Technological advances have made overseas deployment nearly no faster than domestic deployment.

Evidence

Lily pads have also grown in popularity as some military planners, on both the right and left of the political spectrum, have challenged one of the traditional rationales for maintaining large numbers of bases overseas: deployment speed. According to a Bush administration study, for example, because of technological advancements in airlift and sealift, deploying troops to a conflict from most overseas bases saves little if any time compared to deploying from domestic bases. More and more military analysts are thus concluding that maintaining stores of weapons and supplies overseas—what the military calls “pre-positioning”—is more important than having tens of thousands of troops there, with the attendant costs to support them and their families. Most lily pads can serve this pre-positioning function while also offering, like somewhat bigger forward operating sites, “surge capacity” to expand easily and rapidly in order to accommodate much larger numbers of troops and weaponry in a crisis. — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 954

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• XREF: Directly challenges the reader’s existing assumption that forward basing speeds military response.
• SEED: Strong factual hook for an article on why the speed rationale for overseas bases no longer holds.

Related

• Modern airlift and sealift make overseas bases save little deployment time. (similarity 0.94)
• Modern airlift makes overseas troop basing nearly pointless for deployment speed. (similarity 0.92)
• Transportation advances have erased the deployment-time advantage of overseas bases (similarity 0.88)
• The US military can deploy power faster than any rival without foreign bases. (similarity 0.86)
• Overseas bases offer little deployment advantage over US-based forces (similarity 0.83)
• US military can project power farther than any rival without overseas bases (similarity 0.83)
• The U.S. can project force globally without any permanent overseas bases. (similarity 0.81)
• Closing overseas bases is politically easier than closing domestic ones (similarity 0.80)
• The US military is probably the world’s largest international moving company (similarity 0.79)
• The U.S. military network has expanded geographically despite closing giant Cold War bases (similarity 0.78)
• Small lily pad bases routinely expand into behemoth installations. (similarity 0.78)
• Lily pads grant the U.S. Subic-era access without the political costs of large garrisons (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Transport advances let the US deploy as quickly from home bases as overseas ones #corroborates (0.90) — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 37
• The overseas base presence has begun to shrink modestly #qualifies (0.50) — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 1066