OMNI
US GLOBAL MILITARY BASES NEWSLETTER
#2, November 25, 2015.
Compiled by Dick Bennett for
Peace, Justice, and the Environment.
(#1 Dec. 9, 2012).
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List of United
States military bases -
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Contents #2 US Bases Imperialism
Founding Fathers’ Principles
Nick Turse, US Wars Today
From Tacoma to Takijistan, Encircling Iran
US Bases 800, Russia 1
Lutz, Struggle Against US
Bases
Oppose New Base on Okinawa
Two Books by David Vine
New Essay and Book on
Diego Garcia, Island of Shame
How U.S.
Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World
|
How Many Wars Is the US Really
Fighting? Hint: the answer is way more than you think.
By Nick Turse. SEPTEMBER
24, 2015.
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A US Special Forces trainer supervises a military assault drill
in Sudan in November 2013.(Reuters/Andreea Campeanu)
You can find them in dusty,
sunbaked badlands, moist tropical forests, and the salty spray of third-world
littorals. Standing in judgement, buffeted by the rotor wash of a helicopter
or sweltering beneath
the relentless desert sun, they instruct, yell, and cajole as
skinnier men play act under
their watchful eyes. In
many places, more than their particular brand of camouflage, better boots,
and designer gear sets
them apart. Their days are scented by stale sweat and gunpowder; their nights
are spent in rustic locales or third-world bars.
This
article originally appeared atTomDispatch.com. To
stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to
receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.
These
men—and they are mostly men—belong to
an exclusive military fraternity that
traces its heritage back to the birth of the nation. Typically, they’ve spent
the better part of a decade as more conventional soldiers, sailors, marines, or
airmen before making the cut. They’ve probably been deployed overseas
four to 10 times. The officers are generally approaching their mid-thirties;
the enlisted men, their late twenties. They’ve had more schooling than most in
the military. They’re likely to be married with a couple of kids. And day after
day, they carry out shadowy missions over much of the planet: sometimes covert
raids, more often hush-hush training exercises from
Chad to Uganda, Bahrain to
Saudi Arabia, Albania to Romania, Bangladesh to Sri Lanka, Belize to Uruguay.
They belong to the Special Operations forces (SOF), America’s most elite
troops—Army Green Berets and Navy SEALs, among others—and odds are, if you
throw a dart at a world map or stop a spinning globe with your index finger and
don’t hit water, they’ve been there sometime in 2015.
THE WIDE WORLD OF SPECIAL OPS
This year,
US Special Operations forces have already deployed to 135 nations, according to
Ken McGraw, a spokesman for Special Operations Command (SOCOM). That’s roughly
70 percent of the countries on the planet. Every day, in fact, America’s most
elite troops are carrying out missions in 80 to 90 nations, practicing night
raids or sometimes conducting them
for real, engaging in sniper training or sometimes actually gunning down
enemies from afar. As part of a global engagement strategy of endless hush-hush
operations conducted on every continent but Antarctica, they have now eclipsed
the number and range of special ops missions undertaken at the height of the
conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In the
waning days of the Bush administration, Special Operations forces (SOF) were
reportedly deployed in only about 60
nations around the world. By 2010, according to the Washington Post, that number had swelled to 75. Three
years later, it had jumped to 134
nations, “slipping” to 133
last year, before reaching a new record of 135 this summer. This 80 percent
increase over the last five years is indicative of SOCOM’s exponential
expansion which first shifted into high gear following the 9/11 attacks.
Special
Operations Command’s funding, for example, has more than tripled from about $3
billion in 2001 to nearly $10 billion in 2014 “constant dollars,”according to the Government Accountability Office
(GAO). And this doesn’t include funding from the various service branches,
which SOCOM estimates at around another $8 billion annually, or other
undisclosed sums that the GAO was unable to track. The average number of
Special Operations forces deployed overseas has nearly tripled during these
same years, while SOCOM more than doubled its personnel from about 33,000 in
2001 to nearly 70,000now.
Each
day, according to
SOCOM commander General Joseph Votel, approximately 11,000 special
operators are deployed or stationed outside the United States with many more on
standby, ready to respond in the event of an overseas crisis. “I think a lot of
our resources are focused in Iraq and in the Middle East, in Syria for right
now. That’s really where our head has been,” Votel told the Aspen
Security Forum in July. Still, he insisted his troops were not “doing anything
on the ground in Syria”—even if they had carried out a
night raid there a couple of months before and it was later revealed that they
are involved in a
covert campaign of drone strikes in that country.
“I think we are increasing
our focus on Eastern Europe at this time,” he added. “At the same time we
continue to provide some level of support on South America for Colombia and the
other interests that we have down there. And then of course we’re engaged out
in the Pacific with a lot of our partners, reassuring them and working those
relationships and maintaining our presence out there.”
In
reality, the average percentage of Special Operations forces deployed to the
Greater Middle East has decreased in recent years. Back in 2006, 85 percent of
special operators were deployed in support of Central Command or CENTCOM, the
geographic combatant command (GCC) that oversees operations in the region. By
last year, that number had dropped to 69
percent, according to GAO figures. Over that same span, Northern
Command—devoted to homeland defense—held steady at 1 percent, European Command
(EUCOM) doubled its percentage, from 3 percent to 6 percent, Pacific Command
(PACOM) increased from 7 percent to 10 percent, and Southern Command, which overseas Central and South America as well
as the Caribbean, inched up from 3 percent to 4 percent. The largest increase,
however, was in a region conspicuously absent from Votel’s rundown of special
ops deployments. In 2006, just 1 percent of the special operators deployed abroad were sent to Africa Command’s area
of operations. Last year, it was 10 percent.
