America's
Empire of Bases by Chalmers Johnson (2004)
As distinct from other peoples, most Americans do not recognize—or
do not want to recognize—that the United
States dominates the world through
its military power. Due to government secrecy,
our citizens are often ignorant of the fact that our garrisons encircle the
planet. This vast network of
American bases on every continent except Antarctica
actually constitutes a new form of empire—an empire
of bases with
its own geography
not likely to be taught in any high school geography class. Without
grasping the dimensions
of this globe-girdling Baseworld, one can't begin to understand the
size and nature of our imperial aspirations or the degree to which
a new kind
of militarism is undermining our constitutional order.
Our military deploys well over half
a million soldiers, spies, technicians,
teachers, dependents, and civilian contractors in other nations.
To dominate the oceans and seas of the world, we are creating some
thirteen naval task forces built around aircraft carriers whose names sum up our
martial heritage—Kitty Hawk, Constellation, Enterprise, John
F. Kennedy, Nimitz,
Dwight D. Eisenhower, Carl Vinson, Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln,
George Washington, John C. Stennis, Harry S. Truman, and Ronald Reagan.
We operate numerous secret bases outside our territory to monitor
what the people of the world, including our own citizens, are saying,
faxing,
or e-mailing to one another.
Our installations abroad bring profits to civilian industries,
which design and manufacture weapons for the armed forces or, like
the now
well-publicized Kellogg, Brown & Root company, a subsidiary of the
Halliburton Corporation of Houston, undertake contract services to build
and maintain our far-flung outposts. One task of such contractors is
to keep uniformed members of the imperium housed in comfortable quarters,
well fed, amused, and supplied with enjoyable, affordable vacation facilities.
Whole sectors of the American economy have come to rely on the military for sales. On the eve of our second war on Iraq, for example, while the
Defense Department was ordering up an extra ration of cruise missiles
and depleted-uranium armor-piercing tank shells, it also acquired 273,000
bottles of Native Tan sunblock, almost triple its 1999 order and undoubtedly
a boon to the supplier, Control Supply Company of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and
its subcontractor, Sun Fun Products of Daytona Beach, Florida.
At Least Seven Hundred Foreign Bases
It's not easy to assess the size or exact value of
our empire of bases. Official records on these subjects
are misleading,
although instructive.
According to the Defense Department's annual "Base Structure
Report" for
fiscal year 2003, which itemizes foreign and domestic U.S. military
real estate, the Pentagon currently owns or rents 702 overseas bases in
about
130 countries and HAS another 6,000 bases
in the United States and its territories. Pentagon bureaucrats calculate
that it would require at
least $113.2 billion to replace just the foreign bases—surely far
too low a figure but still larger than the gross domestic product
of most countries—and an estimated $591,519.8 million to replace
all
of them. The military high command deploys to our overseas bases
some 253,288 uniformed personnel, plus an equal number of dependents
and Department
of Defense civilian officials, and employs an additional 44,446
locally hired foreigners. The Pentagon claims that these bases contain 44,870
barracks, hangars, hospitals, and other buildings, which it owns,
and that it leases 4,844 more.
These numbers, although staggeringly large, do not
begin to cover all the actual bases we occupy globally. The 2003
Base Status
Report fails
to mention, for instance, any garrisons in Kosovo—even though it
is the site of the huge Camp Bondsteel, built in 1999 and maintained
ever
since by Kellogg, Brown & Root. The Report similarly omits bases
in Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Qatar, and Uzbekistan,
although the U.S. military has established colossal base structures
throughout the so-called arc of instability in the two-and-a-half
years since 9/11.
For Okinawa, the southernmost island
of Japan, which has been an American military colony for
the past 58 years, the report deceptively lists only
one Marine base, Camp Butler, when in fact Okinawa "hosts" ten
Marine Corps bases, including Marine Corps Air Station Futenma occupying
1,186 acres in the center of that modest-sized island's second largest
city. (Manhattan's Central Park, by contrast, is only 843 acres.)
The Pentagon similarly fails to note all of the $5-billion-worth
of military
and espionage installations in Britain, which have long been conveniently
disguised as Royal Air Force bases. If there were an honest
count,
the actual size of our military empire would probably top
1,000 different
bases in other people's countries, but no one—possibly not even
the
Pentagon—knows the exact number for sure, although it has been
distinctly on the rise in recent years.
