The Bush administration planned to consolidate most forces on a few enormous main bases.

Evidence

The administration said it would eliminate more than a third of the nation’s Cold War–era bases in Europe, South Korea, and Japan. In Europe alone, the Pentagon identified around three hundred base sites for closure, most of them in Germany. The Pentagon would shift troops to be closer to current and predicted conflict zones, moving them from Europe and the Middle East to Asia, Africa, and South America. The administration planned to return as many as seventy thousand more troops stationed abroad—about 20 percent of the overseas total—as well as a hundred thousand family members to the United States. The remaining U.S. forces overseas, who would still number in the hundreds of thousands, were to be concentrated in a smaller collection of sprawling (and often enlarged) main bases like Ramstein, Osan Air Base in South Korea, and Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni in Japan. — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 134

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The Bush administration planned rolling regime change across the Middle East — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 489