Globetrotting
is SOCOM’s stock in trade and, not coincidentally, it’s divided into a
collection of planet-girding “sub-unified commands”: the self-explanatory SOCAFRICA; SOCEUR, the European contingent; SOCCENT,
the sub-unified command of CENTCOM; SOCKOR, which is devoted strictly to Korea;
SOCPAC, which covers the rest of the Asia-Pacific region; SOCSOUTH, which
conducts missions in Central America, South America, and the Caribbean;
SOCNORTH, which is devoted to “homeland defense”; and the ever-itinerant Joint
Special Operations Command or JSOC, a clandestine sub-command (formerly headed
by Votel) made up of personnel from each service branch, including SEALs, Air
Force special tactics airmen, and the Army’s Delta Force that specializes
in tracking and killing suspected
terrorists.
The elite
of the elite in the special ops community, JSOC takes on covert, clandestine,
and low-visibility operations in the hottest of hot spots. Some covert ops that
have come to light in recent years include a host of Delta Force missions:
among them, an operation in May in which members of the elite force killed an
Islamic State commander known as Abu Sayyaf during a night raid in Syria; the
2014 release of
long-time Taliban prisoner Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl; the capture of Ahmed
Abu Khattala, a suspect in 2012 terror attacks in Benghazi, Libya; and the
2013 abduction of
Anas al-Libi, an al-Qaeda militant, off a street in that same country.
Similarly, Navy SEALs have,
among other operations, carried out successful hostage rescue missions in Afghanistanand Somalia in
2012; a disastrous one in Yemen in 2014;
a 2013 kidnap raid in Somalia that went awry; and—that same year—a failed
evacuation mission inSouth Sudan in
which three SEALs were wounded when their aircraft was hit by small arms fire.
SOCOM’S SOF ALPHABET SOUP
Most deployments have,
however, been training missions designed to tutor proxies and forge stronger
ties with allies. “Special Operations forces provide individual-level training,
unit-level training, and formal classroom training,” explains SOCOM’s Ken McGraw.
“Individual training can be in subjects like basic rifle marksmanship, land
navigation, airborne operations, and first aid. They provide unit-level
training in subjects like small unit tactics, counterterrorism operations and
maritime operations. SOF can also provide formal classroom training in subjects
like the military decision-making process or staff planning.”
From 2012
to 2014, for instance, Special Operations forces carried out 500
Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET) missions in as
many as 67 countries each year. JCETs are officially devoted to training US
forces, but they nonetheless serve as a key facet of SOCOM’s global engagement
strategy. The missions “foster key military partnerships with foreign
militaries, enhance partner-nations’ capability to provide for their own
defense, and build interoperability between US SOF and partner-nation forces,”
according to SOCOM’s McGraw.
And JCETs
are just a fraction of the story. SOCOM carries out many other multinational
overseas training operations. According to data from the Office of the Under
Secretary of Defense (Comptroller), for example, Special Operations
forces conducted 75
training exercises in 30 countries in 2014. The numbers were projected to jump
to 98 exercises in 34 countries by the end of this year.
“SOCOM
places a premium on international partnerships and building their capacity.
Today, SOCOM has persistent partnerships with about 60 countries through our
Special Operations Forces Liaison Elements and Joint Planning and Advisory
Teams,” said SOCOM’s
Votel at a conference earlier this year, drawing attention to two of the many
types of shadowy Special Ops entities that operate overseas. These SOFLEs and JPATs belong to
a mind-bending alphabet soup of special ops entities operating around the
globe, a jumble of opaque acronyms and stilted abbreviations masking a secret
world of clandestine efforts often conducted in
the shadows in impoverished lands ruled by problematic regimes. The proliferation
of this bewildering SOCOM shorthand—SOJTFs and CJSOTFs, SOCCEs and
SOLEs—mirrors the relentless expansion of the command, with its signature brand
of military speak or milspeak proving as indecipherable to most Americans as
its missions are secret from them.
THE
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Around the
world, you can find Special Operations Joint Task Forces (SOJTFs), Combined
Joint Special Operations Task Forces (CJSOTFs), and Joint
Special Operations Task Forces (JSOTFs), Theater
Special Operations Commands (TSOCs), as well as
Special Operations Command and Control Elements (SOCCEs) and Special
Operations Liaison Elements (SOLEs). And that
list doesn’t even include Special Operations Command Forward (SOC FWD)
elements—small teams which, according to the military, “shape and coordinate
special operations forces security cooperation and engagement in support of
theater special operations command, geographic combatant command, and country
team goals and objectives.”
Special
Operations Command will not divulge the locations or even a simple count of its
SOC FWDs for “security reasons.” When asked how releasing only the number could
imperil security, SOCOM’s Ken McGraw was typically opaque. “The information is
classified,” he responded. “I am not the classification authority for that
information so I do not know the specifics of why the information is
classified.” Open source data suggests, however, that they are clustered in
favored black ops stomping grounds, including SOC FWD Pakistan, SOC FWD Yemen,
and SOC FWD Lebanon, as
well as SOC FWD East Africa, SOC FWD Central Africa, and SOC FWD West Africa.
What’s
clear is that SOCOM prefers to operate in the shadows while its personnel and
missions expand globally to little notice or attention. “The key thing that
SOCOM brings to the table is that we are—we think of ourselves—as a global
force. We support the geographic combatant commanders, but we are not bound by
the artificial boundaries that normally define the regional areas in which they
operate. So what we try to do is we try to operate across those boundaries,”
SOCOM’s Votel told the Aspen
Security Forum.
In one
particular blurring of boundaries, Special Operations liaison officers (SOLOs)
are embedded in at least 14 key US embassies to assist in advising the special
forces of various allied nations. Already operating in Australia, Brazil,
Canada, Colombia, El Salvador, France, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, Poland,
Peru, Turkey, and the United Kingdom, the SOLO program is poised, according to
Votel, to expand to 40 countries by 2019. The command, and especially JSOC, has
also forged close ties with the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau
of Investigation, and the National Security Agency, among other outfits,
through the use of liaison
officers and Special Operations Support Teams (SOSTs).
