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 Schröder'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
Grafenwöhr 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.
Copyright C2004 Chalmers Johnson
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