For their occupants, these are not unpleasant
places to live and work. Military service today, which is voluntary, bears
almost no relation
to the duties of a soldier during World War II or the Korean or Vietnamese
wars. Most chores like laundry, KP ("kitchen police"), mail
call, and cleaning latrines have been subcontracted to private military
companies like Kellogg, Brown & Root, DynCorp, and the Vinnell Corporation.
Fully one-third of the funds recently appropriated for the war in Iraq
(about $30 billion), for instance, are going into private American hands
for exactly such services. Where possible everything is done to make
daily existence seem like a Hollywood version of life at home. According
to the Washington Post, in Fallujah, just west of Baghdad, waiters in
white shirts, black pants, and black bow ties serve dinner to the officers
of the 82nd Airborne Division in their heavily guarded compound, and
the first Burger King has already gone up inside the enormous military
base we've established at Baghdad International Airport.
Some of these bases are so gigantic they require as many as nine internal
bus routes for soldiers and civilian contractors to get around inside
the earthen berms and concertina wire. That's the case at Camp Anaconda,
headquarters of the 3rd Brigade, 4th Infantry Division, whose job is
to police some 1,500 square miles of Iraq north of Baghdad, from Samarra
to Taji. Anaconda occupies 25 square kilometers and will ultimately house
as many as 20,000 troops. Despite extensive security precautions, the
base has frequently come under mortar attack, notably on the Fourth of
July, 2003, just as Arnold Schwarzenegger was chatting up our wounded
at the local field hospital.
The military prefers bases that resemble small fundamentalist
towns in the Bible Belt rather than the big population centers of
the United
States. For example, even though more than 100,000 women live on
our overseas bases—including women in the services, spouses, and
relatives
of military personnel—obtaining an abortion at a local military
hospital is prohibited. Since there are some 14,000 sexual
assaults or attempted
sexual assaults each year in the military, women who become pregnant
overseas and want an abortion have no choice but to try the local
economy, which cannot be either easy or pleasant in Baghdad or other
parts of
our empire these days.
Our armed missionaries live in a closed-off, self-contained
world serviced by its own airline—the Air Mobility Command, with
its fleet of long-range
C-17 Globemasters, C-5 Galaxies, C-141 Starlifters, KC-135 Stratotankers,
KC-10 Extenders, and C-9 Nightingales that link our far-flung outposts
from Greenland to Australia. For generals and admirals, the military
provides seventy-one Learjets, thirteen Gulfstream IIIs, and seventeen
Cessna Citation luxury jets to fly them to such spots as the armed
forces' ski and vacation center at Garmisch in the Bavarian Alps
or to any of
the 234 military golf courses the Pentagon operates worldwide. Defense
secretary Donald Rumsfeld flies around in his own personal Boeing
757, called a C-32A in the Air Force.
Our "Footprint" on the World
Of all the insensitive, if graphic, metaphors we've
allowed into our vocabulary, none quite equals "footprint" to
describe the military impact of our empire. Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard
Myers and senior members of the Senate's Military Construction Subcommittee
such as Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) are apparently incapable of completing
a sentence without using it. Establishing a more impressive footprint
has now become part of the new justification for a major enlargement
of our empire—and an announced repositioning of our bases and forces
abroad—in the wake of our conquest of Iraq. The man in charge
of this project is Andy Hoehn, deputy assistant secretary of defense
for strategy.
He and his colleagues are supposed to draw up plans to implement
President Bush's preventive war strategy against "rogue states," "bad
guys," and "evil-doers." They have identified something
they call the "arc of instability," which
is said to run from the Andean region of South America (read: Colombia)
through
North Africa
and then sweeps across the Middle East to the Philippines and Indonesia.
This is, of course, more or less identical with what used to be called
the Third World—and perhaps no less crucially it covers the world's
key oil reserves. Hoehn contends, "When you overlay our footprint
onto that, we don't look particularly well-positioned to deal with
the problems we're now going to confront."