“In
today’s environment, our effectiveness is directly tied to our ability to
operate with domestic and international partners. We, as a joint force, must
continue to institutionalize interoperability, integration, and interdependence
between conventional forces and special operations forces through doctrine,
training, and operational deployments,” Votel told the Senate
Armed Services Committee this spring. “From working with indigenous forces and
local governments to improve local security, to high-risk counterterrorism
operations—SOF are in vital roles performing essential tasks.”
SOCOM will not name the
135 countries in which America’s most elite forces were deployed this year, let
alone disclose the nature of those operations. Most were, undoubtedly, training
efforts. Documents obtained from the Pentagon via the Freedom of Information
Act outlining Joint Combined Exchange Training in 2013 offer an indication of what
Special Operations forces do on a daily basis and also what skills are deemed
necessary for their real-world missions: combat marksmanship, patrolling,
weapons training, small unit tactics, special operations in urban terrain,
close quarters combat, advanced marksmanship, sniper employment, long-range
shooting, deliberate attack, and heavy weapons employment, in addition to
combat casualty care, human rights awareness, land navigation, and mission
planning, among others.
From Joint
Special Operations Task Force-Juniper Shield, which operates in
Africa’s Trans-Sahara region, and Special
Operations Command and Control Element-Horn of Africa, to Army Special
Operations Forces Liaison Element-Korea and Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force-Arabian
Peninsula, the global growth of SOF missions has been breathtaking. SEALs or
Green Berets, Delta Force operators or Air Commandos, they
are constantly taking on what Votel likes to call the
“nation’s most complex, demanding, and high-risk challenges.”
These forces carry out
operations almost entirely unknown to the American taxpayers who fund them,
operations conducted far from the scrutiny of the media or meaningful outside
oversight of any kind. Everyday, in around 80 or more countries that Special
Operations Command will not name, they undertake missions the command refuses
to talk about. They exist in a secret world of obtuse acronyms and shadowy
efforts, of mystery missions kept secret from the American public, not to
mention most of the citizens of the 135 nations where they’ve been deployed
this year.
This
summer, when Votel commented that more special ops troops are deployed to more
locations and are conducting more operations than at the height of the Afghan
and Iraq wars, he drew attention to two conflicts in
which those forces played major roles that have not turned out well for the
United States. Consider that symbolic of what the bulking up of his command has
meant in these years.
“Ultimately,
the best indicator of our success will be the success of the [geographic
combatant commands],” says the special ops chief, but with USsetbacks in
Africa Command’s area of operations from Mali and Nigeria toBurkina Faso and Cameroon; in Central
Command’s bailiwick from Iraq andAfghanistan to Yemen and Syria; in the PACOM region vis-Ã -vis China; and perhaps
even in the EUCOM area of operations due to Russia, it’s far
from clear what successes can be attributed to the ever-expanding secret
operations of America’s secret military. The special ops commander seems
resigned to the very real limitations of what his secretive but much-ballyhooed,
highly-trained, well-funded, heavily-armed operators can
do.
“We can buy space, we can
buy time,” says Votel, stressing that SOCOM can “play a very, very key role” in
countering “violent extremism,” but only up to a point — and that point seems
to fall strikingly short of anything resembling victory or even significant
foreign policy success. “Ultimately, you know, problems like we see in Iraq and
Syria,” he says, “aren’t going to be resolved by us.”
Attachments
area
Preview YouTube video GEN
Votel Speaks about SOCOM
FROM TACOMA TO TAJIKISTAN, Google
Search, July 12, 2015
https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=zQVqvB9UmUTc...
Google
Map of major US bases within close
proximity to Iran, in addition to other NATOmilitary sites near the Islamic Republic. Locations shown are
semi-permanent ...
o
Turkmenistan:
Secret U.S. Base For Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran ...www.globalresearch.ca/turkmenistan-secret-u-s-base-for.../20411
Aug 2, 2010 - Turkmenistan: Secret U.S. Base For Afghanistan,
Iraq, Iran Campaigns ... In September 2004, at the Mary-2 airfield, U.S. military experts ...
www.aljazeera.com/indepth/.../2012417131242767298.html
Al
Jazeera
May 1, 2012 - Dozens of US and allied
forces' military
installations dot
the region, from ... Turkey and Israel to the west, Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan to
the ...
www.huffingtonpost.com/news/military-bases/ The Huffington Post
Did you know the U.S. military maintains
roughly 1,000 military installations .... This year Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and
Kyrgyzstan turn ...
Speaks about SOCOM
THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING. US 800, RUSSIA 1.
Russia is bombing ISIL forces from “the Tartus naval base on
Syria’s Mediterranean coast, Russia’s only military site outside the former
Soviet Union.” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (Oct. 2, 2015), compiled by AD-G Staff
from Wire Reports. In contrast, some 800
US military bases in foreign lands encircle the globe. (David Vine, Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World,
2015). The whole world, except for the clueless US
public, is indignant at our claims of seeking peace and our grossly aggressive
and illegal threatening, while denouncing Russia and China—and N. Korea—of
being the aggressors. (The US has 10
carrier battle groups composed of six ships; China has only one recently built
carrier.)
The Bases of Empire
The
Global Struggle against U.S. Military Posts
·
Edited by Catherine Lutz
·
With a preface by Cynthia Enloe
378 pages
March,
2009
AUTHORS
Catherine
Lutz is Professor of Anthropology at Brown University, where
she has a joint appointment with the Watson Institute for International
Studies. Her books include Homefront: A Military City and the American
20th Century.
All books
by Catherine Lutz
All
books by Cynthia Enloe
A quarter
of a million U.S. troops are massed in over seven hundred major official
overseas airbases around the world. In the past decade, the Pentagon has
formulated and enacted a plan to realign, or reconfigure, its bases in keeping
with new doctrines of pre-emption and intensified concern with strategic
resource control, all with seemingly little concern for the surrounding
geography and its inhabitants.
