This independent assessment is a comprehensive study of the strategic benefits, risks, and costs of U.S. military presence overseas. The report provides policymakers a way to evaluate the range of strategic benefits and costs that follow from revising the U.S. overseas military presence by characterizing how this presence contributes to assurance, deterrence, responsiveness, and security cooperation goals.

Section 347 of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act called on the Department of Defense to commission an independent assessment of the overseas basing presence of U.S. military forces. As the recipient of that commission, RAND's National Defense Research Institute conducted an independent assessment of the advisability of changes in the overseas basing presence of U.S. forces based on an evaluation of strategic benefits, risks, and costs. The report characterizes how overseas presence contributes to assurance of allies, deterrence, contingency responsiveness, and security cooperation, along with the risks involved with investing in facilities overseas. It breaks new ground in the understanding of the costs associated with overseas presence, including how permanent and rotational presence costs compare, and provides cost models for policymakers to weigh alternative posture options. To support this understanding of costs the report also lays out the conditions of U.S. installations and levels of host nation support. The report concludes that there are certain minimum requirements necessary to carry out the current national security strategy, but it is prudent, based upon the net value produced, to maintain an overseas posture that goes beyond these minimums. Additionally, it combines benefit, cost, and risk considerations to distill a number of strategic judgments that have implications for the advisability of considering identified posture changes.

According to the Department of Defense's 2004 Base Structure Report, the United States officially maintains 860 overseas military installations and another 115 on noncontinental U.S. territories. Over the last fifteen years the Department of Defense has been moving from a few large-footprint bases to smaller and much more numerous bases across the globe. This so-called lily-pad strategy, designed to allow high-speed reactions to military emergencies anywhere in the world, has provoked significant debate in military circles and sometimes-fierce contention within the polity of the host countries. In Base Politics, Alexander Cooley examines how domestic politics in different host countries, especially in periods of democratic transition, affect the status of U.S. bases and the degree to which the U.S. military has become a part of their local and national landscapes. Drawing on exhaustive field research in different host nations across East Asia and Southern Europe, as well as the new postcommunist base hosts in the Black Sea and Central Asia, Cooley offers an original and provocative account of how and why politicians in host countries contest or accept the presence of the U.S. military on their territory. Overseas bases, Cooley shows, are not merely installations that serve a military purpose. For host governments and citizens, U.S. bases are also concrete institutions and embodiments of U.S. power, identity, and diplomacy. Analyzing the degree to which overseas bases become enmeshed in local political agendas and interests, Base Politics will be required reading for anyone interested in understanding the extent—and limits—of America's overseas military influence.

In August 16, 2004, President Bush announced a program of sweeping changes to the numbers and locations of military basing facilities at overseas locations, now known as the Integrated Global Presence and Basing Strategy (IGPBS) or Global Posture Review, a component of ongoing force transformation efforts. Roughly 70,000 personnel would return from overseas locations from Europe and Asia to bases in the continental United States (CONUS). Other overseas forces would be redistributed within current host nations such as Germany and South Korea, and new bases would be established in nations of Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Africa. In the Department of Defense's (DOD) view, these locations would be closer, and better able, to respond to potential trouble spots. In August 2005, the congressionally mandated Commission on the Review of Overseas Military Facility Structure of the United States (also known as the "Overseas Basing Commission") formally reported its findings. It disagreed with the "timing and synchronization" of the DOD overseas re-basing initiative, and questioned whether a strategic vision agreed upon by all effected government agencies was guiding the re-basing. It also saw the initiative as potentially at odds with stresses on the force that the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan caused. The Commission questioned whether sufficient interagency coordination, such as State Department led basing rights negotiations, have occurred. It expressed doubts that the military had enough airlift and sealift to make the strategy work, and noted that DOD had likely underestimated the cost of all aspects associated with the moves (DOD budgeted $4 billion, the Commission estimated $20 billion). The Commission also expressed fear that the re-basing could harm military quality of life, which would in turn hamper recruiting and retention. Recent international diplomatic and security developments could further influence debate on overseas basing.

"In the years around the Second World War, policymakers in the United States and Western Europe faced unique security challenges occasioned by the development of new technologies and the emergence of transnational ideological conflict. In coming to terms with these challenges, they developed the historically novel practice in which a state might maintain a long-term, peacetime military presence on the territory of another sovereign state without the subjugation of the latter. Such basing arrangements between substantive equals were previously unthinkable: under the inherited understanding of sovereignty, in which there was a tight linkage between military presence and territorial authority, such military presences could only be understood in terms of occupation or annexation. These "sovereign basing" practices, as I call them, are now central to many aspects of contemporary security politics. This book applies concepts derived from pragmatist thought to a historical study of the relations between the United States and its wartime allies to explain the origin of this phenomenon. A pragmatist lens draws attention to how the actors involved creatively recombined inherited practices in response to changes in the material and social context of action and thereby transformed the practice of sovereignty. The tools offered by pragmatism provide needed analytical leverage over the emergence of novelty and offer valuable insight into the dynamics of stability and change. The practice of sovereign basing, bound up as it is now with the constitution of interests and understanding of how states exercise power, is likely a durable feature of international politics."--

On August 16, 2004, the Bush Administration announced a proposal to significantly alter the U.S. overseas military basing posture. The proposal would, if implemented, establish new overseas operating sites, and transfer up to 70,000 U.S. troops, plus 100,000 family members and civilians, from Europe and Asia back to the United States. The Administration argues that current U.S. global basing arrangements are a product of World War II and the Korean War. With the end of the Cold War, these basing arrangements need to be updated to ensure that U.S. forces are optimally positioned to respond to potential 21st-Century military threats. The Administration's proposal has received mixed reactions from non-DoD observers. A May 2004 Congressional Budget Office report raises questions concerning the potential cost effectiveness of changing the current Army overseas basing posture. The Administration's proposal raises several potential oversight issues for Congress. This report will be updated as necessary.