737 U.S. Military Bases =
Global Empire
The following is excerpted from Chalmers
Johnson's new book, "NEMESIS:
The Last Days of the American Republic
" (Metropolitan Books).
By Chalmers Johnson
02/19/07 "ICH"
-- - 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; and by following the
changing politics of global basing, one can
learn much about our ever more
all-encompassing imperial "footprint" and
the militarism that grows with it.
It is not easy, however, to assess the size
or exact value of our empire of bases.
Official records available to the public on
these subjects are misleading, although
instructive. According to the Defense
Department's annual inventories from 2002 to
2005 of real property it owns around the
world, the Base Structure Report, there has
been an immense churning in the numbers of
installations.
The total of America's military bases in
other people's countries in 2005, according
to official sources, was 737. Reflecting
massive deployments to Iraq and the pursuit
of President Bush's strategy of preemptive
war, the trend line for numbers of overseas
bases continues to go up.
Interestingly enough, the thirty-eight large
and medium-sized American facilities spread
around the globe in 2005 -- mostly air and
naval bases for our bombers and fleets --
almost exactly equals Britain's thirty-six
naval bases and army garrisons at its
imperial zenith in 1898. The Roman Empire at
its height in 117 AD required thirty-seven
major bases to police its realm from
Britannia to Egypt, from Hispania to
Armenia. Perhaps the optimum number of major
citadels and fortresses for an imperialist
aspiring to dominate the world is somewhere
between thirty-five and forty.
Using data from fiscal year 2005, the
Pentagon bureaucrats calculated that its
overseas bases were worth at least $127
billion -- surely far too low a figure but
still larger than the gross domestic
products of most countries -- and an
estimated $658.1 billion for all of them,
foreign and domestic (a base's "worth" is
based on a Department of Defense estimate of
what it would cost to replace it). During
fiscal 2005, the military high command
deployed to our overseas bases some 196,975
uniformed personnel as well as an equal
number of dependents and Department of
Defense civilian officials, and employed an
additional 81,425 locally hired foreigners.
The worldwide total of U.S. military
personnel in 2005, including those based
domestically, was 1,840,062 supported by an
additional 473,306 Defense Department civil
service employees and 203,328 local hires.
Its overseas bases, according to the
Pentagon, contained 32,327 barracks,
hangars, hospitals, and other buildings,
which it owns, and 16,527 more that it
leased. The size of these holdings was
recorded in the inventory as covering
687,347 acres overseas and 29,819,492 acres
worldwide, making the Pentagon easily one of
the world's largest landlords.
These numbers, although staggeringly big, do
not begin to cover all the actual bases we
occupy globally. The 2005 Base Structure
Report fails, for instance, to mention any
garrisons in Kosovo (or Serbia, of which
Kosovo is still officially a province) --
even though it is the site of the huge Camp
Bondsteel built in 1999 and maintained ever
since by the KBR corporation (formerly known
as Kellogg Brown & Root), a subsidiary of
the Halliburton Corporation of Houston.
The report similarly omits bases in
Afghanistan, Iraq (106 garrisons as of May
2005), Israel, Kyrgyzstan, Qatar, and
Uzbekistan, even though the U.S. military
has established colossal base structures in
the Persian Gulf and Central Asian areas
since 9/11. By way of excuse, a note in the
preface says that "facilities provided by
other nations at foreign locations" are not
included, although this is not strictly
true. The report does include twenty sites
in Turkey, all owned by the Turkish
government and used jointly with the
Americans. The Pentagon continues to omit
from its accounts most 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 overseas,
but no one -- possibly not even the Pentagon
-- knows the exact number for sure.
In some cases, foreign countries themselves
have tried to keep their U.S. bases secret,
fearing embarrassment if their collusion
with American imperialism were revealed. In
other instances, the Pentagon seems to want
to play down the building of facilities
aimed at dominating energy sources, or, in a
related situation, retaining a network of
bases that would keep Iraq under our
hegemony regardless of the wishes of any
future Iraqi government. The U.S. government
tries not to divulge any information about
the bases we use to eavesdrop on global
communications, or our nuclear deployments,
which, as William Arkin, an authority on the
subject, writes, "[have] violated its treaty
obligations. The U.S. was lying to many of
its closest allies, even in NATO, about its
nuclear designs. Tens of thousands of
nuclear weapons, hundreds of bases, and
dozens of ships and submarines existed in a
special secret world of their own with no
rational military or even 'deterrence'
justification."
In Jordan, to take but one example, we have
secretly deployed up to five thousand troops
in bases on the Iraqi and Syrian borders.