The
contributors in The Bases of Empire trace the political,
environmental, and economic impact of these bases on their surrounding
communities across the globe, including Latin America, Europe, and Asia, where
opposition to the United States’ presence has been longstanding and widespread,
and is growing rapidly.
Through
sharp analysis and critique, The Bases of Empire illuminates
the vigorous campaigns to hold the United States accountable for the damage its
bases cause in allied countries as well as in war zones, and offers ways to
reorient security policies in other, more humane, and truly secure directions.
Contributors: Julian
Aguon, Kozue Akibayashi, Ayse Gul Altinay, Tom Engelhardt, Cynthia Enloe,
Joseph Gerson, David Heller, Amy Holmes, Laura Jeffery, Kyle Kajihiro, Hans
Lammerant, John Lindsay-Poland, Catherine Lutz, Katherine McCaffrey, Roland G.
Simbulan, Suzuyo Takazato, and David Vine.
REVIEWS
·
"Lutz makes a real contribution to the study of the
American empire of bases."
—Chalmers
Johnson at Truthdig.com
·
"These fascinating case studies provide a powerful
assessment of the worldwide network of U.S. military bases and the burgeoning
anti-base campaign, and analyze the changing nature of empire building and the
re-mapping of the sociopolitical terrain within the context of the 'global war
on terror.' A major contribution to understanding the causes and consequences
of U.S. military bases at home and abroad."
—Kimberly
Theidon, Harvard University
·
"A real contribution to the study of the American empire of
bases. . . This book is an antidote to parochialsim."
—Truthdig
·
“Catherine Lutz’s The Bases of Empire is a
must-read for every American and peace activist. . .Lutz does an extraordinary
job distilling the history of U.S. bases and debunking common myths of why
they’re needed.
—The
Fellowship of Reconciliation
Opposing US Base Construction on Okinawa
Global Network
[globalnet@mindspring.com]To: GN List Serve
[globenet@yahoogroups.com]
Wednesday, January 08,
2014 7:57 AM
STATEMENT
We oppose
construction of a new US
military base within Okinawa, and support the people of Okinawa
in their struggle for peace, dignity, human rights and protection of the
environment
We the
undersigned oppose the deal made at the end of 2013 between Prime Minister
Shinzo Abe and Governor of Okinawa Hirokazu Nakaima to deepen and extend the
military colonization of Okinawa at the
expense of the people and the environment. Using the lure of economic
development, Mr. Abe has extracted approval from Governor Nakaima to reclaim
the water off Henoko, on the northeastern shore of Okinawa
Plans to
build the base at Henoko have been on the drawing board since the 1960s. They were revitalized in 1996, when
the sentiments against US
military bases peaked following the rape of a twelve year-old Okinawan child by
three U.S.
Governor
Nakaima’s reclamation approval does not reflect the popular will of the people
of Okinawa . Immediately before the gubernatorial
election of 2010, Mr. Nakaima, who had previously accepted the new base
construction plan, changed his position and called for relocation of the
Futenma base outside the prefecture. He won the election by defeating a
candidate who had consistently opposed the new base. Polls in recent years have
shown that 70 to 90 percent of the people of Okinawa
opposed the Henoko base plan. The poll conducted immediately after Nakaima’s
recent reclamation approval showed that 72.4 percent of the people of Okinawa saw the governor’s decision as a “breach of his
election pledge.” The reclamation approval was a betrayal of the people of Okinawa .
73.8
percent of the US military bases
(those for exclusive US use)
in Japan are concentrated in
Okinawa, which is only .6 percent of the total land mass of Japan Okinawa Island
is occupied by the US Japan US
The new
agreement would also perpetuate the long suffering of the people of Okinawa . Invaded in the beginning of the 17th century by Japan and annexed
forcefully into the Japanese nation at the end of 19th century, Okinawa was in 1944
transformed into a fortress to resistadvancing US forces and thus to buy time
to protect the Emperor System. The
Battle of Okinawa killed more than 100,000 local residents, about a quarter of
the island’s population. After the war, more bases were built under the US Japan Okinawa continue to suffer from crimes and accidents,
high decibel aircraft noise and environmental pollution caused by the bases.
Throughout these decades, they have suffered what the U.S. Declaration of
Independence denounces as “abuses and usurpations,” including the presence of
foreign “standing armies without the consent of our legislatures.”
Not unlike
the 20th century U.S.
Civil Rights struggle, Okinawans have non-violently pressed for the end to
their military colonization. They tried to stop live-fire military drills that
threatened their lives by entering the exercise zone in protest; they formed
human chains around military bases to express their opposition; and about a
hundred thousand people, one tenth of the population have turned out periodically
for massive demonstrations. Octogenarians initiated the campaign to prevent the
construction of the Henoko base with a sit-in that has been continuing for
years. The prefectural assembly passed resolutions to oppose the Henoko base
plan. In January 2013, leaders of all the 41 municipalities of Okinawa signed
the petition to the government to remove the newly deployed MV-22 Osprey from
Futenma base and to give up the plan to build a replacement base in Okinawa .
We support
the people of Okinawa in their non-violent
struggle for peace, dignity, human rights and protection of the environment.
The Henoko marine base project must be canceled and Futenma returned forthwith
to the people of Okinawa .
January 2014
Norman Birnbaum, Professor Emeritus, Georgetown
University
Herbert Bix, Emeritus Professor of History and Sociology, State
University of New
York at Binghamton
Reiner Braun, Co-president International
Peace Bureau and Executive Director of International Association of Lawyers
Against Nuclear Arms
Noam Chomsky, Professor Emeritus of Linguistics, Massachusetts Institute of
Technology
John W.
