The US Army shuttered three bases in Qatar last month and transferred the remaining equipment to Jordan, Stars and Stripes reported on Thursday. According to a US Army statement, the service closed Camp As Sayliyah-Main, Camp As Sayliyah-South, and an ammunition supply point named Falcon.
The Army said the most consequential closure was the shuttering of a prepositioning facility at Camp As Sayliyah. The military installation consisted of 27 warehouses which have 36.3 acres of storage space. It was the largest prepositioning facility for the US Army outside of the United States and was used to preposition troops and equipment for US wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries.
Supplies from all three bases were transferred to Jordan, US Central Command (CENTCOM) said. While the equipment remains in the Middle East, shuttering such a large military facility in the region is another example of the US military shifting its focus towards confronting China and Russia.
The US has also removed eight Patriot antimissile batteries from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, and Jordan. Military personnel and other equipment are also expected to be pulled out of the region.
In its 2022 budget request, the Pentagon identified China as the top “pacing threat” facing the US military. Previous administrations had attempted to “pivot to Asia” to confront China, but the Biden administration seems determined to really do it this time. Kurt Campbell, Biden’s top Asia official on the National Security Council, recently said for the “first time” the US is “shifting our strategic focus, our economic interests, our military might more to the Indo-Pacific.”
Hmmm they couldn’t defeat the taliban who had nothing but ied and small arms so solution is to pack up and gear up to fight the Chinese behemoth in its own backyard. Clearly us has stumbled upon the perfect recipe for success 🙌.
There are different kinds of wars.
In fact, the US did beat the Taliban in a conventional war to topple the Taliban government and initially seize territory. It was the long war of occupation and “nation-building” that the US lost. Same thing happened in Iraq.
The US couldn’t occupy the bulk of China, and if it could it probably wouldn’t do any better there than it did in Afghanistan. That’s not the same thing as saying that the US couldn’t “defeat” Chinese forces in head-to-head conventional contests of force.
To me it isn’t different kinds of war but more like different phases of the same war. If we had immediately left after conventionally toppling the Taliban then that would have been the Afghanistan war. But we stayed and the war is 20 years old. One war and we lost.
Fair points from A.z and wars both. I guess what I’m getting at is that the nature of the war determines who can “win.”
If the US had stuck with its announced mission — go in, liquidate al Qaeda’s infrastructure (and some of its key personnel), and get out — it would have “won.” And a side effect of it doing so would have been that the Taliban, who would at worst have been very temporarily displaced as the country’s political power, would have been less likely to tolerate that kind of organization using its territory for basing in the future.
Instead, the US went in with the (unannounced until things were under weigh) second mission of toppling the Taliban regime, replacing it with a “liberal western democratic” regime, and occupying the country / defending that new regime until it could successfully suppress a Taliban resurgence. That war wasn’t won, and couldn’t be won.
In any US war with China, which side could plausibly win would be decided by what the objectives of the mutual forces were.
The US could not invade the Chinese mainland, topple the Beijing regime, and occupy the country while a new government grew into its role. It would be silly to even try that.
Whether the US could prevent Beijing from annexing Taiwan is somewhat iffy, if Beijing is willing to take 6 or 7 figure casualties to do it. As A.z. points out, the US won every battle in Vietnam and lost the war anyway. The US could quite possibly do the same thing in the Taiwan Strait. Beijing has weight of numbers and it has shorter distances to cover.
Then again, the US could almost certainly help Taiwan turn itself into an analog to Vietnam or Afghanistan for the Beijing regime, while fomenting rebellion in other territories occupied/colonized by Beijing (Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, etc.), and military confrontations over territories with multiple claimants (Paracels, Spratlys, etc.).
While I’m sympathetic to the victims of Beijing’s colonialism, I’d rather the US stayed out of the matter. But it’s not obvious to me that things would be one-sided in Beijing’s favor.
Defeating mean to me atleast is not letting them come back stronger and on the verge of taking over most of Afghanistan, and by that account they didn’t defeat taliban. If ur account is correct us defeated the vietkong as they never lost a single battle. it is about winning the war that counts and us did not win and when they face China in a conventional battle face to face in their own backyard unless they have the Indians as cannon fodders they will be beaten in a straight shootout
What is being left unsaid is that the huge Al Udeid AFB is being further expanded as Qatar has now been allowed to purchase F-35s of it’s own to complement the US forces.
What came as areal surprise to me was the recent discovery that the UK operates some 145 foreign bases far and wide. The yearn for an empire is as yet undimmed.