'FORWARD POSITIONING': Good news: Pentagon is finally going to pull 116,000 troops out of pointless stations in Western Europe. Bad news: they're not going to 'bring them home'. Oh, no, they're going to settle them in EASTERN Europe, in Africa, etc. !!
Why? This is move called 'forward positioning'. "The idea is to have troops on hand to go after terrorists where they congregate and strike them before they can attack the U.S."/AssocPress26OCT
|
Think about this: we could keep all our troops in U.S., and, in a crisis, move tens of thousands of them quickly (and relatively cheaply) anywhere in the world (we moved them to Iraq). So why the hell should we 'position' them permanently in these 'forward' positions?
|
Such overseas positioning (a) will be enormously expensive (b) will divert stationing expenditures overseas, while army bases in the U.S. (contributing to prosperity of U.S. neighbors) are being closed;
and (c) will be stressful on GIs, who don't like to be overseas, in countries where they're usually not popular.
(d) American troops are famously inept at handling terrorists/guerillas; it will be the terrorists who go after these sitting ducks., as they went after the marines in Lebanon. (The 40,000 GIs in So.Korea are now hostages to the awesome firepower of N.Korea!)
e)Pentagon may not have that many troops available to man all these stations--not after the slump in enlistments/reenlistments which is likely from now on, after Pentagon mistreatment of GIs in Iraq!
(f) Terrorists don't NEED to 'congregate'--terrorist training camps will likely be in the jungles of Indonesia.
In no way will all this wasteful fuss minimize chances of terrorist attacks on America!
|
You can bet the main reason for this folly is some trick of 'positioning' billions and billions of federal DOLLARS with Republican-friendly corporate contractors.