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<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175338/tomgram:_nick_turse,_the_pentagon" eudora="autourl">
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<dd><font size=4>Empire of Bases </font><font size=3>2.0 <br>
<dd>Does the Pentagon Really Have 1,180 Foreign Bases? <br>
</b>
<dd>By <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/authors/nickturse">Nick
Turse</a><br><br>
<dd>The United States has 460 bases overseas! It has 507 permanent
bases! What is the U.S doing with more than 560 foreign
bases? Why does it have 662 bases abroad? Does the United
States really</i> have more than 1,000 military bases across the
globe?<br><br>
<dd>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. <br><br>
<dd><a name="more"></a>The man who wrote the definitive book on it didn’t
know for sure. The Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times</i>
columnist didn’t even come close. Yours truly has written numerous
articles on U.S. military bases and even
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0805089195/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20">
part of a book</a><a name="more"></a> on the subject, but failed like the
rest. <br>
<br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>Keeping Count<br><br>
</b>
<dd>In a recent
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/opinion/26kristof.html">op-ed
piece</a>, New York Times</i> 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?”<br><br>
<dd>For years, the late Chalmers Johnson, the man who literally wrote the
book on the U.S. military’s
<a href="http://motherjones.com/politics/2008/08/americas-unwelcome-advances">
empire of bases</a>,
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0805077979/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20">
The Sorrows of Empire</a></i>, 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.)”<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>A Legacy of Bases<br><br>
</b>
<dd>In 1955, 10 years after World War II ended, the Chicago Daily
Tribune</i> 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.”<br><br>
<dd>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. <br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>Losing Count<br><br>
</b>
<dd>Last January, Colonel Wayne Shanks, a spokesman for the U.S.-led
International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), told me that there were
<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175204/tomgram:_nick_turse,_america%27s_shadowy_base_world/">
nearly 400 U.S. and coalition bases</a> 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.<br>
<dd>In September, I contacted ISAF’s Joint Command Public Affairs Office
to follow up. To my surprise, I was told that “</b>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.”<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>Black Sites in Baseworld<br><br>
</b>
<dd>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.”<br><br>
<dd>There are, however,
<a href="http://www.kiplinger.com/columns/washington/archives/overseas-bases-in-budget-crosshairs.html">
other ways</a> 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,
<a href="http://www.edelweisslodgeandresort.com/afrc_worldwide.html">
resort hotels</a> (yes, the Department of Defense has them),
<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/1181/chalmers_johnson_empire_of_bases">
ski areas</a> (them, too) and the largest of their
<a href="http://www.alternet.org/economy/82009/">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. Add to
them the number of Afghan bases and you’re left with about 981 foreign
military bases.<br><br>
<dd>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
<a href="http://www.armytimes.com/news/2010/11/army-iraq-drawdown-75-percent-complete-111110w/">
more than 400 bases</a> 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,
<a href="http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/article/20101225/NEWS01/101224016/Troops-spend-holiday-far-from-home--family">
Camp Ramadi</a>,
<a href="http://www.blackanthem.com/News/Military_News_1/394th-CSSB-Soldiers-host-Children-s-Day-for-Iraqi-orphans23115.shtml">
Contingency Operating Base Speicher</a>, and
<a href="http://www.reuters.com/assets/print?aid=USTRE6BO0W720101226">
Joint Base Balad</a>, which, alone, boasts about 7,000 American
troops. These missing bases would raise the worldwide total to
about 1,069.<br><br>
<dd>War zones aren’t the only secret spots. Take a close look at
<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175321/tomgram%3A_nick_turse%2C_off-base_america__/">
Middle Eastern nations</a> whose governments, fearing domestic public
opinion, prefer that no publicity be given to American military
<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175159/tomgram:_nick_turse,_out_of_iraq,_into_the_gulf/">
bases</a> 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
<a href="http://www.army.mil/-news/2010/12/27/49894-chiarelli-visits-third-army-soldiers/index.html">
Camp Arifjan</a>,
<a href="http://www.army.mil/-news/2010/12/21/49745-new-central-issue-facility-opens-in-kuwait/">
Camp Buering</a>,