Dower, Professor
Emeritus of History, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
And more.
US Westward
Imperialism newsletters are showing the history and China
But maybe the Chinese
are finding a way to defend their space that duplicates the US U.S. Arkansas
In contrast to a
moment’s risible mood, all of this leads us also to a meditation on
national space—from my islands, my air space….my Pacific, my E. Asia, to Henri
Lefebvre’s The Production of Space or
Stuart Elden’s Terror and Territory: The
Spatial Extent of Sovereignty.
Lefebvre wrote: “Sovereignty
implies ‘space,’” and sovereignty--dominance, power--over a space involves
violence to sustain and defend its space and control the people within it, “a
space established and constituted by violence.”
“The Control of territory is what makes a state possible” writes
Elden. “Thus, control of territory accords
a specific legitimacy to the violence and determines its spatial extent. Those in control of territory—states—can act
in ways those not in control cannot.”
Seems obvious. The catch is, thinking Westward, where does
the US state end, at Hawaii , or at Guam ? It
extends by the possessiveness engendered by force or simply the
practicalities of presence to all the over1000 military bases outside the
boundaries of the US US
is prepared to defend one and all of them from attack because they are part of
the USA
That is why the No
Bases Movement arose. (Google No Bases
Network.)
--Dick
Recommended
Reading From The American Empire Project
|
The Truth About Diego Garcia
And 50 Years of Fiction About an American Military Base by David Vine  First,
they tried to shoot the dogs. Next, they tried to poison them with
strychnine. When both failed as efficient killing methods, British government
agents and U.S. Navy personnel used raw meat to lure the pets into a sealed
shed. Locking them inside, they gassed the howling animals with exhaust piped
in from U.S. military vehicles. Then, setting coconut husks ablaze, they
burned the dogs' carcasses as their owners were left to watch and ponder
their own fate.
The truth about the U.S. military base on the British-controlled
Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia is often hard to believe. It would be
easy enough to confuse the real story with fictional accounts of the island
found in the Transformers movies,
on the television series 24, and in Internet
conspiracy theories about
the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.
|
|
From Italy to the Indian Ocean, from Japan to Honduras, a
far-reaching examination of the perils of American military bases overseas
American military bases encircle the globe. More than two
decades after the end of the Cold War, the U.S. still stations its troops at
nearly a thousand locations in foreign lands. These bases are usually taken
for granted or overlooked entirely, a little-noticed part of the Pentagon's
vast operations. But in an eye-opening account, Base Nation shows
that the worldwide network of bases brings with it a panoply of ills—and
actually makes the nation less safe in the long run.
|
|
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|
·
Facebook
·
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·
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·
Print
Michigan Base in the Pesh
Valley in Afghanistan's Kunar Province, 2009 (Reuters/Tim Wimborne)
Tomgram: David Vine, Our Base
Nation
Posted by David
Vine at 6:30pm, September
13, 2015.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch. Also republished in Space Alert!
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch. Also republished in Space Alert!
It’s not that I knew nothing about U.S. military bases before I
met Chalmers Johnson. In certain ways, my idea of the good life had been
strongly shaped by such a base. Admittedly, it wasn’t in Germany or Japan
or South Korea or some other distant land, but on Governor’s Island, an
Army base just off the southern tip of New York City. In the 1950s, my
father ran a gas station there. On Saturday mornings, I would often accompany
him to work on a ferry from downtown Manhattan and spend a dreamy
suburban-style day there amid zipping Jeeps and marching troops and military
kids, playing ball, wandering freely, catching cowboy or war flicks at the
island’s only movie house, and imagining that this was the best of all possible
worlds. And yet between that moment and the moment in September 1998 when
Johnson’s proposal for a book to be called Blowback: The Costs and Consequences
of American Empire fell
into my editorial hands, I
probably never gave our country’s bases another thought.
In that, I was like millions of Americans who, as soldiers or
civilians, had cycled through such bases at home and around the world and never
considered them again. And we were hardly alone when it came to the hundreds
and hundreds of foreign garrisons that made up what Johnson termed our “empire of bases.”
Historians, political scientists, and journalists, among many others, paid them
little mind. Our overseas garrisons were seldom discussed or debated or covered
in the media in any significant way. No one in Congress challenged their
existence. No president gave a speech about them. Though I hesitate to
use the term, there was something like a conspiracy of silence around them --
or perhaps a sense of discomfort that they even existed led everyone to act as
if they didn’t. And yet they were the face of this country to significant parts
of the world. In their profusion and their reach, they represented a staggering reality
for which there was no historical precedent. Billions and billions of dollars
poured into them. Hundreds of thousands of troops and their dependents were
stationed on them. It should have told us all something that they were quite so
unremarked upon, but until Johnson came along, they were, in essence, not so
much our little secret as a secret we kept even from ourselves. As he wrote
with a certain wonder in the second book in his Blowback Trilogy, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism,
Secrecy, and the End of the Republic, “The landscape of this
military empire is as unfamiliar and fantastic to most Americans today as Tibet
or Timbuktu were to nineteenth-century Europeans.”
Johnson broke the silence around them -- repeatedly. And yet, in
an era in which such bases, still being built, have played a crucial role in our various wars, conflicts,
bombing and drone assassination campaigns, and other interventions in the
Greater Middle East, they remain a barely acknowledged aspect of American life.
Why this is so should be considered both a curiosity and a mystery. Is it that
a genuine acknowledgement of the existence of a vast network of global
garrisons would lead to uncomfortable conclusions about the imperial nature of
this country? I’m not sure myself. That they remain largely surrounded by an
accepted and acceptable silence, however, continues to be an American reality.