(Jordan has also cooperated with the CIA in
torturing prisoners we deliver to them for
"interrogation.") Nonetheless, Jordan
continues to stress that it has no special
arrangements with the United States, no
bases, and no American military presence.
The country is formally sovereign but
actually a satellite of the United States
and has been so for at least the past ten
years. Similarly, before our withdrawal from
Saudi Arabia in 2003, we habitually denied
that we maintained a fleet of enormous and
easily observed B-52 bombers in Jeddah
because that was what the Saudi government
demanded. So long as military bureaucrats
can continue to enforce a culture of secrecy
to protect themselves, no one will know the
true size of our baseworld, least of all the
elected representatives of the American
people.
In 2005, deployments at home and abroad were
in a state of considerable flux. This was
said to be caused both by a long overdue
change in the strategy for maintaining our
global dominance and by the closing of
surplus bases at home. In reality, many of
the changes seemed to be determined largely
by the Bush administration's urge to punish
nations and domestic states that had not
supported its efforts in Iraq and to reward
those that had. Thus, within the United
States, bases were being relocated to the
South, to states with cultures, as the
Christian Science Monitor put it, "more tied
to martial traditions" than the Northeast,
the northern Middle West, or the Pacific
Coast. According to a North Carolina
businessman gloating over his new customers,
"The military is going where it is wanted
and valued most."
In part, the realignment revolved around the
Pentagon's decision to bring home by 2007 or
2008 two army divisions from Germany -- the
First Armored Division and the First
Infantry Division -- and one brigade (3,500
men) of the Second Infantry Division from
South Korea (which, in 2005, was officially
rehoused at Fort Carson, Colorado). So long
as the Iraq insurgency continues, the forces
involved are mostly overseas and the
facilities at home are not ready for them
(nor is there enough money budgeted to get
them ready).
Nonetheless, sooner or later, up to 70,000
troops and 100,000 family members will have
to be accommodated within the United States.
The attendant 2005 "base closings" in the
United States are actually a base
consolidation and enlargement program with
tremendous infusions of money and customers
going to a few selected hub areas. At the
same time, what sounds like a retrenchment
in the empire abroad is really proving to be
an exponential growth in new types of bases
-- without dependents and the amenities they
would require -- in very remote areas where
the U.S. military has never been before.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in
1991, it was obvious to anyone who thought
about it that the huge concentrations of
American military might in Germany, Italy,
Japan, and South Korea were no longer needed
to meet possible military threats. There
were not going to be future wars with the
Soviet Union or any country connected to any
of those places.
In 1991, the first Bush administration
should have begun decommissioning or
redeploying redundant forces; and, in fact,
the Clinton administration did close some
bases in Germany, such as those protecting
the Fulda Gap, once envisioned as the
likeliest route for a Soviet invasion of
Western Europe. But nothing was really done
in those years to plan for the strategic
repositioning of the American military
outside the United States.
By the end of the 1990s, the
neoconservatives were developing their
grandiose theories to promote overt
imperialism by the "lone superpower" --
including preventive and preemptive
unilateral military action, spreading
democracy abroad at the point of a gun,
obstructing the rise of any "near-peer"
country or bloc of countries that might
challenge U.S. military supremacy, and a
vision of a "democratic" Middle East that
would supply us with all the oil we wanted.
A component of their grand design was a
redeployment and streamlining of the
military. The initial rationale was for a
program of transformation that would turn
the armed forces into a lighter, more agile,
more high-tech military, which, it was
imagined, would free up funds that could be
invested in imperial policing.
What came to be known as "defense
transformation" first began to be publicly
bandied about during the 2000 presidential
election campaign. Then 9/11 and the wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq intervened. In August
2002, when the whole neocon program began to
be put into action, it centered above all on
a quick, easy war to incorporate Iraq into
the empire. By this time, civilian leaders
in the Pentagon had become dangerously
overconfident because of what they perceived
as America's military brilliance and
invincibility as demonstrated in its 2001
campaign against the Taliban and al-Qaeda --
a strategy that involved reigniting the
Afghan civil war through huge payoffs to
Afghanistan's Northern Alliance warlords and
the massive use of American airpower to
support their advance on Kabul.
In August 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld unveiled his "1-4-2-1 defense
strategy" to replace the Clinton era's plan
for having a military capable of fighting
two wars -- in the Middle East and Northeast
Asia -- simultaneously. Now, war planners
were to prepare to defend the United States
while building and assembling forces capable
of "deterring aggression and coercion" in
four "critical regions": Europe, Northeast
Asia (South Korea and Japan), East Asia (the
Taiwan Strait), and the Middle East, be able
to defeat aggression in two of these regions
simultaneously, and "win decisively" (in the
sense of "regime change" and occupation) in
one of those conflicts "at a time and place
of our choosing."As the military analyst
William M. Arkin commented, "[With] American
military forces ... already stretched to the
limit, the new strategy goes far beyond
preparing for reactive contingencies and
reads more like a plan for picking fights in
new parts of the world."