<a href="http://www.nationalguard.com/news/2010/feb/08/camp-virginia-commanded-contolled-by-960th-bsb">
Camp Virginia</a>,
<a href="http://voices.washingtonpost.com/hard-hits/2010/12/uso_trip_day_2.html">
Kuwait Naval Base</a>,
<a href="http://www.wgmd.com/?p=14568&cpage=1">Ali Al Salem Air
Base</a>, and
</b>
<a href="http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/2010/04/marine_sr21_042610w/">
Udari Range</a>. Add in these missing sites and the total number of
bases abroad reaches 1,074.<br><br>
<dd>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
<a href="http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2008/04/bomber-crash-si/">major
logistics and command hub</a> for the U.S. wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan. Add it in and the foreign base count reaches
1,075.<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>Discounted, Uncounted, and Unknown<br><br>
</b>
<dd>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
<a href="http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/12/us-military-joins-cias-drone-war-in-pakistan/">
both the CIA and the Air Force</a> and conducting a not-so-secret war in
Pakistan,
<a href="http://www.boston.com/news/world/asia/articles/2010/10/28/attacks_laid_to_us_drones_leave_seven_dead_in_pakistan/">
take off</a> from one or more bases in that country. <br><br>
<dd>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,”
<a href="http://www.thenation.com/article/secret-us-war-pakistan">
exposed</a> by Jeremy Scahill in the Nation</i> magazine, and one or more
airfields run by employees of the private security contractor
<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/11/blackwater-in-cia-pakistan-base">
Blackwater</a> (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.<br><br>
<dd>Similarly uncounted are the U.S. Navy’s
<a href="http://www.navy.mil/navydata/ships/carriers/powerhouse/cvbg.asp">
carrier strike groups</a>, flotillas that consist of massive
<a href="http://www.navy.mil/navydata/fact_display.asp?cid=4200&tid=200&ct=4">
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. The U.S.
boasts 11 such
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2007/01/13/weekinreview/20070114_MARSH_GRAPHIC.html">
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,
<a href="http://www.navy.com/navy/about/locations/ports.html">says the
Navy</a>, travel “to any of more than 100 ports of call worldwide” from
Hong Kong to Rio de Janeiro. <br><br>
<dd>“The ability to conduct logistics functions afloat enables naval
forces to maintain station anywhere,” reads the Navy’s Naval Operations
Concept: 2010</i>. So these bases that float under the radar should
really be counted, too.<br><br>
<dd>A Bang, A Whimper, and the Alamo of the Twenty-First Century<br><br>
</b>
<dd>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. <br><br>
<dd>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. <br><br>
<dd>All we know is that it raises the ire of adversaries
<a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/binladen/who/edicts.html">
like al Qaeda</a>, has a tendency to grate on even the
<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/1112/johnson_chalmers_three_rapes">
closest of allies</a> like
<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175214/tomgram:_john_feffer,_can_japan_say_no_to_washington/">
the Japanese</a>, 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.<br><br>
<dd>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. <br><br>
<dd>Last year,
<a href="http://www.stripes.com/news/overseas-military-spending-comes-under-congressional-scrutiny-1.111779">
rumbling</a> 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.”<br><br>
<dd>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. <br><br>
<dd>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. <br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>Nick Turse is an investigative journalist, the associate editor of
<a href="http://tomdispatch.com/">TomDispatch.com</a>, and currently a
fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute. His latest book is
</i>
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/1844674517/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20">
The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan</a> (Verso Books). You can
follow him on Twitter
</i><a href="http://twitter.com/NickTurse">@NickTurse</a>, on
</i><a href="http://nickturse.tumblr.com/">Tumblr</a>, and on
</i><a href="http://www.facebook.com/nick.turse">Facebook</a>. His
website is <a href="http://www.nickturse.com/">NickTurse.com</a>.
To catch Timothy MacBain's latest TomCast audio interview in which Turse
discusses how to count up America’s empire of bases,
<a href="http://tomdispatch.blogspot.com/2011/01/way-off-base.html">click
here</a> or, to download it to your iPod,
<a href="http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=j0SS4Al/iVI&subid=&offerid=146261.1&type=10&tmpid=5573&RD_PARM1=http%3A%2F%2Fitunes.apple.com%2Fus%2Fpodcast%2Ftomcast-from-tomdispatch-com%2Fid357095817">
here</a>.<br><br>
</i>
<dd>Copyright 2011 Nick Turse<br><br>
<br><br>
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