Defense Secretary Ashton Carter pointed to the importance of Alaska's strategic location and the difficulty of managing a reduction in overall Army troops in a talk with troops Friday at Fort Wainwright in Fairbanks.
Carter's visit to the base came as Alaska's congressional delegation is working to convince the military to back away from planned troop cuts at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage.
The defense secretary was asked about plans to reduce the 4th Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division, known as the 4-25th, during a question-and-answer session with troops. He gave no clear answer about whether the Army will drop plans to cut troops amid a rebalance of the Pacific theater and concerns about Arctic security.
Alaska sits at the "fulcrum of strategic change," Carter said -- with some of the military's "most advanced combat aircraft," the "most sophisticated training ranges," cold-weather training, radar and missile defense operations. "These are things that are going to be part of our strategic future for sure. So they'll be part of the Alaskan military footprint for sure, for a long time," Carter said.
"Alaska is on the way from the United States to just about everywhere else," particularly the Indo-Asia-Pacific region, which contains "half of humankind and half of the economy of the world," Carter said.
But circumstances do change, Carter said.
The Army's decision to reduce its force size is not simply a question of budget, but also has to do with scaling back at the end of a long overseas presence elsewhere in the world, the defense secretary said. "The Army has decided that it's better strategically to use its funding elsewhere," he said.
Carter said it's an issue he's working through with the new Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley.
While Congress has made progress in the last week with a budget agreement, allocation of those funds still offers choices: pay soldiers better, hire more soldiers, buy new equipment or invest in training, Carter said.
"So General Milley and I are trying to balance those four things as we try to decide how to allocate the funds we have, and we have to balance those things depending on what the circumstances of the world" are, he said.