The United States is in a unique geo-strategic position with friendly neighbors to the north and south, and vast moats to the east and west. With the demise of the Soviet Union, the United States no longer faces a serious military challenger or global hegemonic threat. Given that no other country in the world has significant global power projection capability, America is relatively safe from a military invasion.

And the vast U.S. strategic nuclear arsenal is a powerful deterrent against any country with nuclear weapons -- even against so-called rogue states if they eventually acquire long-range ballistic missiles.

So, the United States can afford to spend less on defense and still be secure. A smaller U.S. military would be highly capable relative to the other militaries of the world. And downsizing the military does not mean that the United States would be retreating into a shell and adopting an isolationist posture.

Even if U.S. forces were pulled back from their current forward deployments, the United States would still be able to project power if vital U.S. security interests were at risk. Although it is counterintuitive, forward deployment does not significantly enhance the U.S. military's ability to fight wars.

The comparative advantage that the U.S. military possesses is air power, which can be dispatched relatively quickly and at very long ranges. Indeed, during Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, the U.S. Air Force was able to fly missions from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri to Afghanistan and back.

It is also worth noting that the U.S. military had neither troops nor bases adjacent to Afghanistan -- yet military operations commenced less than a month after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

More importantly, the real threat to the United States no longer consists of nation states, but the terrorist threat represented by al-Qaida, which is relatively undeterred by the U.S. military. Indeed, an expansive defense perimeter and forward deployed forces did not stop 19 hijackers from attacking the United States on Sept. 11, 2001. And U.S. forces abroad -- particularly those deployed in Muslim countries -- do more to exacerbate the terrorist threat than diminish it.

We know, for example, that the presence of 5,000 U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia after the Gulf War was the basis of Osama bin Laden's hatred of the United States and one of his consistently stated reasons for engaging in terrorism, including the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. Scaling back the unnecessary U.S. military presence around the world -- particularly in the Middle East -- is likely to do more to reduce America's profile as a target for terrorism.

Moreover, the shorthand phrase "war on terrorism" is misleading because the term "war" implies the use of military force as the primary instrument of policy for waging the fight against terrorism.

But traditional military operations will be the exception rather than the rule in the conflict with al-Qaida because our adversary is not a military force to be confronted by massive firepower. Rather, it is a loosely connected and decentralized network with cells and operatives in 60 countries around the world.

The reality is that the arduous task of dismantling and degrading the al-Qaida network will largely be the task of unprecedented international intelligence and law enforcement cooperation, which means the military aspects of the war on terrorism will largely be the work of special forces in discrete operations against specific targets rather than large-scale military operations.

Ultimately, larger defense budgets are both unnecessary and unwise because they do not target the al-Qaida terrorist threat. Most current defense spending continues to fund a large U.S. military presence deployed to all four corners of the globe, including the U.S. occupation of Iraq that is a rallying cry for jihad - much the same as the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan was in the 1980s.

But having such a large military results in the Madeleine Albright syndrome: "What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about if we can't use it?" In other words, it tempts policymakers to engage in unnecessary military interventions and deployments, which in turn are a source of the terrorist threat to the United States.

Charles V. Pena is an adviser to the Center for Defense Information's Straus Military Reform Project, senior fellow with the Independent Institute and Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, military analyst for MSNBC television, and author of Winning the Un-War: A New Strategy for the War on Terrorism.

(United Press International's "Outside View" commentaries are written by outside contributors who specialize in a variety of important issues. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of United Press International. In the interests of creating an open forum, original submissions are invited.)

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