Thank heavens, then, that, almost five years after Chalmers
Johnson’s death, TomDispatchregular David
Vine has produced a groundbreaking new book, Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases
Abroad Harm America and the World, which should once again
bring that empire of bases back into the national discussion. Today, Vine
offers an overview of what it means for this country to continue to garrison
the planet 24/7. Tom
Garrisoning
the Globe
How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Undermine National Security and Harm Us All
By David Vine
How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Undermine National Security and Harm Us All
By David Vine
David Vine, a TomDispatch regular, is associate professor of anthropology
at American University in Washington, D.C. His book, Base Nation: How U.S. Military
Bases Abroad Harm America and the World, has just been published as part of the American Empire Project (Metropolitan Books). He has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and Mother Jones, among other publications. For more
information and
With the US military having withdrawn many of
its forces from Iraq and Afghanistan, most Americans would be forgiven for
being unaware that hundreds of US bases and hundreds of thousands of US troops
still encircle the globe. Although few know it, the United States garrisons the
planet unlike any country in history, and the evidence is on view from Honduras
to Oman, Japan to Germany, Singapore to Djibouti.
This article originally appeared atTomDispatch.com.
To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to
receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.
Like most Americans, for most of my life, I
rarely thought about military bases. Scholar and former CIA consultant Chalmers
Johnson described me well when he wrote in 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.”
To the extent that Americans think about these
bases at all, we generally assume they’re essential to national security and
global peace. Our leaders have claimed as much since most of them were
established during World War II and the early days of the Cold War. As a
result, we consider the situation normal and accept that US military
installations exist in staggering numbers in other countries, on other peoples’
land. On the other hand, the idea that there would be foreign bases on US soil
is unthinkable.
While there are no freestanding foreign bases
permanently located in the United States, there are now around 800 US bases in
foreign countries. Seventy years after World War II and 62 years after the
Korean War, there are still 174 US “base sites” in Germany, 113 in Japan, and
83 in South Korea, according to the Pentagon.
Hundreds more dot the planet in around 80 countries,
including Aruba and Australia, Bahrain and Bulgaria, Colombia, Kenya, and
Qatar, among many other places. Although few Americans realize it, the United
States likely has more bases in foreign lands than any other people, nation, or
empire in history.
Oddly enough, however, the mainstream media
rarely report or comment on the issue. For years, during debates over the
closure of the prison at the base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, nary a pundit
or politician wondered why the United States has a base on Cuban territory in
the first place or questioned whether we should have one there at all. Rarely
does anyone ask if we need hundreds of bases overseas or if, at an estimated
annual cost of perhaps $156 billion or more,
the United States can afford them. Rarely does anyone wonder how we would feel
if China, Russia, or Iran built even a single base anywhere near our borders,
let alone in the United States.
THE BASE NATION’S SCALE
Our 800 bases outside the 50 states and
Washington, D.C., come in all sizes and shapes. Some are city-sized “Little Americas”—places
like Ramstein Air Base in Germany, Kadena
Air Base in Okinawa, and the little known Navy and Air Force
base onDiego Garcia in
the Indian Ocean. These support a remarkable infrastructure, including schools,
hospitals, power plants, housing complexes, and an array of amenities often
referred to as “Burger Kings and bowling alleys.” Among the smallest US
installations globally are “lily pad” bases
(also known as “cooperative security locations”), which tend to house drones,
surveillance aircraft, or pre-positioned weaponry and supplies. These are
increasingly found in parts of Africa and Eastern Europe that had previously
lacked much of a US military presence.
Other facilities scattered across the planet
include ports and airfields, repair complexes, training areas, nuclear weapons
installations, missile testing sites, arsenals, warehouses, barracks, military
schools, listening and communications posts, and a growing array of
drone bases. Military hospitals and prisons, rehab facilities, CIA paramilitary
bases, and intelligence facilities (including former CIA “black site” prisons)
must also be considered part of our Base Nation because of their military
functions. Even US military resorts and recreation areas in places like the
Bavarian Alps and Seoul, South Korea, are bases of a kind. Worldwide, the
military runs mor170 golf courses.
The Pentagon’s overseas presence is actually
even larger. There are US troops or other military personnel in about 160 foreign countries and territories, including small
numbers of marines guarding embassies and larger deployments of trainers and
advisors like the roughly 3,500now working
with the Iraqi Army. And don’t forget the Navy’s 11 aircraft carriers. Each
should be considered a kind of floating base, or as the Navy tellingly refers to them,
“four and a half acres of sovereign US territory.” Finally, above the seas, one
finds a growing military presence in space.
The United States isn’t, however, the only
country to control military
bases outside its territory. Great Britain still
has about seven bases and France five in former colonies. Russia has around
eight in former Soviet republics. For the first time since World War II,
Japan’s “Self-Defense Forces” have a foreign base in Djibouti in
the Horn of Africa, alongside US and French bases there.South Korea, India, Chile, Turkey, and Israel each
reportedly have at least one foreign base. There are also reports that China may be
seeking its first base overseas. In total, these countries probably have about
30 installations abroad, meaning that the United States has approximately 95%
of the world’s foreign bases.
“FORWARD” FOREVER?
Although the United States has had bases in foreign lands since
shortly after it gained its independence, nothing like today’s massive global
deployment of military force was imaginable until World War II. In 1940, with
the flash of a pen, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a “destroyers-for-bases”
deal with Great Britain that instantly gave the United States 99-year leases to
installations in British colonies worldwide. Base acquisition and construction
accelerated rapidly once the country entered the war. By 1945, the US military
was building base facilities at
a rate of 112 a month. By war’s end, the global total topped 2,000 sites. In
only five years, the United States had developed history’s first truly global
network of bases, vastly overshadowing that of the British Empire upon which
“the sun never set.”
After the war, the military returned about half
the installations but maintained what historian George Stambuk termed a
“permanent institution” of bases abroad. Their number spiked during the wars in
Korea and Vietnam, declining after each of them. By the time the Soviet Union
imploded in 1991, there were about 1,600 US bases abroad, with some 300,000 US
troops stationed on those in Europe alone.
