As the recent military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq have illustrated, the Cold War concept guiding the overseas basing for the U.S. military is obsolete. Yet the number, structure, and scope of our overseas bases are still largely aligned for the threat of Soviet aggression.

The process of when, how and why we base troops abroad is in need of a thorough examination to assure that our basing structure is adequate for the new security environment. As Chairman and Ranking Member of the Senate Military Construction Subcommittee, we have proposed legislation to assess every overseas installation.

During the Cold War, our primary military mission was to defend our nation and our allies from the symmetric Soviet threat of aggression, and “boots on the ground” in Europe and Asia allowed us to do just that.

But even though the Cold War has been over for a decade, our nation still has 112,000 troops in Europe, 37,000 in Korea and 45,000 in Japan, largely in installations designed, devised, and intended for the threats of an earlier era. Training constraints are evident in many of these bases.

The threats we face today, however, are largely asymmetric, such as terrorists groups or rogue states gaining weapons of mass destruction. Events of the past decade, especially since 9/11, have taught us that we need not only to maintain a military presence abroad, but to be in a position to support contingencies where we have no permanent bases, such as in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Africa, and throughout the Middle East.