Dynamic Force Employment is the Future of America’s Middle East Presence

Few things grab the attention of Arab leaders who are friendly to Washington more than America’s military presence in the region. Even the slightest drawdown greatly worries and often drives them to assume the worst about US intentions.

A calm assessment of America’s changing geopolitical priorities, followed by an understanding of how the United States has sought to adjust its military posture in the region, should ease the worries of Arab partners, or at least some of them.

While it is true that the United States has reached fatigue in the Middle East given its costly interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, the more powerful driver behind reducing military investments in the region is the US strategic prioritization of the Indo-Pacific and European theaters.

Checking China and countering Russia requires more resources than previously allocated to each respective theater, and given that US resources are limited, they must be brought in from other places. By any objective account, the United States had an oversized presence in the Middle East, which made the region a natural candidate for a reduced US military footprint.

The view of US abandonment of the Middle East has needlessly dominated policy and emotions in the region. It remains baseless. So long as the region contains strategic natural resources including high percentages of oil and gas, and so long as the export of those resources is crucial for the wellbeing of the international economy, the United States will care about the region and devote resources to maintain stability in that vital part of the world. The question now is how the United States can preserve its interests, strengthen its partnerships, and commit to its stabilizing mission in the region with fewer resources at its disposal.

There’s no doubt that Washington has struggled with this question at the policy level – the conflict between Israel and Hamas is just the latest example of the limitations of US Middle East policy. But what’s encouraging is that the US Department of Defense has stepped up and proposed some creative ideas regarding the future of America’s military presence in the region. Enter dynamic force employment.

The concept of dynamic force employment was officially introduced in the 2018 National Defense Strategy. Implemented in the Middle East more than anywhere else lately, it seeks to reduce routine deployments to provide flexibility and make peacetime force movements more agile without compromising on combat readiness. Current commander of US Air Forces Central Command, Lt. Gen. Greg Guillot, argued that “dynamic force employment deployments demonstrate the ability to move combat capability into theater just in time for when it is required, not just in case it might be needed.”

Dynamic force employment also better protects US forces from Iran’s threat of missiles and unmanned aerial systems. In his posture statement on March 15, 2022, former CENTCOM Commander Gen. Frank McKenzie correctly noted that “distributing forces more broadly outside of the most significant Iranian threat ranges not only enhances survivability but also demonstrates an increased capability to rapidly mass combat effects...”

And that’s precisely what CENTCOM has demonstrated in its approach to the region over the past few weeks and months. We’ve seen the United States deploy additional military assets including aircraft carriers, warships, and fighter aircraft to respond to the rising threat of Iran’s threat network. These resources had to come from other regions including Europe and even from military bases in the United States.

Dynamic force employment shouldn’t suggest that the United States has switched to a strategy of offshore balancing or that it is about to gradually give up its forward-deployed military presence in the Middle East. An effective posture that contributes to the missions of deterrence, reassurance, and security cooperation must have an element of forward deployment.

To deter Iran, the United States must have assets in theater to affect the decision-making calculus of the leadership in Tehran and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. To be sure, US deterrence against Iran has been contested. But it would be even less effective without immediate and powerful American means of punishment in theater that could prevent Iran from quickly establishing facts on the ground in a crisis.

To reassure partners, the United States needs visible and permanent military power in the region. Regional partners feel a lot more reassured by the constant basing of American troops and equipment on their soil because it reflects a certain level of US commitment to their security. Also, to effectively conduct security cooperation, the United States needs troops and trained personnel in the region to advise and assist their counterparts. The entire enterprise of security cooperation is about building trust and personal relationships, and you simply cannot do that remotely.

How much forward presence is necessary to effectively pursue all three of these missions is always hard to know. One also has to recognize that when it comes to posture, there is an inherent tension between deterrence, reassurance, and security cooperation.

While security cooperation doesn’t need a large US footprint – it needs the right kind of personnel in the right places more than anything else – partners will always prefer a robust and sizable presence. With respect to deterrence, it is virtually impossible to know how much US firepower is enough to be effective because the concept itself is incredibly hard to measure and evaluate (it also depends on several other variables including credibility and consistency) and because Iran consistently operates below the threshold of war.

Dynamic force employment is supposed to smartly balance between all three missions by keeping a forward-deployed presence while putting a bigger premium on maintaining access, investing in adaptability, and building resilience. This is particularly challenging because regional partners could decide to reduce US access if they see that Washington is further drawing down its physical presence.

