Volume 1 | Issue 5 | Article ID 2029 | May 23, 2003 The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus America's Empire of Bases Chalmers Johnson America's Empire of Bases weapons for the armed forces or, like the now well-publicized Kellogg, Brown & Root by Chalmers Johnson company, a subsidiary of the Halliburton Corporation of Houston, undertake contract As distinct from other peoples, most Americans services to build and maintain our far-flung do not recognize -- or do not want to recognize outposts. One task of such contractors is to -- that the United States dominates the world keep uniformed members of the imperium through its military power. Due to government housed in comfortable quarters, well fed, secrecy, our citizens are often ignorant of the amused, and supplied with enjoyable, fact that our garrisons encircle the planet. This affordable vacation facilities. Whole sectors of vast network of American bases on every the American economy have come to rely on continent except Antarctica actually constitutes the military for sales. On the eve of our second a new form of empire -- an empire of bases with war on Iraq, for example, while the Defense its own geography not likely to be taught in any Department was ordering up an extra ration of high school geography class. Without grasping cruise missiles and depleted-uranium armor- the dimensions of this globe-girdlingpiercing tank shells, it also acquired 273,000 Baseworld, one can't begin to understand the bottles of Native Tan sunblock, almost triple its size and nature of our imperial aspirations or 1999 order and undoubtedly a boon to the the degree to which a new kind of militarism is supplier, Control Supply Company of Tulsa, undermining our constitutional order. Oklahoma, and its subcontractor, Sun Fun Products of Daytona Beach, Florida. Our military deploys well over half a million soldiers, spies, technicians, teachers,At Least Seven Hundred Foreign Bases dependents, and civilian contractors in other nations. To dominate the oceans and seas of It's not easy to assess the size or exact value of the world, we are creating some thirteen naval our empire of bases. Official records on these task forces built around aircraft carriers whose subjects are misleading, although instructive. names sum up our martial heritage -- Kitty According to the Defense Department's annual Hawk, Constellation, Enterprise, John F. "Base Structure Report" for fiscal year 2003, Kennedy, Nimitz, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Carl which itemizes foreign and domestic U.S. Vinson, Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, military real estate, the Pentagon currently George Washington, John C. Stennis, Harry S. owns or rents 702 overseas bases in about 130 Truman, and Ronald Reagan. We operate countries and HAS another 6,000 bases in the numerous secret bases outside our territory to United States and its territories. Pentagon monitor what the people of the world, including bureaucrats calculate that it would require at our own citizens, are saying, faxing, or e- least $113.2 billion to replace just the foreign mailing to one another. bases -- surely far too low a figure but still larger than the gross domestic product of most Our installations abroad bring profits to civilian countries -- and an estimated $591,519.8 industries, which design and manufacture million to replace all of them. The military high 1 1 | 5 | 0 APJ | JF command deploys to our overseas bases some which is voluntary, bears almost no relation to 253,288 uniformed personnel, plus an equal the duties of a soldier during World War II or number of dependents and Department of the Korean or Vietnamese wars. Most chores Defense civilian officials, and employs an like laundry, KP ("kitchen police"), mail call, additional 44,446 locally hired foreigners. The and cleaning latrines have been subcontracted Pentagon claims that these bases contain to private military companies like Kellogg, 44,870 barracks, hangars, hospitals, and other Brown & Root, DynCorp, and the Vinnell buildings, which it owns, and that it leases Corporation. Fully one-third of the funds 4,844 more. recently appropriated for the war in Iraq (about $30 billion), for instance, are going into private These numbers, although staggeringly large, do American hands for exactly such services. not begin to cover all the actual bases we Where possible everything is done to make occupy globally. The 2003 Base Status Report daily existence seem like a Hollywood version fails to mention, for instance, any garrisons in of life at home. According to the Washington Kosovo -- even though it is the site of the huge Post, in Fallujah, just west of Baghdad, waiters Camp Bondsteel, built in 1999 and maintained in white shirts, black pants, and black bow ties ever since by Kellogg, Brown & Root. The serve dinner to the officers of the 82nd Report similarly omits bases in Afghanistan, Airborne Division in their heavily guarded Iraq, Israel, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Qatar, and