Once upon a time, you could trace the spread
of imperialism by counting up colonies. America's version of the colony is the military
base. By
following the changing politics of global basing, one can learn much
about our ever larger imperial stance and the militarism that grows
with it. Militarism and imperialism are Siamese twins joined at the
hip. Each
thrives off the other. Already highly advanced in our country, they
are both on the verge of a quantum leap that will almost surely stretch
our
military beyond its capabilities, bringing about fiscal insolvency
and very possibly doing mortal damage to our republican institutions.
The
only way this is discussed in our press is via reportage on highly
arcane plans for changes in basing policy and the positioning of
troops abroad—and these plans, as reported in the media, cannot
be taken at face
value.
Marine Brig. Gen. Mastin Robeson, commanding our 1,800
troops occupying the old French Foreign Legion base at Camp Lemonier
in Djibouti at the
entrance to the Red Sea, claims that in order to put "preventive
war" into action, we require a "global presence," by which
he means gaining hegemony over any place that is not already under our
thumb. According to the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, the
idea is to create "a global cavalry" that can ride in from "frontier
stockades" and shoot up the "bad guys" as soon as we get
some intelligence on them.
"Lily Pads" in Australia, Romania,
Mali, Algeria . . .
In order to put
our forces close to every hot spot or danger area in this newly discovered
arc of instability, the Pentagon
has been proposing—this is usually called "repositioning"—many
new bases, including at least four and perhaps as many as six permanent
ones in
Iraq. A number of these are already under construction—at Baghdad
International Airport, Tallil air base near Nasariyah, in the western
desert near the Syrian border, and at Bashur air field in the Kurdish
region of the north. (This does not count the previously mentioned
Anaconda, which is currently being called an "operating base," though
it may very well become permanent over time.) In addition, we plan
to keep under our control the whole northern quarter of Kuwait—1,600
square miles out of Kuwait's 6,900 square miles—that we now use
to resupply our Iraq legions and as a place for Green Zone bureaucrats
to
relax.
Other countries mentioned as sites for what Colin
Powell calls our new "family
of bases" include: In the impoverished areas of the "new" Europe—Romania,
Poland, and Bulgaria; in Asia—Pakistan (where we already have
four bases), India, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines,
and even, unbelievably, Vietnam; in North Africa—Morocco, Tunisia,
and especially Algeria (scene of the slaughter of some 100,00 civilians
since 1992, when, to quash an election, the military took over, backed
by our country and France); and in West Africa—Senegal, Ghana,
Mali, and Sierra Leone (even though it has been torn by civil war
since 1991).
The models for all these new installations, according to Pentagon
sources, are the string of bases we have built around the Persian
Gulf in the
last two decades in such anti-democratic autocracies as Bahrain,
Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates.
Most of these new bases will be what the military, in
a switch of metaphors, calls "lily pads" to which our troops could jump like so many
well-armed frogs from the homeland, our remaining NATO bases, or bases
in the docile satellites of Japan and Britain. To offset the expense
involved in such expansion, the Pentagon leaks plans to close many of
the huge Cold War military reservations in Germany, South Korea, and
perhaps Okinawa as part of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld's "rationalization" of
our armed forces. In the wake of the Iraq victory, the U.S. has already
withdrawn virtually all of its forces from Saudi Arabia and Turkey, partially
as a way of punishing them for not supporting the war strongly enough.
It wants to do the same thing to South Korea, perhaps the most anti-American
democracy on Earth today, which would free up the 2nd Infantry Division
on the demilitarized zone with North Korea for probable deployment to
Iraq, where our forces are significantly overstretched.
In Europe, these plans include giving up several bases in
Germany, also in part because of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's domestically
popular
defiance of Bush over Iraq. But the degree to which we are capable
of doing so may prove limited indeed. At the simplest level, the
Pentagon's
planners do not really seem to grasp just how many buildings the
71,702 soldiers and airmen in Germany alone occupy and how expensive
it would
be to reposition most of them and build even slightly comparable
bases, together with the necessary infrastructure, in former Communist
countries
like Romania, one of Europe's poorest countries. Lt. Col. Amy Ehmann
in Hanau, Germany, has said to the press, "There's no place
to put these people," in Romania, Bulgaria, or Djibouti, and
she predicts that 80% of them will in the end stay in Germany. It's
also
certain that
generals of the high command have no intention of living in backwaters
like Constanta, Romania, and will keep the U.S. military headquarters
in Stuttgart while holding on to Ramstein Air Force Base, Spangdahlem
Air Force Base, and the Grafenwoehr Training Area.
