Shaky foreign bases

Recently, the United States has seen both the promise and the peril of its plan to undertake the biggest reorganisation of American overseas military might since the end of the Second World War.

As the Pentagon transforms its military to meet the more flexible needs of the war on terror, it has also begun to recast the footprint of its overseas bases, and nowhere has this been more obvious than in the remote Central Asian republics of Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.

For more than three years, they have allowed the United States to use a pair of austere airfields to provide crucial support for troops in Afghanistan and they have served as models of how America will wage its wars in the future.

Yet even as Kyrgyzstan reaffirmed its commitment to the United States for the duration of the Afghan war last week, Uzbekistan sent US forces an eviction notice.

It is a glimpse of what awaits the Pentagon as it spreads beyond the stability of Cold War bases in Europe and the Far East.

New alliances with nations from Southeast Asia to the Horn of Africa promise quick access to the remotest corners of the globe, but they could increasingly link American security to the whims of fickle allies and controversial regimes.

The recent developments in Uzbekistan perfectly encapsulated what the Pentagon expects in the future as it tries to woo new countries.

"We're going to find this is going to be a rolling process," Douglas Feith, the Pentagon's undersecretary for policy, told Congress last year.

Changes course

The goal, analysts say, is to cement as many agreements as possible across the world, so that if one country changes course and denies the United States access, the Pentagon will have other options near at hand.

But the new course will call on Pentagon leaders to be statesmen as well as military strategists.

The shift is part of the Pentagon's Global Posture Review, which looks at overseas bases in much the same way that the Base Realignment and Closure process is now looking at domestic bases.

And as is the case in Uzbekistan, the Pentagon contends that its current network of overseas bases is a relic of the Cold War.

"Today we no longer can predict where, when, or in what manner our forces may be called on to fight," says Ryan Henry, the Pentagon's principal deputy undersecretary for policy, in congressional testimony.

Already, the American military has expanded its presence to unfamiliar areas, from Senegal to Singapore.

Yet that is taking American forces into more volatile areas. There, they can help stabilise unsettled regions through their presence and training.

But in these regions allegiances to America can easily ebb and flow as happened in 2003 when Turkey denied US forces access to Iraq.

Moreover, the United States risks further unsettling the international scene if it affiliates with unpopular or repressive regimes.