Access becomes even more important to the United States as tensions with Iran grow and the likelihood of war increases. The first few moments of a potential confrontation or even military crisis between the United States and Iran require a high degree of US operational flexibility, which can only be enabled by access.

In the end, any US discussion of posture, be it in the Middle East or elsewhere, should be informed first and foremost by strategy. Strategy drives posture, not the other way around. There is no point in debating numbers of American troops and capabilities in the Middle East if Washington doesn't have a clear idea of what objectives it wants those troops and capabilities to achieve.

But even when that moment of clarity in US Middle East strategy comes, Washington should always remember that the regional partners get a vote. Without their access and permission, the United States can do very little in the Middle East.

By casting doubt on the world order, Donald Trump risks dragging the globe back into an era where great powers impose their imperial will on the weak, analysts warn.
Russia wants Ukraine, China demands Taiwan and now the US president seems to be following suit, whether by coveting Canada as the "51st US state", insisting "we've got to have" Greenland or kicking Chinese interests out of the Panama Canal.
Where the United States once defended state sovereignty and international law, Trump's disregard for his neighbors' borders and expansionist ambitions mark a return to the days when the world was carved up into spheres of influence.
As recently as Wednesday, US defense secretary Pete Hegseth floated the idea of an American military base to secure the Panama Canal, a strategic waterway controlled by the United States until 1999 which Trump's administration has vowed to "take back".
Hegseth's comments came nearly 35 years after the United States invaded to topple Panama's dictator Manuel Noriega, harking back to when successive US administrations viewed Latin America as "America's backyard".
"The Trump 2.0 administration is largely accepting the familiar great power claim to 'spheres of influence'," Professor Gregory O. Hall, of the University of Kentucky, told AFP.
Indian diplomat Jawed Ashraf warned that by "speaking openly about Greenland, Canada, Panama Canal", "the new administration may have accelerated the slide" towards a return to great power domination.
The empire strikes back
Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has posed as the custodian of an international order "based on the ideas of countries' equal sovereignty and territorial integrity", said American researcher Jeffrey Mankoff, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
But those principles run counter to how Russia and China see their own interests, according to the author of "Empires of Eurasia: how imperial legacies shape international security".
Both countries are "themselves products of empires and continue to function in many ways like empires", seeking to throw their weight around for reasons of prestige, power or protection, Mankoff said.
That is not to say that spheres of influence disappeared with the fall of the Soviet Union.
"Even then, the US and Western allies sought to expand their sphere of influence eastward into what was the erstwhile Soviet and then the Russian sphere of influence," Ashraf, a former adviser to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, pointed out.
But until the return of Trump, the United States exploited its position as the "policeman of the world" to ward off imperial ambitions while pushing its own interests.
Now that Trump appears to view the cost of upholding a rules-based order challenged by its rivals and increasingly criticized in the rest of the world as too expensive, the United States is contributing to the cracks in the facade with Russia and China's help.
And as the international order weakens, the great powers "see opportunities to once again behave in an imperial way", said Mankoff.
Yalta yet again
As at Yalta in 1945, when the United States and the Soviet Union divided the post-World War II world between their respective zones of influence, Washington, Beijing and Moscow could again agree to carve up the globe anew.
"Improved ties between the United States and its great-power rivals, Russia and China, appear to be imminent," Derek Grossman, of the United States' RAND Corporation think tank, said in March.
But the haggling over who gets dominance over what and where would likely come at the expense of other countries.
"Today's major powers are seeking to negotiate a new global order primarily with each other," Monica Toft, professor of international relations at Tufts University in Massachusets wrote in the journal Foreign Affairs.
"In a scenario in which the United States, China, and Russia all agree that they have a vital interest in avoiding a nuclear war, acknowledging each other's spheres of influence can serve as a mechanism to deter escalation," Toft said.
If that were the case, "negotiations to end the war in Ukraine could resemble a new Yalta", she added.
Yet the thought of a Ukraine deemed by Trump to be in Russia's sphere is likely to send shivers down the spines of many in Europe -- not least in Ukraine itself.
"The success or failure of Ukraine to defend its sovereignty is going to have a lot of impact in terms of what the global system ends up looking like a generation from now," Mankoff said.
"So it's important for countries that have the ability and want to uphold an anti-imperial version of international order to assist Ukraine," he added -- pointing the finger at Europe.
"In Trump's world, Europeans need their own sphere of influence," said Rym Momtaz, a researcher at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace.
"For former imperial powers, Europeans seem strangely on the backfoot as nineteenth century spheres of influence come back as the organising principle of global affairs."

Dynamic Force Employment is the Future of America’s Middle East Presence