{"id":9438,"date":"2011-01-17T00:00:10","date_gmt":"2011-01-16T23:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=9438"},"modified":"2011-01-10T18:51:19","modified_gmt":"2011-01-10T17:51:19","slug":"empire-of-bases-2-0","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2011\/01\/empire-of-bases-2-0\/","title":{"rendered":"Empire of Bases 2.0"},"content":{"rendered":"

Does the Pentagon Really Have 1,180 Foreign Bases?<\/em><\/p>\n

The United States has 460 bases overseas!\u00a0 It has 507 permanent bases!\u00a0 What is the U.S doing with more than 560 foreign bases?\u00a0 Why does it have 662 bases abroad?\u00a0 Does the United States\u00a0really<\/em> have more than 1,000 military bases across the globe?<\/p>\n

In a world of statistics and precision, a world in which \u201caccountability\u201d is now a Washington buzzword, a world where all information is available at the click of a mouse, there\u2019s one number no American knows.\u00a0 Not the president.\u00a0 Not the Pentagon.\u00a0 Not the experts.\u00a0 No one.<\/p>\n

The man who wrote the definitive book on it didn\u2019t know for sure.\u00a0 The Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times<\/em> columnist didn\u2019t even come close.\u00a0 Yours truly has written numerous articles on U.S. military bases and even part of a book<\/a> on the subject, but failed like the rest.<\/p>\n

There are more than 1,000 U.S. military bases dotting the globe.\u00a0 To be specific, the most accurate count is 1,077.\u00a0 Unless it\u2019s 1,088.\u00a0 Or, if you count differently, 1,169.\u00a0 Or even 1,180.\u00a0 Actually, the number might even be higher.\u00a0 Nobody knows for sure.<\/p>\n

Keeping Count<\/strong><\/p>\n

In a recent op-ed piece<\/a>, New York Times<\/em> columnist Nicholas Kristof made a trenchant point: \u201cThe United States maintains troops at more than 560 bases and other sites abroad, many of them a legacy of a world war that ended 65 years ago. Do we fear that if we pull our bases from Germany, Russia might invade?\u201d<\/p>\n

For years, the late Chalmers Johnson, the man who literally wrote the book on the U.S. military\u2019s empire of bases<\/a>, The Sorrows of Empire<\/a><\/em>, made the same point and backed it with the most detailed research on the globe-spanning American archipelago of bases that has ever been assembled.\u00a0 Several years ago, after mining the Pentagon\u2019s own publicly-available documents, Johnson wrote, \u201c[T]he United States maintains 761 active military \u2018sites\u2019 in foreign countries. (That’s the Defense Department’s preferred term, rather than \u2018bases,\u2019 although bases are what they are.)\u201d<\/p>\n

Recently, the Pentagon updated its numbers on bases and other sites, and they have dropped.\u00a0 Whether they\u2019ve fallen to the level advanced by Kristof, however, is a matter of interpretation.\u00a0 According to the Department of Defense\u2019s 2010 Base Structure Report, the U.S. military now maintains 662 foreign sites in 38 countries around the world.\u00a0 Dig into that report more deeply, though, and Grand Canyon-sized gaps begin to emerge.<\/p>\n

A Legacy of Bases<\/strong><\/p>\n

In 1955, 10 years after World War II ended, the Chicago Daily Tribune<\/em> published a major investigation of bases, including a map dotted with little stars and triangles, most of them clustered in Europe and the Pacific.\u00a0 \u201cThe American flag flies over more than 300 overseas outposts,\u201d wrote reporter Walter Trohan.\u00a0 \u201cCamps and barracks and bases cover 12 American possessions or territories held in trust.\u00a0 The foreign bases are in 63 foreign nations or islands.\u201d<\/p>\n

Today, according to the Pentagon\u2019s published figures, the American flag flies over 750 U.S. military sites in foreign nations and U.S. territories abroad.\u00a0 This figure does not include small foreign sites of less 10 acres or those that the U.S. military values at less than $10 million.\u00a0 In some cases, numerous bases of this type may be folded together and counted as a single military installation in a given country.\u00a0 A request for further clarification from the Department of Defense went unanswered.<\/p>\n

