Pentagon Official Says U.S. Military to “Heavily Concentrated” in Northeast Asia

This seems to be a trial balloon to judge reaction to possible future plans to be able to use U.S. forces in South Korea for rotational deployments in the great Indo-Pacific theater:

U.S. troops are concentrated in Northeast Asia and should be distributed to better respond to evolving security challenges, including China, a senior Pentagon official has said.

“We are heavily concentrated in Northeast Asia,” David Helvey, assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific affairs, said, according to a news report by the U.S. Department of Defense news on Monday.

“We’d like to be able to make our presence more geographically distributed, more operationally resilient,” Helvey said. “Maybe, the future is going to be less about bases and more about places — being able to operate across a multiplicity of locations, which give us the flexibility and the agility to respond to a variety of different threats and challenges.”

His comments came when the U.S. has been pushing for greater “strategic flexibility” for its forces deployed around the world amid speculation that it could consider pulling some troops out of South Korea.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but maybe this could be a compromise in regards to the ongoing cost sharing issue. The U.S. could say that since South Korea does not want to increase funding to support USFK, the Pentagon will deploy U.S. troops stationed in South Korea to support larger regional security objectives. I guess we will see what happens in the coming years.