In a world of statistics and precision, a world in which
“accountability” is now a Washington buzzword, a world where all
information is available at the click of a mouse, there’s one number no
American knows. Not the president. Not the Pentagon. Not the
experts. No one.
The man who wrote the definitive book on it didn’t know for sure. The Pulitzer Prize-winning
New York Times columnist didn’t even come close. Yours truly has written numerous articles on U.S. military bases and even
part of a book on the subject, but failed like the rest.
There are more than 1,000 U.S. military bases dotting the globe. To
be specific, the most accurate count is 1,077. Unless it’s 1,088. Or,
if you count differently, 1,169. Or even 1,180. Actually, the number
might even be higher. Nobody knows for sure.
Tomgram: Nick Turse, The Pentagon's Planet of Bases
[TomDispatch recommendations: If you have a chance, check out "The Tyranny of Defense Inc.," the latest piece by Andrew Bacevich, author of the bestselling Washington Rules, at the Atlantic.
It was written to commemorate the 50th anniversary of President Dwight
D. Eisenhower’s Farewell Address (in which he coined the phrase “the
military-industrial complex”), but you also find out about an Eisenhower
speech you never knew existed. Don’t miss it. In addition, let me
recommend the Coen brothers’s new film, True Grit. Having grown up on Westerns, I’m with the between-the-coasts crowd on
this one, and thematically I think it fits in perfectly with
TomDispatch: a drunken lout of a U.S. Marshall/nation ready to pull a
gun on and shoot anyone, and hard to distinguish from the worst of
rogues, could nonetheless still be capable of truly heroic acts. I find
that moving and apt. Tom]
India, a rising power, almost had one (but the Tajiks said no). China, which last year became the world’s second largest economy as well as the planet’s leading energy consumer, and is expanding abroad like mad (largely via trade and
the power of the purse), still has none. The Russians have a few (in
Central Asia where “the great game” is ongoing), as do those former
colonial powers Great Britain and France, as do certain NATO countries in Afghanistan. Sooner or later, Japan may even have one.
All of them together -- and maybe you've already guessed that I’m
talking about military bases not on one’s own territory -- add up to a
relatively modest (if unknown) total. The U.S., on the other hand, has
enough bases abroad to sink the world. You almost have the feeling that
a single American mega-base like Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan could
swallow them all up. It’s so large that a special Air Force “team” has
to be assigned to it just to deal with the mail arriving every day, 360,000 pounds of it in November 2010 alone. At the same base, the U.S. has just spent $130 million building “a better gas station for aircraft... [a]
new refueling system, which features a pair of 1.1-million gallon tanks
and two miles of pipes.” Imagine that: two miles of pipes, thousands
of miles from home -- and that’s just to scratch the surface of Bagram's
enormity.
Spencer Ackerman of Wired’s Danger Room blog visited the base last
August, found that construction was underway everywhere (think hundreds
of millions of dollars more from the pockets of U.S. taxpayers), and
wrote: “More notable than the overstuffed runways is the over-driven
road. [The Western part of] Disney Drive, the main thoroughfare that
rings the eight-square-mile base,[...] is a two-lane parking lot of
Humvees, flamboyant cargo big-rigs from Pakistan known as jingle trucks,
yellow DHL shipping vans, contractor vehicles, and mud-caked flatbeds.
If the Navy could figure out a way to bring a littoral-combat ship to a
landlocked country, it would idle on Disney.”
Serving 20,000 or more U.S. troops, and with the usual assortment of
Burger Kings and Popeyes, the place is nothing short of a U.S. town,
bustling in a way increasingly rare for actual American towns these
days, part of a planetary military deployment of a sort never before
seen in history. Yet, as various authors at this site have long noted,
the staggering size, scope, and strangeness of all this is seldom
considered, analyzed, or debated in the American mainstream. It’s a
given, like the sun rising in the east. And yet, what exactly is that
given? As Nick Turse, who has been following American basing plans for
this site over the years, points out, it’s not as easy to answer that
question as you might imagine. (To catch Timothy MacBain's latest
TomCast audio interview in which Turse discusses how to count up
America’s empire of bases, click here or, to download it to your iPod, here.) Tom
Empire of Bases 2.0: Does the Pentagon
Really Have 1,180 Foreign Bases?
Keeping Count
In a recent op-ed piece, New York Times
columnist Nicholas Kristof made a trenchant point: “The 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?”