Although the military vacated about 60% of its
foreign garrisons in the 1990s, the overall base infrastructure stayed
relatively intact. Despite additional base closures in Europe and to a lesser
extent in East Asia over the last decade and despite the absence of a
superpower adversary, nearly250,000 troops are still deployed on installations
worldwide. Although there are about half as many bases as there were in 1989,
the number of countries with US bases has roughly doubled from 40 to 80. In recent
years, President Obama’s “Pacific pivot” has meant billions of dollars in
profligate spending in Asia, where the military already had hundreds of bases
and tens of thousands of troops. Billions more have been sunk into building an
unparalleled permanent base infrastructure in every Persian Gulf country save
Iran. In Europe, the Pentagon has been spending billions more erecting expensive new bases at
the same time that it has been closing others.
Since the start of the Cold War, the idea that
our country should have a large collection of bases and hundreds of thousands
of troops permanently stationed overseas has remained a quasi-religious dictum
of foreign and national security policy. The nearly 70-year-old idea underlying
this deeply held belief is known as the “forward strategy.”
Originally, the strategy held that the United States should maintain large
concentrations of military forces and bases as close as possible to the Soviet
Union to hem in and “contain” its supposed urge to expand.
But the disappearance of another superpower to
contain made remarkably little difference to the forward strategy. Chalmers
Johnson first grew concerned about our empire of bases when he recognized that
the structure of the “American Raj”
remained largely unchanged despite the collapse of the supposed enemy.
Two decades after the Soviet Union’s demise,
people across the political spectrum still unquestioningly assume that overseas
bases and forward-deployed forces are essential to protect the country. George
W. Bush’s administration was typical ininsisting that
bases abroad “maintained the peace” and were “symbols of… US commitments to
allies and friends.” The Obama administration has similarlydeclared that
protecting the American people and international security “requires a global
security posture.”
Support for the forward
strategy has remained the consensus among politicians of both parties, national
security experts, military officials, journalists, and almost everyone else in
Washington’s power structure. Opposition of any sort to maintaining large
numbers of overseas bases and troops has long been pilloried as peacenik
idealism or the sort of isolationism that allowed Hitler to conquer Europe.
THE COSTS OF GARRISONING THE WORLD
As Johnson showed us, there are many reasons to
question the overseas base status quo. The most obvious one is economic.
Garrisons overseas are very expensive. According to the RAND Corporation, even when host countries like Japan
and Germany cover some of the costs, US taxpayers still pay an annual average
of $10,000 to $40,000 more per year to station a member of the military abroad
than in the United States. The expense of transportation, the higher cost of
living in some host countries, and the need to provide schools, hospitals,
housing, and other support to family members of military personnel mean that
the dollars add up quickly—especially with more than half a million troops,
family members, and civilian employees on bases overseas at any time.
By my very conservative calculations,
maintaining installations and troops overseas cost at least $85 billion in
2014—more than the discretionary budget of every government agency except the
Defense Department itself. If the US presence in Afghanistan and Iraq is
included, that bill reaches $156 billion or more.
While bases may be costly for taxpayers, they
are extremely profitable for the country’s privateers of
twenty-first-century war like DynCorp International and former Halliburton
subsidiary KBR. As Chalmers
Johnson noted, “Our
installations abroad bring profits to civilian industries,” which win billions
in contracts annually to “build and maintain our far-flung outposts.”
Meanwhile, many of the communities hosting
bases overseas never see the economic windfalls that US and local leaders
regularly promise. Some areas, especially in poor rural communities,
have seen short-term economic booms touched off by base construction. In the
long-term, however, most bases rarely create sustainable, healthy local
economies. Compared with other forms of economic activity, they represent
unproductive uses of land, employ relatively few people for the expanses
occupied, and contribute little to local economic growth. Research has
consistently shown that when bases finally close, the economic impact is generally limited and
in some cases actually positive—that is, local communities can end upbetter off when they trade bases for housing,
schools, shopping complexes, and other forms of economic development.
Meanwhile for the United States, investing
taxpayer dollars in the construction and maintenance of overseas bases means
forgoing investments in areas like education, transportation, housing, and
healthcare, despite the fact that these industries are more of a boon to
overall economic productivity and create more jobs compared
to equivalent military spending. Think about what $85 billion per year would
mean in terms of rebuilding the country’s crumbling civilian infrastructure.
THE HUMAN TOLL
Beyond the financial
costs are the human ones. The families of military personnel are among those
who suffer from the spread of overseas bases given the strain of distant
deployments, family separations, and frequent moves. Overseas bases also
contribute to the shocking rates of sexual assault in the military: an
estimated 30% of servicewomen are victimized during their time in the military
and a disproportionate number of these crimes happen at bases abroad. Outside
the base gates, in places like South Korea, one often finds exploitative
prostitution industries geared to US military personnel.
Worldwide, bases have
caused widespread environmental damage because of toxic leaks, accidents, and
in some cases the deliberate dumping of hazardous materials. GI crime has long
angered locals. In Okinawa and elsewhere, US troops have repeatedly committed
horrific acts of rape against local women. From Greenland to the tropical
island of Diego Garcia, the military has displaced local peoples from their
lands to build its bases.
In contrast to
frequently invoked rhetoric about spreading democracy, the military has shown a
preference for establishing bases in undemocratic and often despotic states
like Qatar and Bahrain. In Iraq, Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia, US bases have
created fertile breeding grounds for radicalism and anti-Americanism. The
presence of bases near Muslim holy sites in Saudi Arabia was a major recruiting
tool for al-Qaeda and part of Osama bin Laden’s professed motivation for the
September 11, 2001, attacks.
