(Via Milinet)
July 21, 2000
Take the Marines Off Okinawa
By JACOB HEILBRUNN
WASHINGTON -- President Clinton's arrival in Okinawa today for
the Group of 8
meeting of big industrial nations calls attention to something
beyond the
international economic issues that the leaders there will
discuss: the debate
about whether the time has come to end the American military
presence on
Okinawa.
The Okinawans who have used the visit of the world leaders as a
stage for
demonstrating in favor of American withdrawal are protesting
acts like a
hit-and-run incident involving an Air Force staff sergeant and
the
molestation of a 14-year-old Okinawan girl in which a marine was
accused.
The Japanese government, however, shows no interest in a removal
of the
Americans, because Japan's defenses are bolstered by the
American base.
In the United States, however, the issue is most often framed as
a debate
between isolationists who want us to get out of Asia and
champions of
maintaining our presence in Okinawa as a sign of American
resolve in that
part of the world. Both have it wrong. The United States can
afford to pull
its troops out of Okinawa with no loss of our commitment to
Asian security.
In fact, America's position would be enhanced.
A decade after the fall of the Soviet Union, the challenges to
America in
Asia are a Chinese military buildup, the China-Taiwan conflict
and North
Korea. Yet in Okinawa, 20,000 marines remain as a relic of the
cold war.
Supporters of the status quo argue that the marines on Okinawa
could help
move supplies in the event of a war in Korea or Taiwan and that
they provide
ready reinforcements for possible rapid deployment to other
regions, like the
Persian Gulf. The Clinton administration codified this consensus
in the 1995
Nye report, when it declared that America would keep a minimum
of 100,000
troops in Asia until at least 2015, explicitly including the
20,000 on
Okinawa in that total.
The truth is that the United States can not only retain but
improve upon
these goals by removing its forces from Okinawa. Over the past
decade the
Pentagon has been moving toward a new strategy based on getting
American
troops to global hot spots by sea and air, a strategy known as
maritime
pre-positioning force. International seas offer complete and
expeditious
freedom of movement, and the Marines already have the equivalent
of a
division stationed on ships around the globe. The Navy is also
working to
improve the replenishment of ships already at sea with missiles,
cannon
rounds, bullets and fuel. The marines in Okinawa might be
redeployed to
bolster this strategy.
There are disadvantages, after all, in keeping them where they
are. Okinawa
is what is known as an unaccompanied tour, which means the
marines cannot
bring their wives.
The small Okinawa base also has no room for large-scale battle
training.
More fundamentally, as the military expert Paul Bracken points
out in his
recent book, "Fire in the East," maintaining a string of bases
in Asia has
rendered the American military dangerously vulnerable to
chemical and
ballistic missile attacks. The United States, he says, needs to
restructure
the military to allow it to operate at greater distances from
home and become
"less reliant on vulnerable forward bases."
One step would be to shift the basing of fleets so that
destroyers can remain
permanently stationed in the Pacific rather than trundling to
and from the
West Coast. Facilities in Japan are already being built up, Guam
could be
expanded, and most intriguingly, Vietnam might be willing to
consider leasing
Cam Ranh Bay back to the United States, especially as it fears
growing
Chinese military strength.
In an era of tight military budgets and limited manpower, such
measures would
improve the speed with which American firepower can reach Asia,
and they
would have none of Okinawa's drawbacks.
Jacob Heilbrunn writes often about American U.S. foreign policy.
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