While the Pentagon is shrinking or shutting roughly 30 facilities across Europe, the real story isn't the downsizing: it's a shift. Even as the US consolidates facilities in Western Europe, it's building up infrastructure in Eastern Europe to contain a perceived threat from Russia.
The European Infrastructure Consolidation (EIC) announced it will pull the US completely or partially out of sites in Britain, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Portugal, and the Netherlands. Once $1.4 billion in shutdown costs are paid over the next few years, Defence officials said, EIC should yield $500 million a year in savings. At the same time, however, the Pentagon's pouring $985 billion this year into the entirely separate European Reassurance Initiative (ERI), most of it for exercises, patrols, and other shows of force, but at least some for facilities in Eastern Europe.
The Pentagon said it would divest RAF Mildenhall north-east of London, home to tanker, reconnaissance and special operations aircraft, and withdraw 3,200 military personnel and their families over the next several years.
The reductions at RAF Mildenhall in Suffolk would be partially offset later in the decade when the Pentagon adds 1,200 personnel and two squadrons of F-35 joint strike fighters at nearby RAF Lakenheath, home to the US 48th Fighter Wing.
The net loss of US troops in Britain would be about 2,000, the Pentagon said, the biggest of the consolidation moves in Europe in terms of personnel. Several facilities in Germany would be closed, but overall US troop numbers were expected to rise by a few hundred.
About 500 US military and civilian personnel would be withdrawn from Lajes Field in the Azores, reducing US troop numbers in Portugal. An air control squadron from Germany would be relocated to Italy, increasing US forces there by some 300.
The Europe base moves come as the Pentagon is under orders to reduce projected spending by nearly $1tn over a decade. In an effort to curb costs, the department has repeatedly asked Congress for permission to close some facilities in the United States, where excess capacity is thought to be around 20%.
However these closures and cost cutting measures seem inconsistent when considering the fact that 18 months ago the US began expanding its operations at RAF Mildenhall to the tune of £15m. The base took on over 20 new aircraft and 900 new staff. At the time the USAF said it was a sign of its continued commitment to RAF Mildenhall.
Rather than cutting their forces in Europe altogether, the US are rather reconsolidating and shifting their efforts to where they are seen as being most needed.
"The infrastructure improvements [include], for example, building or augmenting barracks on existing bases in Europe that our troops are currently rotating through, to exercise with our European counterparts," said Derek Chollet, assistant secretary of defence for international affairs. "Up to this point, our troops who have been rotating through Central or Eastern Europe have been piggybacking on existing facilities that are perhaps not necessarily up to [it]."
Those Eastern European improvements all fall under the European Reassurance Initiative. But the European Infrastructure Consolidation plan was carefully designed to keep intact US capacity, even as it closed facilities in Western Europe.
EIC is "consolidating and educing some existing support structure, [but] we are not affecting our operational capability," Chollet emphasised.
John Conger, the acting deputy under-secretary for installations added: "we did not contemplate changes that reduced war-fighting capability: that was a fundamental constraint" of the EIC process.
Bases that often date to the Soviet era can require inefficient ad hoc measures to make them usable for modern US forces. Improving the infrastructure, Chollet said: "will therefore enable us down the road to continue our rotations, but at a lower cost." In other words (not the ones the diplomatic Chollet would have chosen), it's an investment in long-term deterrence against a perceived threat from Russia.