Although this kind of
perpetual turmoil is little noticed at home, bases abroad have all too often
generate grievances, protest, and antagonistic relationships. Although few here
recognize it, our bases are a major part of the image the United States
presents to the world—and they often show us in an extremely unflattering
light.
CREATING A NEW COLD WAR, BASE BY BASE
It is also not at all
clear that bases enhance national security and global peace in any way. In the
absence of a superpower enemy, the argument that bases many thousands of miles
from US shores are necessary to defend the United States—or even its allies—is
a hard argument to make. On the contrary, the global collection of bases has
generally enabled the launching of military interventions, drone strikes, and
wars of choice that have resulted in repeated disasters, costing millions of
lives and untold destruction from Vietnam to Iraq.
By making it easier to wage foreign wars, bases
overseas have ensured that military action is an ever more attractive
option—often the only imaginable option—for US policymakers. As the
anthropologist Catherine Lutz has said, when all you have in your foreign policy toolbox
is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. Ultimately, bases abroad
have frequently made war more likely rather than less.
Proponents of the long-outdated forward
strategy will reply that overseas bases “deter” enemies and help keep the
global peace. As supporters of the status quo, they have been proclaiming such
security benefits as self-evident truths for decades. Few have provided
anything of substance to support their claims. While there is some evidence
that military forces can indeed deter imminent threats, little if any research suggests
that overseas bases are an effective form of long-term deterrence. Studies by
both the Bush administration and
theRAND Corporation&—not
exactly left-wing peaceniks—indicate that advances in transportation technology
have largely erased the advantage of stationing troops abroad. In the case of a
legitimate defensive war or peacekeeping operation, the military could
generally deploy troops just as quickly from domestic bases as from most bases
abroad. Rapid sealift and airlift capabilities coupled with agreements allowing
the use of bases in allied nations and, potentially, pre-positioned supplies
are a dramatically less expensive and less inflammatory alternative to
maintaining permanent bases overseas.
It is also questionable
whether such bases actually increase the security of host nations. The presence
of US bases can turn a country into an explicit target for foreign powers or
militants—just as US installations have endangered Americans overseas.
Similarly, rather than
stabilizing dangerous regions, foreign bases frequently heighten military
tensions and discourage diplomatic solutions to conflicts. Placing US bases
near the borders of countries like China, Russia, and Iran, for example,
increases threats to their security and encourages them to respond by boosting
their own military spending and activity. Imagine how US leaders would respond
if China were to build even a single small base in Mexico, Canada, or the
Caribbean. Notably, the most dangerous moment during the Cold War—the 1962
Cuban missile crisis—revolved around the construction of Soviet nuclear missile
facilities in Cuba, roughly 90 miles from the US border.
The creation and maintenance of so many US
bases overseas likewise encourages other nations to build their own foreign
bases in what could rapidly become an escalating “base race.” Bases
near the borders of China and Russia, in particular, threaten to fuel new cold
wars. US officials may insist that building yet more bases in East Asia is a
defensive act meant to ensure peace in the Pacific, but tell that to the
Chinese. That country’s leaders are undoubtedly not “reassured” by the creation
of yet more bases encircling their borders. Contrary to the claim that such
installations increase global security, they tend to ratchet up regional
tensions, increasing the risk of future military confrontation.
In this way, just as
the war on terror has become a global conflict that only seems to spread
terror, the creation of new US bases to protect against imagined future Chinese
or Russian threats runs the risk of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. These
bases may ultimately help create the very threat they are supposedly designed
to protect against. In other words, far from making the world a safer place, US
bases can actually make war more likely and the country less secure.
BEHIND THE WIRE
In his farewell address to the nation upon leaving the
White House in 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower famously warned the nation
about the insidious economic, political, and even spiritual effects of what he
dubbed “the military-industrial-congressional complex,” the vast interlocking
national security state born out of World War II. As Chalmers Johnson’s work reminded
us in this new century, our 70-year-old collection of bases is evidence of how,
despite Ike’s warning, the United States has entered a permanent state of war
with an economy, a government, and a global system of power enmeshed in
preparations for future conflicts.
America’s overseas
bases offer a window onto our military’s impact in the world and in our own
daily lives. The history of these hulking “Little Americas” of concrete, fast
food, and weaponry provides a living chronicle of the United States in the
post-World War II era. In a certain sense, in these last seven decades, whether
we realize it or not, we’ve all come to live “behind the wire,” as military
personnel like to say.
We may think such bases
have made us safer. In reality, they’ve helped lock us inside a permanently
militarized society that has made all of us—everyone on this planet—less
secure, damaging lives at home and abroad.
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DAVID VINE David Vine is assistant
professor of anthropology at American University, in Washington, DC. He is the
author of Island of Shame: The Secret History
of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia (Princeton
University Press, 2009). He has written for the New York
Times, the Washington Post,
the Guardian, and Mother Jones, among
other places. He is currently completing a book about the more than 1,000 U.S.
military bases located outside the United States.
To view
this email as a webpage, go here.
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"U.S.
national security policy rests on the assertion that 'forward presence'
contributes directly to global peace and security. In this powerful book,
David Vine examines, dismantles, and disproves that claim. Base
Nation offers a devastating critique, and no doubt Washington will
try to ignore it. Citizens should refuse to let that happen."
-ANDREW J. BACEVICH
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BUY THE BOOK
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U.S. MILITARY
BASES ABROAD, 2015
As of
2015, the United States controlled approximately 800 bases outside the fifty
U.S. states and Washington, D.C. The sheer number of bases as well as the
secrecy and lack of transparency of the overseas base network make any
graphic depiction challenging. This map reflects the bases' relative number
and positioning given the best available information.
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Photos
from Base Nation
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Trailer
for Base Nation
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Contents #1 Dec. 9, 2012
US
Bases
Protest:
No Bases Network
Global
Research, International Network for the Abolition of
Foreign Military Bases
Dufour Review
Bases Worldwide 2012
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