By Chalmers Johnson
TomDispatch
January 15, 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. This vast network
of American bases on every continent except Antarctica
actually constitutes a new form of empire -- an empire of
bases with its own geography not likely to be taught in any
high school geography class. Without grasping the dimensions
of this globe-girdling Baseworld, one can't begin to
understand the size and nature of our imperial aspirations or
the degree to which a new kind of militarism is undermining
our constitutional order.

Our military deploys well over half a million soldiers, spies,
technicians, teachers, dependents, and civilian contractors in
other nations. To dominate the oceans and seas of the world,
we are creating some thirteen naval task forces built around
aircraft carriers whose names sum up our martial heritage --
Kitty Hawk, Constellation, Enterprise, John F. Kennedy,
Nimitz, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Carl Vinson, Theodore Roosevelt,
Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, John C. Stennis, Harry S.
Truman, and Ronald Reagan. We operate numerous secret bases
outside our territory to monitor what the people of the world,
including our own citizens, are saying, faxing, or e-mailing
to one another.

Our installations abroad bring profits to civilian industries,
which design and manufacture weapons for the armed forces or,
like the now well-publicized Kellogg, Brown & Root company, a
subsidiary of the Halliburton Corporation of Houston,
undertake contract services to build and maintain our
far-flung outposts. One task of such contractors is to keep
uniformed members of the imperium housed in comfortable
quarters, well fed, amused, and supplied with enjoyable,
affordable vacation facilities. Whole sectors of the American
economy have come to rely on the military for sales. On the
eve of our second war on Iraq, for example, while the Defense
Department was ordering up an extra ration of cruise missiles
and depleted-uranium armor-piercing tank shells, it also
acquired 273,000 bottles of Native Tan sunblock, almost triple
its 1999 order and undoubtedly a boon to the supplier, Control
Supply Company of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and its subcontractor, Sun
Fun Products of Daytona Beach, Florida.

At Least Seven Hundred Foreign Bases

It's not easy to assess the size or exact value of our empire
of bases. Official records on these subjects are misleading,
although instructive. According to the Defense Department's
annual "Base Structure Report" for fiscal year 2003, which
itemizes foreign and domestic U.S. military real estate, the
Pentagon currently owns or rents 702 overseas bases in about
130 countries and HAS another 6,000 bases in the United States
and its territories. Pentagon bureaucrats calculate that it
would require at least $113.2 billion to replace just the
foreign bases -- surely far too low a figure but still larger
than the gross domestic product of most countries -- and an
estimated $591,519.8 million to replace all of them. The
military high command deploys to our overseas bases some
253,288 uniformed personnel, plus an equal number of
dependents and Department of Defense civilian officials, and
employs an additional 44,446 locally hired foreigners. The
Pentagon claims that these bases contain 44,870 barracks,
hangars, hospitals, and other buildings, which it owns, and
that it leases 4,844 more.

These numbers, although staggeringly large, do not begin to
cover all the actual bases we occupy globally. The 2003 Base
Status Report fails to mention, for instance, any garrisons in
Kosovo -- even though it is the site of the huge Camp
Bondsteel, built in 1999 and maintained ever since by Kellogg,
Brown & Root. The Report similarly omits bases in Afghanistan,
Iraq, Israel, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Qatar, and Uzbekistan,
although the U.S. military has established colossal base
structures throughout the so-called arc of instability in the
two-and-a-half years since 9/11.

For Okinawa, the southernmost island of Japan, which has been
an American military colony for the past 58 years, the report
deceptively lists only one Marine base, Camp Butler, when in
fact Okinawa "hosts" ten Marine Corps bases, including Marine
Corps Air Station Futenma occupying 1,186 acres in the center
of that modest-sized island's second largest city.

(Manhattan's Central Park, by contrast, is only 843 acres.)

The Pentagon similarly fails to note all of the

$5-billion-worth of military and espionage installations in
Britain, which have long been conveniently disguised as Royal
Air Force bases. If there were an honest count, the actual
size of our military empire would probably top 1,000 different
bases in other people's countries, but no one -- possibly not
even the Pentagon -- knows the exact number for sure, although
it has been distinctly on the rise in recent years.