One reason why the Pentagon is considering moving out
of rich democracies like Germany and South Korea and looks covetously
at military dictatorships and poverty-stricken dependencies is to take advantage of what the Pentagon
calls their "more permissive environmental regulations." The
Pentagon always imposes on countries in which it deploys our forces so-called
Status of Forces Agreements, which usually exempt the United States from
cleaning up or paying for the environmental damage it causes. This is
a standing grievance in Okinawa, where the American environmental record
has been nothing short of abominable. Part of this attitude is simply
the desire of the Pentagon to put itself beyond any of the restraints
that govern civilian life, an attitude increasingly at play in the "homeland" as
well. For example, the 2004 defense authorization bill of $401.3 billion
that President Bush signed into law in November 2003 exempts the military
from abiding by the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection
Act.
While there is every reason to believe that the impulse to create ever
more lily pads in the Third World remains unchecked, there are several
reasons to doubt that some of the more grandiose plans, for either expansion
or downsizing, will ever be put into effect or, if they are, that they
will do anything other than make the problem of terrorism
worse than
it is. For one thing, Russia is opposed to the expansion of U.S. military
power on its borders and is already moving to checkmate American basing
sorties into places like Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan. The first
post-Soviet-era Russian airbase in Kyrgyzstan has just been completed
forty miles from the U.S. base at Bishkek, and in December 2003, the
dictator of Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov, declared that he would not permit
a permanent deployment of U.S. forces in his country even though we already
have a base there.
When it comes to downsizing, on the other hand, domestic politics may
come into play. By law the Pentagon's Base Realignment and Closing Commission
must submit its fifth and final list of domestic bases to be shut down
to the White House by September 8, 2005. As an efficiency measure, Secretary
of Defense Rumsfeld has said he'd like to be rid of at least one-third
of domestic Army bases and one-quarter of domestic Air Force bases, which
is sure to produce a political firestorm on Capitol Hill. In order to
protect their respective states' bases, the two mother hens of the Senate's
Military Construction Appropriations Subcommittee, Kay Bailey Hutchison
(R-TX) and Dianne Feinstein, are demanding that the Pentagon close overseas
bases first and bring the troops now stationed there home to domestic
bases, which could then remain open. Hutchison and Feinstein included
in the Military Appropriations Act of 2004 money for an independent commission
to investigate and report on overseas bases that are no longer needed.
The Bush administration opposed this provision of the Act but it passed
anyway and the president signed it into law on November 22, 2003. The
Pentagon is probably adept enough to hamstring the commission, but a
domestic base-closing furor clearly looms on the horizon.
By far the greatest defect in the "global
cavalry" strategy,
however, is that it accentuates Washington's impulse to apply irrelevant military
remedies to terrorism. As the prominent British military
historian, Correlli Barnett, has observed, the U.S. attacks on Afghanistan
and Iraq
only increased the threat of al-Qaeda. From 1993 through the 9/11
assaults of 2001, there were five major al-Qaeda attacks worldwide;
in the two
years since then there have been seventeen such bombings, including
the Istanbul suicide assaults on the British consulate and an HSBC
Bank.
Military operations against terrorists are not the solution. As Barnett
puts it, "Rather than kicking down front doors and barging into
ancient and complex societies with simple nostrums of 'freedom and
democracy,' we need tactics of cunning and subtlety, based on a profound
understanding
of the people and cultures we are dealing with—an understanding
up till now entirely lacking in the top-level policy-makers in Washington,
especially in the Pentagon."
In his notorious "long, hard slog" memo on Iraq of October
16, 2003, Defense secretary Rumsfeld wrote, "Today, we lack metrics
to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror." Correlli-Barnett's "metrics" indicate
otherwise. But the "war on terrorism" is at best only a small
part of the reason for all our military strategizing. The real reason
for constructing this new ring of American bases along the equator is
to expand our empire and reinforce our military domination of the world.
Chalmers
Johnson's latest book is, The Sorrows
of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (Metropolitan).
His previous book,
Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire,
has just been updated with a new introduction.
