where we have to deal with nasty characters like
Iran and “friends” like Mohammed bin Salman! But, unfortunately, “Great
Powers” don’t get to choose.

Kori Schake: It’s exciting that there’s so much new information now available that allows us to test these propositions.

Oriana Skylar Mastro: I want to echo my agreement with many of these points. Some mentioned that I want to amplify:

1) Forward presence gives the US more options to
respond in crises on lower rungs of the escalation ladder.

2) It’s cheaper to house US forces abroad than it
would be to station them in the United States.

3) Given the geographic distance of Asia and
advancements in precision-guided munitions, ‘fighting our way back in’ is
almost an operational impossibility. Offshore balancers like to refer to WWII
as an example of how it can be done. But the US had Great Britain as an
operating base. And the US and its allies still lost 4400 people with the
landing. There is no way we can do something similar from CONUS against China,
which has the most advanced cruise and ballistic missile program in the world.

One additional consideration — readiness and preparing the battlefield. In my mind, the greatest benefit of forward-deploying military forces is not the signal it sends (though that’s good too) but the operational benefits. You need to know the environment. That requires being there and operating there in peacetime. One prime example is anti-submarine warfare. To track other submarines, you need information like the temperature, salinity, water density, and a map of the ocean floor. These things are not constant. So you can’t gather this information and then leave, and it’s useful years later. If one’s potential adversaries are constantly learning about the potential operational environment and the US is not, we will be at a serious disadvantage.

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