A seemingly easy three-week victory over
Saddam Hussein's forces in the spring of
2003 only reconfirmed these plans. The U.S.
military was now thought to be so
magnificent that it could accomplish any
task assigned to it. The collapse of the
Baathist regime in Baghdad also emboldened
Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld to use
"transformation" to penalize nations that
had been, at best, lukewarm about America's
unilateralism -- Germany, Saudi Arabia,
South Korea, and Turkey -- and to reward
those whose leaders had welcomed Operation
Iraqi Freedom, including such old allies as
Japan and Italy but also former communist
countries such as Poland, Romania, and
Bulgaria. The result was the Department of
Defense's Integrated Global Presence and
Basing Strategy, known informally as the
"Global Posture Review."
President Bush first mentioned it in a
statement on November 21, 2003, in which he
pledged to "realign the global posture" of
the United States. He reiterated the phrase
and elaborated on it on August 16, 2004, in
a speech to the annual convention of the
Veterans of Foreign Wars in Cincinnati.
Because Bush's Cincinnati address was part
of the 2004 presidential election campaign,
his comments were not taken very seriously
at the time. While he did say that the
United States would reduce its troop
strength in Europe and Asia by 60,000 to
70,000, he assured his listeners that this
would take a decade to accomplish -- well
beyond his term in office -- and made a
series of promises that sounded more like a
reenlistment pitch than a statement of
strategy.
"Over the coming decade, we'll deploy a more
agile and more flexible force, which means
that more of our troops will be stationed
and deployed from here at home. We'll move
some of our troops and capabilities to new
locations, so they can surge quickly to deal
with unexpected threats. ... It will reduce
the stress on our troops and our military
families. ... See, our service members will
have more time on the home front, and more
predictability and fewer moves over a
career. Our military spouses will have fewer
job changes, greater stability, more time
for their kids and to spend with their
families at home."
On September 23, 2004, however, Secretary
Rumsfeld disclosed the first concrete
details of the plan to the Senate Armed
Services Committee. With characteristic
grandiosity, he described it as "the biggest
re-structuring of America's global forces
since 1945." Quoting then undersecretary
Douglas Feith, he added, "During the Cold
War we had a strong sense that we knew where
the major risks and fights were going to be,
so we could deploy people right there. We're
operating now [with] an entirely different
concept. We need to be able to do [the]
whole range of military operations, from
combat to peacekeeping, anywhere in the
world pretty quickly."
Though this may sound plausible enough, in
basing terms it opens up a vast landscape of
diplomatic and bureaucratic minefields that
Rumsfeld's militarists surely
underestimated. In order to expand into new
areas, the Departments of State and Defense
must negotiate with the host countries such
things as Status of Forces Agreements, or
SOFAs, which are discussed in detail in the
next chapter. In addition, they must
conclude many other required protocols, such
as access rights for our aircraft and ships
into foreign territory and airspace, and
Article 98 Agreements. The latter refer to
article 98 of the International Criminal
Court's Rome Statute, which allows countries
to exempt U.S. citizens on their territory
from the ICC's jurisdiction.
Such immunity agreements were
congressionally mandated by the American
Service-Members' Protection Act of 2002,
even though the European Union holds that
they are illegal. Still other necessary
accords are acquisitions and cross-servicing
agreements or ACSAs, which concern the
supply and storage of jet fuel, ammunition,
and so forth; terms of leases on real
property; levels of bilateral political and
economic aid to the United States (so-called
host-nation support); training and exercise
arrangements (Are night landings allowed?
Live firing drills?); and environmental
pollution liabilities.
When the United States is not present in a
country as its conqueror or military savior,
as it was in Germany, Japan, and Italy after
World War II and in South Korea after the
1953 Korean War armistice, it is much more
difficult to secure the kinds of agreements
that allow the Pentagon to do anything it
wants and that cause a host nation to pick
up a large part of the costs of doing so.
When not based on conquest, the structure of
the American empire of bases comes to look
exceedingly fragile.
See also: Chalmers Johnson: ”The Last
Days of the American Republic.”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article13602.htm
From the book
NEMESIS: The Last Days of the American
Republic
by Chalmers Johnson. Reprinted by
arrangement with Metropolitan Books, an
imprint of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.
Copyright (c) 2006 by Chalmers Johnson. All
rights reserved.
