“The proposed restationing of U.S. military forces overseas is an enormous undertaking, and it will have a significant impact on our security interests throughout the world. This new report by the Overseas Basing Commission concludes that the Defense Department may be rushing into a wholesale rearrangement of U.S. forces without adequate input or a thorough analysis of the costs and impact on our armed forces in a post 9/11 world.

It is critical that the global basing strategy be synchronized, in terms of pace, timing, and cost, with ongoing operations such as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and with other strategic analyses, such as the Quadrennial Defense Review and the upcoming round of domestic base closures. The Commission raises serious questions about whether this is being done.

The report also warns that the Defense Department may not have adequate housing and infrastructure for some 70,000 troops who would be returned to the United States from abroad and may also lack enough ships and aircraft to redeploy the troops overseas in a crisis.

The Commission, created by legislation sponsored by Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison and myself, is now scheduled to present its findings at a Senate Military Construction Appropriations Subcommittee hearing on May 10. I am hopeful that this report and its recommendations will help ensure that the United States is not rushing too rapidly into a wholesale rearrangement of U.S. forces at a time when it is fighting a war on two fronts, reorganizing the Army, closing domestic U.S. installations, and updating its Quadrennial Defense Strategy.

The Commission report provides important new evidence that the Defense Department has not fully connected the dots between global rebasing, BRAC, and emerging military requirements. Until we do that, and until we can guarantee that the impact of the BRAC process on top of the global rebasing plan does not create more problems than it solves, we should go slow on both fronts.”

Note: the Report is available at www.obc.gov