What we do know is that, on the foreign outposts the U.S. military counts, it controls close to 52,000 buildings, and more than 38,000 pieces of heavy infrastructure like piers, wharves, and gigantic storage tanks, not to mention more than 9,100 \u201clinear structures\u201d like runways, rail lines, and pipelines. \u00a0\u00a0Add in more than 6,300 buildings, 3,500 pieces of infrastructure, and 928 linear structures in U.S. territories and you have an impressive total.\u00a0 And yet, it isn\u2019t close to the full story.<\/p>\n

Losing Count<\/strong><\/p>\n

Last January, Colonel Wayne Shanks, a spokesman for the U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), told me that there were nearly 400 U.S. and coalition bases<\/a> in Afghanistan, including camps, forward operating bases, and combat outposts.\u00a0 He expected that number to increase by 12 or more, he added, over the course of 2010.<\/p>\n

In September, I contacted ISAF\u2019s Joint Command Public Affairs Office to follow up.\u00a0 To my surprise, I was told that \u201c<\/strong>there are approximately 350 forward operating bases with two major military installations, Bagram and Kandahar airfields.\u201d\u00a0 Perplexed by the loss of 50 bases instead of a gain of 12, I contacted Gary Younger, a Public Affairs Officer with the International Security Assistance Force.\u00a0 \u201cThere are less than 10 NATO bases in Afghanistan,\u201d he wrote in an October 2010 email.\u00a0 \u201cThere are over 250 U.S. bases in Afghanistan.\u201d<\/p>\n

By then, it seemed, the U.S. had lost up to 150 bases and I was thoroughly confused.\u00a0 When I contacted the military to sort out the discrepancies and listed the numbers I had been given — from Shanks\u2019 400 base tally to the count of around 250 by Younger — I was handed off again and again until I landed with Sergeant First Class Eric Brown at ISAF Joint Command\u2019s Public Affairs.\u00a0 \u201cThe number of bases in Afghanistan is roughly 411,\u201d Brown wrote in a November email, \u201cwhich is a figure comprised of large base[s], all the way down to the Combat Out Post-level.\u201d\u00a0 Even this, he cautioned, wasn\u2019t actually a full list, because \u201ctemporary positions occupied by platoon-sized elements or less\u201d were not counted.<\/p>\n

Along the way to this \u201cfinal\u201d tally, I was offered a number of explanations —\u00a0 from different methods of accounting to the failure of units in the field to provide accurate information — for the conflicting numbers I had been given.\u00a0 After months of exchanging emails and seeing the numbers swing wildly, ending up with roughly the same count in November as I began with in January suggests that the U.S. command isn\u2019t keeping careful track of the number of bases in Afghanistan.\u00a0 Apparently, the military simply does not know how many bases it has in its primary theater of operations.<\/p>\n

Black Sites in Baseworld<\/strong><\/p>\n

Scan the Department of Defense\u2019s 2010 Base Structure Report for sites in Afghanistan.\u00a0 Go ahead, read through all 206 pages.\u00a0 You won\u2019t find a mention of them, not a citation, not a single reference, not an inkling that the United States has even one base in Afghanistan, let alone more than 400.\u00a0 This is hardly an insignificant omission.\u00a0 Add those 411 missing bases to Kristof\u2019s total and you get 971 sites around the world.\u00a0 Add it to the Pentagon\u2019s official tally and you\u2019re left with 1,073 bases and sites overseas, around 770 more than Walter Trohan uncovered for his 1955 article.\u00a0 That number even tops the 1967 count of 1,014 U.S. bases abroad, which Chalmers Johnson considered \u201cthe Cold War peak.\u201d<\/p>\n

There are, however, other ways<\/a> to tally the total.\u00a0 In a letter written last Spring, Senator Ron Wyden and Representatives Barney Frank, Ron Paul, and Walter Jones asserted that there were just 460 U.S. military installations abroad, not counting those in Iraq and Afghanistan.\u00a0 Nicholas Kristof, who came up with a count of 100 more than that, didn\u2019t respond to an email for clarification, but may have done the same analysis as I did: search the Pentagon\u2019s Base Structure Report and select out the obvious sites that, while having a sizeable \u201cfootprint,\u201d could only tenuously be counted as bases, like dependent family housing complexes and schools, resort hotels<\/a> (yes, the Department of Defense has them), ski areas<\/a> (them, too) and the largest of their golf courses<\/a> — the U.S. military claimed to possess a total of 172 courses of all sizes in 2007 — and you get a total of around 570 foreign sites.\u00a0 Add to them the number of Afghan bases and you\u2019re left with about 981 foreign military bases.<\/p>\n

