By Stephen Daggett, specialist in national defense with the CRS Foreign Affairs and National Defense Division.

A fundamental premise of the Administration's defense policy is that the Unites States should maintain a substantial, if reduced, forward troop presence abroad. Some nongovernmental experts and many Members of Congress call for larger withdrawals of troops from overseas than the Administration is planning.

As of September 30, 1991, the latest date for which official figures are available, the United States has deployed about 448,000 active-duty troops abroad, including about 52,000 on ships at sea, 265,000 in European NATO nations, 45,000 in Japan, and 40,000 in South Korea. The extent of U.S. military deployments overseas and the cost of U.S. military commitments have been a source of contention within the Congress for many years.

From Burdensharing to Collective Security

In the past, debate about overseas troop deployments focused mainly on the burdensharing issue, with many Members of Congress complaining that U.S. allies were not contributing their fair share to alliance forces and to military operations, like the Persian Gulf war, outside of alliance areas of responsibility. Now, with the collapse of the Soviet threat in Europe and a reduction in global tensions, the issue has been compounded by debate over the rationale for maintaining substantial overseas troop deployments at all.

The Bush Administration argues that a substantial, if reduced, forward military presence remains an essential element of U.S. national security policy. Administration plans call for reducing the U.S. presence in Europe from more than 300,000 two years ago to 150,000 by 1995 and for withdrawing about 6,000 troops from Korea. The United States would still remain a large forward presence abroad, however. Pressures for larger withdrawals, especially from Europe, have grown quite strong in Congress. In 1991, for example, both Houses of Congress approved advisory language calling for no more than 100,000 troops in Europe by 1995. Moreover, a number of defense policy leaders in Congress appear inclined to support the ultimate withdrawal of U.S. ground troops from Korea, though tactical air units would remain.

In the end, debate over U.S. troop levels abroad is a political issue as much as a military one. An underlying question is what kind of collective security arrangements will evolve in Europe, Northeast Asia, and elsewhere, and what the U.S. role in these arrangements should be. An even more far- reaching question concerns whether the United States should seek to assert itself as the single global superpower and provide a degree of stability and military leadership sufficient to dissuade other nations from developing a level of military power that could eventually challenge U.S. interests.

Costs of U.S. Military Commitments Abroad

A major element of the debate about overseas troop deployments in particular, and burdensharing in general, concerns the costs of U.S. military commitments to various regions. The debate may be muddled, however, by a failure to make careful distinctions between different kinds of costs. Four kinds of costs should be distinguished.

The first is incremental cost of U.S. forces deployed abroad, which is the difference between the cost of operating U.S. troops deployed in a foreign nation and the cost of maintaining the same troops at installations in the United States. Officials estimate that the operating costs of U.S. forces in Europe are about 10 percent higher than similar costs in the United States, mainly because of the need to provide services like post offices and family counseling that are available off base in the United States but not abroad. These incremental costs are relatively small, however--less than $2 billion a year. Direct costs in Japan are lower than in the United States because Japan is paying a growing share of base operating expenses.

Second is the direct operating cost of U.S. forces deployed abroad--paying troops, operating weapons, and maintaining bases for U.S. units overseas after taking account of offsetting contributions by host nations. These direct costs amounted to about $17 billion in Europe in 1990, $3 billion in Japan (an amount kept so low by Japan's contributions), and $2.2 billion in Korea.

Third is the total cost of U.S. forces deployed abroad, which adds to the direct cost of troops deployed abroad a proportional share of "indirect" costs, including weapons modernization and "overhead" costs such as recruitment, training, medical care, administration, base construction and operation, communications, and intelligence. In recent years, the Defense Department has classified estimates of such costs on the grounds that the allocation of such costs to particular military units is inherently arbitrary, and may be misleading, if it is assumed that the elimination of particular units would result in budget savings equal to the "cost" measured in this manner.

Fourth is the total cost of U.S. forces that potentially could be committed to regional contingencies in the event of a major conflict. In recent years, DOD has also classified these cost estimates, arguing that they are misleading for the reasons noted in the preceding paragraph, and also because forces normally assigned to Europe, for example, are also available for use in other contingencies, as the Persian Gulf war illustrated.

Given these considerations, and making assumptions that DOD finds objectionable, it is possible to allocate the defense budget by region, and DOD has done so in the past. The following table, a DOD analysis of the FY82 Carter Administration defense budget request (which was substantially boosted by the incoming Reagan Administration in early 1981), distinguishes funding for forces oriented mainly toward Europe from funding for other forces. This remains the most recent, unclassified data available providing a full regional breakdown of defense dollars. There is little reason to believe that the allocation of funds changed significantly between then and the beginning of post-cold war force reductions in FY91.

Allocation of DOD Funding for U.S. Military Forces, FY82 (Budget Authority in Billions of Current Year Dollars)

Source: Department of Defense data provided in U.S. Senate, Committee on Armed Services.

Since 1983, Congress has required DOD to provide annual reports to defense committees on the cost of forces formally committed to NATO using the same regional breakdown reflected above. As noted, these reports have been classified. In 1984 the report for FY85 included an unclassified summary that provided a figure for the total cost of all U.S. European- deployed forces and of all U.S.-based forces that the United States has pledged to contribute to NATO as reinforcements over the course of a conflict. The cost of these forces amounted to $177 billion out of a total FY85 DOD budget request of $305 billion--i.e., about 58 percent of the equested DOD budget was for forces that could be deployed to Europe.

This is the basic source of the commonly used estimate that up to 60 percent of the defense budget goes for forces oriented toward Europe. Compared to the categories of data in the table, this figure appears to include "Europe deployed forces," plus "early reinforcements for Europe", plus "multipurpose forces" that could be used for "later reinforcements" in Europe, plus, perhaps, a share of so-called "strategic reserves," which are nonnuclear forces based in the United States for a variety of contingencies. These estimates represented the cost not only of forces deployed in Europe, but also of all the forces based in the United States and at sea that could conceivably have been committed to Europe in an all-out war with the Soviet Union and its allies.

Although this calculation is frequently cited in the defense policy debate, it is rapidly being overtaken by events. Planned cuts in the size of the force include relatively greater reductions in units assigned to Europe than in forces assigned elsewhere. Moreover, the debate now is over how large the force should be in light of specific threats in various regions, how large a force is necessary to maintain across-the-board military capabilities, how many contingencies the United States should plan to meet simultaneously, what role the United States should expect allies to play, and how fast the United States should pursue weapons modernization. A dispute over how and whether to assume that particular forces are devoted to certain regions and over how to allocate overhead expenses and acquisition costs to particular units may be useful in the burdensharing debate, but adds little else to the discussion over post-cold war defense policy.