An excellent move by the Bush administration (see, I don't whine all the time!) to redeploy troops currently stationed in Germany to where they're needed. Perhaps home with their families.
The WSJ's lead editorial today (free site) looks at the move and relates it to domestic politics as well:
But it is already clear that there is a lot more to the Bush plan than was evident in the drawdown of troops that took place in the mid-1990s under President Clinton. The aim is to redeploy U.S. forces so that they are better able to address the 21st-century threats of global terrorism, rogue nations and weapons of mass destruction. Some troops will come home, while others will be shifted to new posts in new parts of the world.This is a good idea on several levels--geographic, political and strategic. The Soviet threat has been replaced by what military analyst Andrew Krepinevich calls an "arc of instability" stretching from the Middle East to India and Pakistan and on to Southeast Asia and China. While it once made sense for U.S. forces to be massed in Germany, it now is preferable for them to be situated closer to the potential threats.
On the negative side, the redeployment is likely to further politicize the next round of base closings in the U.S., scheduled for May 2005. The Pentagon says there's 24% excess capacity in domestic bases and that it could save billions of dollars a year by closing unneeded facilities. The Bush plan will give ammunition to Members of Congress of both parties seeking to preserve military pork for their home districts. Senator John Kerry has already latched onto base closings as a campaign issue, calling last week for a moratorium on the process because of the war on terror.
UPDATE: Mark Steyn has a great column on the US withdrawl as ending "defense welfare" for Europe:
The basic flaw in the Atlantic "alliance" is that, for almost all its participants, the free world is a free lunch: a defence pact of wealthy nations in which only one guy picks up the tab. I said as much in a Canadian column I wrote on 9/11, and a few weeks later the dominion's deputy prime minister, John Manley, conceded that his country was dining in the best restaurants without paying its way: as he put it, "You can't just sit at the G8 table and then, when the bill comes, go to the washroom." But in Nato, for generations, whenever the bill's come, there's been a stampede to the washroom, not just from the Canadians but the Continentals, too.