As it happens, though, Afghanistan isn\u2019t the only country with a baseworld black-out.\u00a0 Search the Pentagon\u2019s tally for sites in Iraq and you won\u2019t find a single entry.\u00a0 (That was true even when the U.S. reportedly had more than 400 bases<\/a> in that country.)\u00a0 Today, the U.S. military footprint there has shrunk radically.\u00a0 The Department of Defense declined to respond to an email request for the current number of bases in Iraq, but published reports indicate that no fewer than 88 are still there, including Camp Taji, Camp Ramadi<\/a>, Contingency Operating Base Speicher<\/a>, and Joint Base Balad<\/a>, which, alone, boasts about 7,000 American troops.\u00a0 These missing bases would raise the worldwide total to about 1,069.<\/p>\n

War zones aren\u2019t the only secret spots.\u00a0 Take a close look at Middle Eastern nations<\/a> whose governments, fearing domestic public opinion, prefer that no publicity be given to American military bases<\/a> on their territory, and then compare it to the Pentagon\u2019s official list.\u00a0 To give an example, the 2010 Base Structure Report lists one nameless U.S. site in Kuwait.\u00a0 Yet we know that the Persian Gulf state hosts a number of U.S. military facilities including Camp Arifjan<\/a>, Camp Buering<\/a>, Camp Virginia<\/a>, Kuwait Naval Base<\/a>, Ali Al Salem Air Base<\/a>, and <\/strong>Udari Range<\/a>.\u00a0 Add in these missing sites and the total number of bases abroad reaches 1,074.<\/p>\n

Check the Pentagon\u2019s base tally for Qatar and you\u2019ll come up empty.\u00a0 But look at the numbers of Department of Defense personnel serving overseas and you\u2019ll find more than 550 service men and women deployed there.\u00a0 While that Persian Gulf nation may have officially built Al Udeid Air Base itself, to call it anything but a U.S. installation would be disingenuous, given that it has served as a major logistics and command hub<\/a> for the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.\u00a0 Add it in and the foreign base count reaches 1,075.<\/p>\n

Saudi Arabia is also missing from the Pentagon\u2019s tally, even though the current list of personnel abroad indicates that hundreds of U.S. troops are deployed there.\u00a0 From the lead up to the First Gulf War in 1990 through the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the U.S. military stationed thousands of troops in the kingdom. In 2003, in response to fundamentalist pressure on the Saudi government, Washington announced that it was pulling all but a small number of troops out of the country. Yet the U.S. continues to train and advise from sites like Eskan Village, a compound 20 kilometers south of Riyadh where, according to 2009 numbers, 800 U.S. personnel (500 of them advisors) were based.<\/p>\n

Discounted, Uncounted, and Unknown<\/strong><\/p>\n

In addition to the unknown number of micro-bases that the Pentagon doesn\u2019t even bother to count and Middle Eastern and Afghan bases that fly under the radar, there are even darker areas in the empire of bases: installations belonging to other countries that are used but not acknowledged by the United States or avowed by the host-nation need to be counted, too.\u00a0 For example, it is now well known that U.S. drone aircraft, operating under the auspices of both the CIA and the Air Force<\/a> and conducting a not-so-secret war in Pakistan, take off<\/a> from one or more bases in that country.<\/p>\n

Additionally, there are other sites like the \u201ccovert forward operating base run by the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in the Pakistani port city of Karachi,\u201d exposed<\/a> by Jeremy Scahill in the Nation<\/em> magazine, and one or more airfields run by employees of the private security contractor Blackwater<\/a> (now renamed Xe Services).\u00a0 While the Department of Defense\u2019s personnel tally indicates that there are well over a hundred troops deployed in Pakistan, it counts no bases there.<\/p>\n

Similarly uncounted are the U.S. Navy\u2019s carrier strike groups<\/a>, flotillas that consist of massive aircraft carriers<\/a>, the largest warships in the world, as well as a guided missile cruiser, two guided missile destroyers, an attack submarine, and an ammunition, oiler, and supply ship.\u00a0 The U.S. boasts 11 such carriers<\/a>, town-sized floating bases that can travel the world, as well as numerous other ships, some boasting well over 1,000 officers and crew, that may, says the Navy<\/a>, travel \u201cto any of more than 100 ports of call worldwide\u201d from Hong Kong to Rio de Janeiro.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe ability to conduct logistics functions afloat enables naval forces to maintain station anywhere,\u201d reads the Navy\u2019s Naval Operations Concept: 2010<\/em>.\u00a0 So these bases that float under the radar should really be counted, too.<\/p>\n

