By Qin Tian
According to recent foreign media reports, the US Department of War, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), and the US Central Command (CENTCOM) are assessing whether to reduce US military presence in the Middle East, particularly in the Gulf region. Although such evaluations remain internal discussions rather than official policy decisions, they clearly reflect the urgency and strategic dilemma of the US military in adjusting its military deployment in the Gulf.
The current round of fierce confrontation between the US and Iran has highlighted the vulnerability of US military bases and troops stationed in the Middle East. According to US media reports in May this year, at least 228 facilities across 15 US military bases in the Middle East were damaged in the conflict. Among them, the base of the US Navy's Fifth Fleet in Bahrain suffered severe damage. In subsequent exchanges of fire, the number of attacks on US military bases and facilities has continued to rise. Assessments show that the cost of repairing these bases and facilities could reach up to $5 billion. However, repair and reconstruction are merely stopgap measures. At present, the structural contradictions between the US and Iran are far from being resolved, and the risk of conflict remains stubbornly high. As long as the flames of war are not extinguished, US military bases in the Middle East will remain targets of Iran's long-range firepower strikes.
Even more severe than the attacks on bases is that the long-standing US "forward deployment" model has faced fundamental questioning in this round of conflict. The "forward deployment" model once supported the US in launching large-scale wars to overthrow Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. However, in this US-Iran conflict, the US has shown little intention of launching a large-scale ground war, leaving the traditional advantage of forward bases in supporting ground operations largely irrelevant. More crucially, Iran now possesses military strength far exceeding that of Iraq and Afghanistan at the time. Its massive arsenal of missiles and drones has long-range precision strike capabilities, turning the densely deployed US forward bases into prime targets for Iran's asymmetric warfare and severely undermining both their strategic value and survivability.
Faced with this grim reality, the US military has already made emergency and temporary adjustments to its troop deployment in the Middle East during the conflict. For instance, it withdrew some soldiers and equipment from the Gulf frontlines to Israel and Jordan, which are further away from Iran; and relocated key supply hubs to Diego Garcia deep in the Indian Ocean. However, for the US, which aims to maintain a long-term military presence in the Middle East, a systematic and fundamental adjustment of military deployment is by no means easy and faces multiple constraints.
First, simple withdrawal cannot guarantee safety. Jordan and Israel are about 1,000 kilometers away from Iran, while the maximum range of Iranian missiles exceeds 2,000 kilometers. Even if US forces are redeployed to Jordan and Israel, they would remain within Iran's effective strike range. If the US military further retreats to a safe distance, its deterrent effect against Iran and its ability to intervene from forward positions would be severely weakened.
Second, adjusting military deployment impacts US dominance and influence in the Middle East. For a long time, the US and Gulf countries have maintained an "oil-for-security" alliance model, of which the US military's forward presence is the cornerstone and symbol. If the US side withdraws its personnel and core facilities in the Gulf on a large scale, its direct military protection for Gulf allies will inevitably shrink drastically, which is bound to impact bilateral mutual trust and alliance relations.
Third, the US worries about the global impact of adjusting its Middle East military deployment. The US is highly vigilant about a "Suez Crisis"-style chain reaction that could be triggered by adjusting its Middle East deployment. Meanwhile, US allies in Europe and the Asia-Pacific are closely watching its military moves in the Middle East and expressing concerns over the US military's recent diversion of resources from other theaters to reinforce the region. If the US withdraws from the Middle East too quickly or too drastically, its allies' confidence in US security commitments may waver, which in the long run will inevitably erode the foundation of the US global military layout and alliance network.
It is not hard to see that the US military's Middle East deployment adjustment faces an intractable strategic dilemma: sticking to the existing "forward deployment" model would make it difficult to effectively counter Iran's missile and drone attacks while forcing the US military to bear the continued high costs of bases damage and personnel casualties; if the deployment is adjusted improperly, this could trigger multiple crises such as the loss of US dominance in the Middle East and the alienation of key allies.
(The author is from the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations.)