For their occupants, these are not unpleasant places to live
and work. Military service today, which is voluntary, bears
almost no relation to the duties of a soldier during World War
II or the Korean or Vietnamese wars. Most chores like laundry,
KP ("kitchen police"), mail call, and cleaning latrines have
been subcontracted to private military companies like Kellogg,
Brown & Root, DynCorp, and the Vinnell Corporation. Fully
one-third of the funds recently appropriated for the war in
Iraq (about $30 billion), for instance, are going into private
American hands for exactly such services. Where possible
everything is done to make daily existence seem like a
Hollywood version of life at home. According to the Washington
Post, in Fallujah, just west of Baghdad, waiters in white
shirts, black pants, and black bow ties serve dinner to the
officers of the 82nd Airborne Division in their heavily
guarded compound, and the first Burger King has already gone
up inside the enormous military base we've established at
Baghdad International Airport.

Some of these bases are so gigantic they require as many as
nine internal bus routes for soldiers and civilian contractors
to get around inside the earthen berms and concertina wire.
That's the case at Camp Anaconda, headquarters of the 3rd
Brigade, 4th Infantry Division, whose job is to police some
1,500 square miles of Iraq north of Baghdad, from Samarra to
Taji. Anaconda occupies 25 square kilometers and will
ultimately house as many as 20,000 troops. Despite extensive
security precautions, the base has frequently come under
mortar attack, notably on the Fourth of July, 2003, just as
Arnold Schwarzenegger was chatting up our wounded at the local
field hospital.

The military prefers bases that resemble small fundamentalist
towns in the Bible Belt rather than the big population centers
of the United States. For example, even though more than
100,000 women live on our overseas bases -- including women in
the services, spouses, and relatives of military personnel --
obtaining an abortion at a local military hospital is
prohibited. Since there are some 14,000 sexual assaults or
attempted sexual assaults each year in the military, women who
become pregnant overseas and want an abortion have no choice
but to try the local economy, which cannot be either easy or
pleasant in Baghdad or other parts of our empire these days.
Our armed missionaries live in a closed-off, self-contained
world serviced by its own airline -- the Air Mobility Command,
with its fleet of long-range C-17 Globemasters, C-5 Galaxies,
C-141 Starlifters, KC-135 Stratotankers, KC-10 Extenders, and
C-9 Nightingales that link our far-flung outposts from
Greenland to Australia. For generals and admirals, the
military provides seventy-one Learjets, thirteen Gulfstream
IIIs, and seventeen Cessna Citation luxury jets to fly them to
such spots as the armed forces' ski and vacation center at
Garmisch in the Bavarian Alps or to any of the 234 military
golf courses the Pentagon operates worldwide. Defense
secretary Donald Rumsfeld flies around in his own personal
Boeing 757, called a C-32A in the Air Force.

Our "Footprint" on the World

Of all the insensitive, if graphic, metaphors we've allowed
into our vocabulary, none quite equals "footprint" to describe
the military impact of our empire. Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard Myers and senior members of the
Senate's Military Construction Subcommittee such as Dianne
Feinstein (D-CA) are apparently incapable of completing a
sentence without using it. Establishing a more impressive
footprint has now become part of the new justification for a
major enlargement of our empire -- and an announced
repositioning of our bases and forces abroad -- in the wake of
our conquest of Iraq. The man in charge of this project is
Andy Hoehn, deputy assistant secretary of defense for
strategy. He and his colleagues are supposed to draw up plans
to implement President Bush's preventive war strategy against
"rogue states," "bad guys," and "evil-doers." They have
identified something they call the "arc of instability," which
is said to run from the Andean region of South America (read:
Colombia) through North Africa and then sweeps across the
Middle East to the Philippines and Indonesia. This is, of
course, more or less identical with what used to be called the
Third World -- and perhaps no less crucially it covers the
world's key oil reserves. Hoehn contends, "When you overlay
our footprint onto that, we don't look particularly
well-positioned to deal with the problems we're now going to
confront."