A Bang, A Whimper, and the Alamo of the Twenty-First Century<\/strong><\/p>\n

Speaking before the Senate Appropriations Committee\u2019s Subcommittee on Military Construction, Veterans, and Related Agencies early last year, Deputy Under Secretary of Defense Dorothy Robyn referenced the Pentagon\u2019s “507 permanent installations.”\u00a0 The Pentagon\u2019s 2010 Base Structure Report, on the other hand, lists 4,999 total sites in the U.S., its territories, and overseas.<\/p>\n

In the grand scheme of things, the actual numbers aren\u2019t all that important.\u00a0 Whether the most accurate total is 900 bases, 1,000 bases or 1,100 posts in foreign lands, what\u2019s undeniable is that the U.S. military maintains, in Chalmers Johnson\u2019s famous phrase, an empire of bases so large and shadowy that no one — not even at the Pentagon — really knows its full size and scope.<\/p>\n

All we know is that it raises the ire of adversaries like al Qaeda<\/a>, has a tendency to grate on even the closest of allies<\/a> like the Japanese<\/a>, and costs American taxpayers a fortune every year.\u00a0 In 2010, according to Robyn, military construction and housing costs at all U.S. bases ran to $23.2 billion.\u00a0 An additional $14.6 billion was needed for maintenance, repair, and recapitalization.\u00a0 To power its facilities, according to 2009 figures, the Pentagon spent $3.8 billion. And that likely doesn\u2019t even scratch the surface of America\u2019s baseworld in terms of its full economic cost.<\/p>\n

Like all empires, the U.S. military\u2019s empire of bases will someday crumble.\u00a0 These bases, however, are not apt to fall like so many dominos in some silver-screen last-stand sequence.\u00a0 They won\u2019t, that is, go out with the \u201cbang\u201d of futuristic Alamos, but with the \u201cwhimper\u201d of insolvency.<\/p>\n

Last year, rumbling<\/a> began even among Washington lawmakers about this increasingly likely prospect.\u00a0 \u201cI do not think we should be spending money to have troops in Germany 65 years after World War II. We have a terrible deficit and we have to cut back,\u201d said Massachusetts Democratic Congressman Barney Frank.\u00a0 Similarly, Republican Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas announced, \u201cIf the United States really wants to assure our allies and deter our enemies, we should do it with strong military capabilities and sound policy — not by keeping troops stationed overseas, not siphoning funds from equipment and arms and putting it into duplicative military construction.\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed, toward the end of 2010, the White House’s bipartisan deficit commission — officially known as the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform — suggested cutting U.S. garrisons in Europe and Asia by one-third, which would, in their estimation, save about $8.5 billion in 2015.<\/p>\n

The empire of bases, while still at or close to its height, is destined to shrink.\u00a0 The military is going to have to scale back its foreign footholds and lessen its global footprint in the years ahead.\u00a0 Economic realities will necessitate that.\u00a0 The choices the Pentagon makes today will likely determine on what terms its garrisons come home tomorrow.\u00a0 At the moment, they can still choose whether coming home will look like an act of magnanimous good statesmanship or inglorious retreat.<\/p>\n

Whatever the decision, the clock is ticking, and before any withdrawals begin, the U.S. military needs to know exactly where it’s withdrawing from (and Americans should have an accurate sense of just where its overseas armies are).\u00a0 An honest count of U.S. bases abroad — a true, full, and comprehensive list — would be a tiny first step in the necessary process of downsizing the global mission.<\/p>\n

__________________<\/p>\n

Nick Turse is an investigative journalist, the associate editor of <\/em>TomDispatch.com<\/em><\/a>, and currently a fellow at Harvard University\u2019s Radcliffe Institute. His latest book is <\/em>The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan<\/a> (Verso Books).\u00a0 You can follow him on Twitter <\/em>@NickTurse<\/a>, on <\/em>Tumblr<\/a>, and on <\/em>Facebook<\/a>.\u00a0 His website is <\/em>NickTurse.com<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0 To catch Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast audio interview in which Turse discusses how to count up America\u2019s empire of bases, click here<\/a> or, to download it to your iPod, here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Copyright 2011 Nick Turse<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 tomdispatch.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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