America’s Empire of Bases

By CHALMERS JOHNSON

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 US 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 a high school geography class. Without grasping the dimensions of this globe-girdling Baseworld, one can’t begin to understand the size and the nature of USA’s imperialist aspirations or the degree to which a new kind of militarism is undermining the US constitutional order.

US military deploys well over half a million soldiers, spies, technicians, teachers, dependents, and civilian contractors in other nations. To dominate the oceans and the seas of the world, we are creating some thirteen naval task forces built around aircraft carriers whose names sum up our martial heritage, like – Kitty Hawk, Enterprise, Constellation, Nimitz, Harry S. Truman and Ronald Reagan amongst other. We operate numerous secret bases outside our territory to monitor what the people of the world, including what our own citizens are saying over the telephone, faxing, or e-mailing to one another.

US installations abroad bring huge 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 with Iraq, for example, while the Defense Department was ordering up and extra ration of cruise missiles and of depleted-uranium armor-piercing tank shells, it also acquired 273,000 bottles of Native Tan sun block lotion, 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.

It’s not easy to assess the size and the exact value of our empire of bases. Official records of these are misleading, although very instructive. According to the US Defense Department’s annual "Based Structure Report" for the fiscal year of 2003, which itemizes foreign and domestic US 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 $114.2 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, estimated $591,519,8 million to replace all of them. The military high command deploys to our overseas bases 253,288 uniformed personnel, plus an equal number of dependents and Department of Defense civilian officials, and employs and additional 44,870 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 US occupies globally. The 2003 Base Status Report fails to mention, for instance, any garrisons that we have in Kosovo – even though it is the site of the huge Camp Bondsteel, built in 1999 and maintained ever since by Kellogg, Brown & Root. This Report similarly omits bases in Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Kuwait, Kyrgystan, Qatar and Uzbekistan, although the US military had 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 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-size island’s second largest city. (Manhattan’s Central Park in New York, by contrast, is only 843 acres.) The Pentagon similarly fails to note all of the $5-billion-worth military and espionage installations in Britain, which have long been conveniently disguised as British Royal Air Force base. If there were an honest count, the actual size of US 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

The Pentagon spares no effort to make these bases seem like a Hollywood summer resort. For instance, the Washington Post reports that in Fallujah, just west of Baghdad, waiters in white shirts, black pants and black bow ties serve dinner to the US officers of the 82nd Airborne Division in their heavily guarded compound, and the first Burger King has already gone up inside the enormous US military base has established in Baghdad International Airport.

Some of these US bases are so gigantic that 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, 4^th Infantry Division, whose job is to police some 1,500 sq. kilometers and will ultimately house as many as 20,000 troops. Despite all these extensive security precautions, the base has frequently come under heavy mortar attacks, notably on the last Fourth of July, 2003, just as Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger was chatting up the US wounded at the local field hospital.

The US military prefers bases that resemble small fundamentalist towns in the US Bible Belt, rather than the big population centers of the United States. For example, even though more than 100,000 women live in the US 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 assaults by US servicemen 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 the US empire these days.

Our missionaries live in a closed-off, self-contained world serviced by US air force transport planes, while the Generals and Admirals are flown in seventy-one Lear Jets and other luxury jets which fly them to such spots as the armed forces ski and vacation center in Germisch and Bavarian Alps or to any of the 234 military golf courses the Pentagon operates word-wide. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld flies around in his own personal Boeing 757, called the 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 the US empire. Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff, General Richard Myers and senior members of the US Senate’s Military Construction Subcommittee such as Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) are apparently incapable of completing a sentence without using this word. Establishing a more impressive footprint has now become part of the new justification for a major enlargement of the US 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 to draw up plans and implement US President Bush’s preventive war strategy against "rogue states", "bad guys", "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 into 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 the colonies. America’s version of the colony is the military base. By following the changing policies of global basing, one can learn much about our ever-larger imperial stance and the militarism that grows with it. Militarism and Imperialism are the Siamese Twins joined at the hip. Each thrives off the other. Already highly advanced in our country, they both are 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. General Martin Robeson, commanding the US 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 the US 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.

In order to put US forces close to every hot spot or danger 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 bases in Iraq. A number of these are already now under construction – at the 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, US plans to keep under control the whole northern quarter of Kuwait – 1,600- square miles of Kuwait’s 6.9000 square miles of territory – that US now uses to re-supply our Iraq legion and as a place for Green Zone bureaucrats to relax.

Other countries mentioned as sites for what Colin Powell calls US’s new "family of bases" include: In the impoverished areas of the "new" Europe – Romania, Poland and Bulgaria; in Asia – Pakistan (where US 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 100,000 civilians since 1992, when, in order to squash an election, the military took over, backed by USA and France); and in West Africa – Senegal, Ghana, Mali, and Sierra Leone ( even though it has been torn by civil war since 1991). The model for all these new installations, according to the 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 the 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, our bases in the docile satellites of Japan and Britain. To offset the expenses involved in such expansion, the Pentagon leaks plans to the world media to close many of the USA’s 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 wake of the Iraq victory, the US 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 in South Korea, perhaps the most anti-American democracy on Earth today.

In Europe, these plans include giving up several bases in Germany, also in part because Gerhard Schroeder’s domestically popular defiance of Bush over Iraq. Lt. Colonel Amy Ehmann of Germany has said to the press: "There’s no place to put all these 71,702 US soldiers in Romania or other former Warsaw Pact countries. It is predicted that more than 80% of the US forces will remain in Germany."

One reason why the US Pentagon is considering moving out of the 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 and the like-mindedness of these governments to US polices". The Pentagon always imposes on countries in which it deploys its troops, the so-called "Status of Forces Agreements", which usually exempts the USA 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 in these countries, an attitude increasingly at bay in the US "homeland" as well. For example, the 2004 defense authorization bill of $40.1 billion that President Bush signed into law in November 2003, exempts the US military outside the USA and also inside the USA from abiding by the Endangered Species Act and the Maritime Mammal Protection Act plus other environmental laws that the US military does not obey.

By far the greatest defect of this USA’s "Global Cavalry" strategy, however, is that it accentuates Washington’s impulse to apply irrelevant military remedy to terrorism. As the prominent British military historian, Correlli Barnett, has observed, the US attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq only increased the threat of al-Qaeda. From 1993 through 9/11 assault in 2001, there were 5 major al-Qaeda attacks world-wide; in the two years since the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, 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 the front doors and barging into ancient and complex societies with simple nostrums of so-called "freedom and democracy", we need tactics of understanding of the people and the culture we are dealing with an understanding up till now entirely lacking in the top-level policy-makers in Washington and especially at the Pentagon. You cannot bring democracy at the point of a gun"

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 of the construction these new world-wide military bases around the world, this is to expand the USA’s Empire and reinforce the US military domination of the world!"