This moment, after the midterm elections and before the partisan wars get fully back into gear, is the right time to take note of efforts to reach across America’s political divide. In an open letter going Thursday to Congress and the administration, a group of military analysts from across the ideological spectrum came together to argue for closing U.S. military bases overseas. Our group, which calls itself the Overseas Bases Realignment and Closure Coalition, or OBRACC, finds agreement from the right, left, and center that doing so would be an important step toward making the United States and the world safer and more prosperous.
The coalition is bucking quite a tide. This month, the congressionally mandated National Defense Strategy Commission called for a beefed-up U.S. military presence to be paid for by budget increases that could propel annual U.S. military past its current $700 billion a year—more than the next eight countries, most of them our allies, put together—to $1 trillion by 2024. Without this money, the commission warned, the U.S. would be required to “alter the expectation of U.S. defense strategy and our global strategic objectives.”
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