compound, and the first Burger King has Uzbekistan, although the U.S. military has already gone up inside the enormous military established colossal base structures throughout base we've established at Baghdad the so-called arc of instability in the two-and-a- International Airport. half years since 9/11. Some of these bases are so gigantic they For Okinawa, the southernmost island of Japan, require as many as nine internal bus routes for which has been an American military colony for soldiers and civilian contractors to get around the past 58 years, the report deceptively lists inside the earthen berms and concertina wire. only one Marine base, Camp Butler, when in That's the case at Camp Anaconda, fact Okinawa "hosts" ten Marine Corps bases, headquarters of the 3rd Brigade, 4th Infantry including Marine Corps Air Station Futenma Division, whose job is to police some 1,500 occupying 1,186 acres in the center of that square miles of Iraq north of Baghdad, from modest-sized island's second largest city. Samarra to Taji. Anaconda occupies 25 square (Manhattan's Central Park, by contrast, is only kilometers and will ultimately house as many as 843 acres.) The Pentagon similarly fails to note 20,000 troops. Despite extensive security all of the $5-billion-worth of military and precautions, the base has frequently come espionage installations in Britain, which have under mortar attack, notably on the Fourth of long been conveniently disguised as Royal Air July, 2003, just as Arnold Schwarzenegger was Force bases. If there were an honest count, the chatting up our wounded at the local field actual size of our military empire would hospital. probably top 1,000 different bases in other people's countries, but no one -- possibly not The military prefers bases that resemble small even the Pentagon -- knows the exact number fundamentalist towns in the Bible Belt rather for sure, although it has been distinctly on the than the big population centers of the United rise in recent years. States. For example, even though more than 100,000 women live on our overseas bases -- For their occupants, these are not unpleasant including women in the services, spouses, and places to live and work. Military service today, relatives of military personnel -- obtaining an 2 1 | 5 | 0 APJ | JF abortion at a local military hospital isstrategy against "rogue states," "bad guys," and prohibited. Since there are some 14,000 sexual "evil-doers." They have identified something assaults or attempted sexual assaults each year they call the "arc of instability," which is said to in the military, women who become pregnant run from the Andean region of South America overseas and want an abortion have no choice (read: Colombia) through North Africa and then but to try the local economy, which cannot be sweeps across the Middle East to the either easy or pleasant in Baghdad or other Philippines and Indonesia. This is, of course, parts of our empire these days. more or less identical with what used to be called the Third World -- and perhaps no less Our armed missionaries live in a closed-off, crucially it covers the world's key oil reserves. self-contained world serviced by its own airline Hoehn contends, "When you overlay our -- the Air Mobility Command, with its fleet of footprint onto that, we don't look particularly long-range C-17 Globemasters, C-5 Galaxies, well-positioned to deal with the problems we're C-141 Starlifters, KC-135 Stratotankers, KC-10 now going to confront." Extenders, and C-9 Nightingales that link our far-flung outposts from Greenland to Australia. Once upon a time, you could trace the spread For generals and admirals, the militaryof imperialism by counting up colonies. provides seventy-one Learjets, thirteenAmerica's version of the colony is the military Gulfstream IIIs, and seventeen Cessna Citation base. By following the changing politics of luxury jets to fly them to such spots as the global basing, one can learn much about our armed forces' ski and vacation center at ever larger imperial stance and the militarism Garmisch in the Bavarian Alps or to any of the that grows with it. Militarism and imperialism 234 military golf courses the Pentagon operates are Siamese twins joined at the hip. Each worldwide. Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld thrives off the other. Already highly advanced flies around in his own personal Boeing 757, in our country, they are both on the verge of a called a C-32A in the Air Force. quantum leap that will almost surely stretch our military beyond its capabilities, bringing Our "Footprint" on the World about fiscal insolvency and very possibly doing mortal damage to our republican institutions. Of all the insensitive, if graphic, metaphors The only way this is discussed in our press is we've allowed into our vocabulary, none quite via reportage on highly arcane plans for equals "footprint" to describe the military changes in basing policy and the positioning of impact of our empire.