737 U.S. Military Bases = Global
Empire
by Chalmers Johnson
http://www.alternet.org/, February
19, 2007
[excerpted from Chalmers Johnson's
new book,
"Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic"]
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.
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.
Chalmers Johnson is president of the Japan
Policy Research Institute, a non-profit research and public affairs
organization devoted to public education concerning Japan and
international relations in the Pacific.
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