For years, the late Chalmers Johnson, the man who literally wrote the book on the U.S. military’s empire of bases, The Sorrows of Empire,
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. Several years ago, after mining the Pentagon’s own
publicly-available documents, Johnson wrote, “[T]he United States
maintains 761 active military ‘sites’ in foreign countries. (That's the
Defense Department's preferred term, rather than ‘bases,’ although bases
are what they are.)”
Recently, the Pentagon updated its numbers on bases and other sites,
and they have dropped. Whether they’ve fallen to the level advanced by
Kristof, however, is a matter of interpretation. According to the
Department of Defense’s 2010 Base Structure Report, the U.S. military
now maintains 662 foreign sites in 38 countries around the world. Dig
into that report more deeply, though, and Grand Canyon-sized gaps begin
to emerge.
A Legacy of Bases
In 1955, 10 years after World War II ended, the Chicago Daily Tribune
published a major investigation of bases, including a map dotted with
little stars and triangles, most of them clustered in Europe and the
Pacific. “The American flag flies over more than 300 overseas
outposts,” wrote reporter Walter Trohan. “Camps and barracks and bases
cover 12 American possessions or territories held in trust. The foreign
bases are in 63 foreign nations or islands.”
Today, according to the Pentagon’s published figures, the American
flag flies over 750 U.S. military sites in foreign nations and U.S.
territories abroad. 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. In some cases, numerous bases of this type may be folded
together and counted as a single military installation in a given
country. A request for further clarification from the Department of
Defense went unanswered.
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 “linear structures” like runways,
rail lines, and pipelines. Add 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. And yet, it isn’t close to the full
story.
Losing Count
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
in Afghanistan, including camps, forward operating bases, and combat
outposts. He expected that number to increase by 12 or more, he added,
over the course of 2010.
In September, I contacted ISAF’s Joint Command Public Affairs Office to follow up. To my surprise, I was told that “there
are approximately 350 forward operating bases with two major military
installations, Bagram and Kandahar airfields.” 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.
“There are less than 10 NATO bases in Afghanistan,” he wrote in an
October 2010 email. “There are over 250 U.S. bases in Afghanistan.”
By then, it seemed, the U.S. had lost up to 150 bases and I was
thoroughly confused. When I contacted the military to sort out the
discrepancies and listed the numbers I had been given -- from Shanks’
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’s Public Affairs. “The number of bases in
Afghanistan is roughly 411,” Brown wrote in a November email, “which is a
figure comprised of large base[s], all the way down to the Combat Out
Post-level.” Even this, he cautioned, wasn’t actually a full list,
because “temporary positions occupied by platoon-sized elements or less”
were not counted.
Along the way to this “final” tally, I was offered a number of
explanations -- 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. 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’t keeping careful track of the number of bases in
Afghanistan. Apparently, the military simply does not know how many
bases it has in its primary theater of operations.
Black Sites in Baseworld
Scan the Department of Defense’s 2010 Base Structure Report for sites
in Afghanistan. Go ahead, read through all 206 pages. You won’t 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. This is hardly an insignificant omission. Add those 411
missing bases to Kristof’s total and you get 971 sites around the
world. Add it to the Pentagon’s official tally and you’re left with
1,073 bases and sites overseas, around 770 more than Walter Trohan
uncovered for his 1955 article. That number even tops the 1967 count of
1,014 U.S. bases abroad, which Chalmers Johnson considered “the Cold
War peak.”
There are, however, other ways
to tally the total. 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. Nicholas Kristof, who came up
with a count of 100 more than that, didn’t respond to an email for
clarification, but may have done the same analysis as I did: search the
Pentagon’s Base Structure Report and select out the obvious sites that,
while having a sizeable “footprint,” could only tenuously be counted as
bases, like dependent family housing complexes and schools, resort hotels (yes, the Department of Defense has them), ski areas (them, too) and the largest of their golf courses
-- 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. Add
to them the number of Afghan bases and you’re left with about 981
foreign military bases.
As it happens, though, Afghanistan isn’t the only country with a
baseworld black-out. Search the Pentagon’s tally for sites in Iraq and
you won’t find a single entry. (That was true even when the U.S.
reportedly had more than 400 bases
in that country.) Today, the U.S. military footprint there has shrunk
radically. 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, Contingency Operating Base Speicher, and Joint Base Balad, which, alone, boasts about 7,000 American troops. These missing bases would raise the worldwide total to about 1,069.
