【英文】兰德报告：预测中国对美国姿态增强的反应（242页）

英文研究报告 2022年11月18日 08:46 管理员

Perhaps not surprisingly, as illustrated in Figure 1.3, major muscle movements in heavy Army and USMC ground force capabilities—including armored, mechanized, artillery, and combat aviation units—have followed a similar pattern to ground forces overall. Aside from fluctuations during the Korean and Vietnam conflicts, the estimated U.S. heavy troop presence in Japan throughout the Cold War remained relatively constant, consisting primarily of artillery and tank elements with the 3rd Marine Division based in Okinawa and the deployment of a Marine air wing to Okinawa in the mid-1970s. The Army’s heavy footprint in Japan has historically been far more negligible than that of the Marine Corps’. Instead, the Army has maintained thousands of soldiers in heavy units in Korea over the past 70-plus years—with notable increases in heavy air defense capabilities throughout the 1990s and 2000s, according to publicly available data from the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS).34 Beyond Korea and Japan, the United States has generally refrained from deploying heavy troop formations at echelons above brigade to INDOPACOM since 1949, including in any of the “tier two” historical hosts (the Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand, and Australia).

Broad historical trends in U.S. aircraft carrier movements largely track those in troop buildups and drawdowns. As illustrated in Figure 1.4, in the early years of the Cold War, the United States maintained a much more robust carrier strike group (CSG) presence in the Indo-Pacific than it does today. From the start of the Korean War (1950) to the end of the Vietnam War (1975), the U.S. Navy averaged 5.2 aircraft carriers in the Indo-Pacific theater every month, frequently reaching a peak of ten carriers in some months of the latter conflict, according to RAND analysis of publicly available data on carrier group deployments.36 By comparison, from the end of combat operations in Southeast Asia in 1975 through the end of the Cold War and up to 2020, we estimate a steady state presence of roughly one CSG in INDOPACOM at any given time—excluding those in transit or those that may be based in the region but engaged in operations in the CENTCOM AOR or elsewhere. Even during INDOPACOM’s peacetime years spanning the mid-1950s to mid-1960s, the U.S. Navy maintained a much larger carrier group presence in the region than it does today, namely in and around Japanese waters.