Report Calls for Dispersing US Bases in Mideast

An influential Washington think-tank called Tuesday for the U.S. military to redraw its map of bases throughout the Middle East to keep out of range of new Iranian weapons that could threaten American troops.

In a new report, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments warned that Tehran's investment in anti-ship and precision guided missiles designed to strike targets throughout the region, combined with sophisticated air defense systems, means that U.S. may have to shift its presence in the region in the coming decade.

The U.S. also needs to change the forces it deploys, the authors concluded. It should focus on trimming older, un-stealthy, short-range strike fighters in exchange for stealthier, long-range bombers and unmanned aircraft that can penetrate Iranian airspace to deliver knockout punches on hardened targets, said Mark Gunzinger.  He briefed reporters Tuesday morning on his new report, "Outside-In, Operating from Range to Defeat Iran's Anti-Access and Area-Denial Threats."

The brief was noteworthy because CSBA's ideas and recommendations have a way of becoming Pentagon policy. Several years ago, CSBA recommended an "air-sea battle" concept that focused on building long-range, carrier-launched stealthy UAVs, a family of long-range strike systems, a cyber buildup and a number of disbursed bare-bones bases in the Pacific where U.S forces could scatter in the event of a war with a China. Many of these recommendations have found their way into the Pentagon's strategy and budgets. 

In order to deny Iran's ability to keep enemies out of the region, the Pentagon must focus on three main "lines of operations," said Gunzinger, a former B-52 pilot. "This is all about gaining the initiative and gaining the freedom of action that would be needed to successfully prosecute a theater campaign," he said.

The first is deploying forces to bases outside the reach of Iran's missiles, in places such as eastern Saudi Arabia, the Horn of Africa, the Seychelles and Turkey. This "posture of advantage" would build new Spartan bases "to allow our close-in forces to rapidly disburse to in times of heightened tensions . . . "that would complicate Iran's targeting" efforts, said Gunzinger. The U.S. could also harden existing facilities, add missile defense units to the region and plan to move important staging bases and command and intelligence centers to locations outside of Iran's reach.

"We're not talking about stripping the Persian Gulf of our presence or taking all of our forces out and fighting from the periphery," said Gunzinger. "We're talking about establishing a more versatile posture in the Persian Gulf, while reducing the vulnerability of forces, as well as establishing those new bases we can deploy to and operate with a great deal of freedom from if we'd have to fight Iran."

Elaborating on this, Gunzinger said it may make more sense to swap missile defense, special operations  and partner training forces for the "large fleet headquarters and combined air operations centers that are a little over 100 nautical miles from the border with Iran, that could be reached with ballistic missiles in less five minutes," said Gunzinger. He went on to say that these large command and control facilities are "installations that we frankly might not need today in the era of networked warfare; it's something to think about."

The next point is to ensure that the U.S. can strike Iran from multiple points far from the Persian Gulf, to "go to the heart of the problem, Iran's command and control, its network and so forth, striking the interior of Iran on day one of a conflict; compressing the threat from all sides, not nibbling away at the threat from the outside and rolling it back" as would happen in a traditional ground conflict, Gunzinger said.

Finally, amphibious ground forces would seize strategic islands and small pockets of the Iranian coast "to deny Iran the ability to use those locals as targeting platforms" to keep U.S. forces out of the Persian Gulf.

Other sub-"lines of operation" include eliminating Iran's ability to use nuclear weapons; eliminating a threat posed by Iran's missile-armed proxies such as Hezbollah; imposing serious economic costs on the Iranian regime for aggression; and encouraging internal revolution to bring down Iran's government from within.

As for nuclear weapons, "the best option is to prevent Iran from achieving a nuclear weapons capability to begin with" since countering an attack could be incredibly difficult, said Gunzinger.

CSBA's new concept for dealing with Iran echoes its and the Pentagon's strategies for defeating what DoD calls "anti-access/area denial" weapons around the globe. Those plans call for investing in stealthy, long-range bombers and UAVs along with submarine-launched cruise missiles and amphibious warfare capabilities.

"We want to be able to have these concepts that provide very vital links between the strategy rolled out two weeks ago and our actual defense" buys, said Gunzinger. "We think the world is becoming increasingly non-permissive for military operations [in all domains]; air, space, sea, undersea and on the ground. If that trend continues, we're going to have to move toward capabilities can operate in all those domains against those kinds of threats."

He went on to say that the Pentagon has "a mix problem, we have too much in the way of non-stealthy, non-survivable air capability and too many short-range versus long-range capabilities. The vast majority of our combat air forces across the services are non-stealthy and relatively short-range. If we had a basing problem in the future, such as the one we illustrated today, you've got to question what value those fighter forces would be until we have access to the bases.

"We're not saying don't buy fighters in the future, we are saying, 'take a look at the mix and make sure it's right.' Today it really isn't, we need more of the long-range surveillance and strike capabilities and perhaps less of the shorter-range capabilities."   

Gunzinger made sure to note that the report is not meant to serve as a guide for the current dispute between Iran and the West over Tehran's quest to develop nuclear weapons. Instead, he called it a long-term map designed to be used as Iran's military grows more sophisticated in the coming decade.