War zones aren’t the only secret spots. Take a close look at Middle Eastern nations whose governments, fearing domestic public opinion, prefer that no publicity be given to American military bases
on their territory, and then compare it to the Pentagon’s official
list. To give an example, the 2010 Base Structure Report lists one
nameless U.S. site in Kuwait. Yet we know that the Persian Gulf state
hosts a number of U.S. military facilities including Camp Arifjan, Camp Buering, Camp Virginia, Kuwait Naval Base, Ali Al Salem Air Base, and Udari Range. Add in these missing sites and the total number of bases abroad reaches 1,074.
Check the Pentagon’s base tally for Qatar and you’ll come up empty.
But look at the numbers of Department of Defense personnel serving
overseas and you’ll find more than 550 service men and women deployed
there. 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 for the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Add it in and the foreign base count reaches 1,075.
Saudi Arabia is also missing from the Pentagon’s tally, even though
the current list of personnel abroad indicates that hundreds of U.S.
troops are deployed there. 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.
Discounted, Uncounted, and Unknown
In addition to the unknown number of micro-bases that the Pentagon
doesn’t 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. For example, it is now well known that U.S. drone
aircraft, operating under the auspices of both the CIA and the Air Force and conducting a not-so-secret war in Pakistan, take off from one or more bases in that country.
Additionally, there are other sites like the “covert forward
operating base run by the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC)
in the Pakistani port city of Karachi,” exposed by Jeremy Scahill in the Nation magazine, and one or more airfields run by employees of the private security contractor Blackwater
(now renamed Xe Services). While the Department of Defense’s personnel
tally indicates that there are well over a hundred troops deployed in
Pakistan, it counts no bases there.
Similarly uncounted are the U.S. Navy’s carrier strike groups, flotillas that consist of massive aircraft carriers,
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. The U.S. boasts 11 such carriers,
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, travel “to any of more than 100 ports of call worldwide” from Hong Kong to Rio de Janeiro.
“The ability to conduct logistics functions afloat enables naval forces to maintain station anywhere,” reads the Navy’s Naval Operations Concept: 2010. So these bases that float under the radar should really be counted, too.
A Bang, A Whimper, and the Alamo of the Twenty-First Century
Speaking before the Senate Appropriations Committee’s Subcommittee on
Military Construction, Veterans, and Related Agencies early last year,
Deputy Under Secretary of Defense Dorothy Robyn referenced the
Pentagon’s "507 permanent installations." The Pentagon’s 2010 Base
Structure Report, on the other hand, lists 4,999 total sites in the
U.S., its territories, and overseas.
In the grand scheme of things, the actual numbers aren’t all that
important. Whether the most accurate total is 900 bases, 1,000 bases or
1,100 posts in foreign lands, what’s undeniable is that the U.S.
military maintains, in Chalmers Johnson’s 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.
All we know is that it raises the ire of adversaries like al Qaeda, has a tendency to grate on even the closest of allies like the Japanese,
and costs American taxpayers a fortune every year. In 2010, according
to Robyn, military construction and housing costs at all U.S. bases ran
to $23.2 billion. An additional $14.6 billion was needed for
maintenance, repair, and recapitalization. To power its facilities,
according to 2009 figures, the Pentagon spent $3.8 billion. And that
likely doesn’t even scratch the surface of America’s baseworld in terms
of its full economic cost.
Like all empires, the U.S. military’s empire of bases will someday
crumble. These bases, however, are not apt to fall like so many dominos
in some silver-screen last-stand sequence. They won’t, that is, go out
with the “bang” of futuristic Alamos, but with the “whimper” of
insolvency.
Last year, rumbling
began even among Washington lawmakers about this increasingly likely
prospect. “I 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,” said Massachusetts Democratic Congressman Barney
Frank. Similarly, Republican Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas
announced, “If 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.”
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.
The empire of bases, while still at or close to its height, is
destined to shrink. The military is going to have to scale back its
foreign footholds and lessen its global footprint in the years ahead.
Economic realities will necessitate that. The choices the Pentagon
makes today will likely determine on what terms its garrisons come home
tomorrow. At the moment, they can still choose whether coming home will
look like an act of magnanimous good statesmanship or inglorious
retreat.
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). 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.
Copyright 2011 Nick Turse
