Forward basing doctrine decoupled US security from US territorial defense

Evidence

Cold War policy held that the United States should maintain large concentrations of military forces and bases as close as possible to the Soviet Union, in order to hem in and “contain” supposed Soviet expansionism. Suddenly, as the historian George Stambuk explains, “the security of the United States, in the minds of policy-makers, lost much of its former inseparability from the concept of the territory of the United States.” — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 23

Categorization

• QUESTION: Why did this conceptual decoupling persist past the Soviet Union’s collapse?
• XREF: Parallels the logic of imperial ‘forward defense’ in Roman frontier strategy.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 23