Once upon a time, you could trace the spread of imperialism by
counting up colonies. America's version of the colony is the
military base. By following the changing politics of global
basing, one can learn much about our ever larger imperial
stance and the militarism that grows with it. Militarism and
imperialism are Siamese twins joined at the hip. Each thrives
off the other. Already highly advanced in our country, they
are both on the verge of a quantum leap that will almost
surely stretch our military beyond its capabilities, bringing
about fiscal insolvency and very possibly doing mortal damage
to our republican institutions. The only way this is discussed
in our press is via reportage on highly arcane plans for
changes in basing policy and the positioning of troops abroad
-- and these plans, as reported in the media, cannot be taken
at face value.

Marine Brig. Gen. Mastin Robeson, commanding our 1,800 troops
occupying the old French Foreign Legion base at Camp Lemonier
in Djibouti at the entrance to the Red Sea, claims that in
order to put "preventive war" into action, we require a
"global presence," by which he means gaining hegemony over any
place that is not already under our thumb. According to the
right-wing American Enterprise Institute, the idea is to
create "a global cavalry" that can ride in from "frontier
stockades" and shoot up the "bad guys" as soon as we get some
intelligence on them.

"Lily Pads" in Australia, Romania, Mali, Algeria . . .
In order to put our forces close to every hot spot or danger
area in this newly discovered arc of instability, the Pentagon
has been proposing -- this is usually called "repositioning"
-- many new bases, including at least four and perhaps as many
as six permanent ones in Iraq. A number of these are already
under construction -- at Baghdad International Airport, Tallil
air base near Nasariyah, in the western desert near the Syrian
border, and at Bashur air field in the Kurdish region of the
north. (This does not count the previously mentioned Anaconda,
which is currently being called an "operating base," though it
may very well become permanent over time.) In addition, we
plan to keep under our control the whole northern quarter of
Kuwait -- 1,600 square miles out of Kuwait's 6,900 square
miles -- that we now use to resupply our Iraq legions and as a
place for Green Zone bureaucrats to relax.

Other countries mentioned as sites for what Colin Powell calls
our new "family of bases" include: In the impoverished areas
of the "new" Europe -- Romania, Poland, and Bulgaria; in Asia
-- Pakistan (where we already have four bases), India,
Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, and even,
unbelievably, Vietnam; in North Africa -- Morocco, Tunisia,
and especially Algeria (scene of the slaughter of some 100,00
civilians since 1992, when, to quash an election, the military
took over, backed by our country and France); and in West
Africa -- Senegal, Ghana, Mali, and Sierra Leone (even though
it has been torn by civil war since 1991). The models for all
these new installations, according to Pentagon sources, are
the string of bases we have built around the Persian Gulf in
the last two decades in such anti-democratic autocracies as
Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates.
Most of these new bases will be what the military, in a switch
of metaphors, calls "lily pads" to which our troops could jump
like so many well-armed frogs from the homeland, our remaining
NATO bases, or bases in the docile satellites of Japan and
Britain. To offset the expense involved in such expansion, the
Pentagon leaks plans to close many of the huge Cold War
military reservations in Germany, South Korea, and perhaps
Okinawa as part of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld's
"rationalization" of our armed forces. In the wake of the Iraq
victory, the U.S. has already withdrawn virtually all of its
forces from Saudi Arabia and Turkey, partially as a way of
punishing them for not supporting the war strongly enough. It
wants to do the same thing to South Korea, perhaps the most
anti-American democracy on Earth today, which would free up
the 2nd Infantry Division on the demilitarized zone with North
Korea for probable deployment to Iraq, where our forces are
significantly overstretched.

In Europe, these plans include giving up several bases in
Germany, also in part because of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's
domestically popular defiance of Bush over Iraq. But the
degree to which we are capable of doing so may prove limited
indeed. At the simplest level, the Pentagon's planners do not
really seem to grasp just how many buildings the 71,702
soldiers and airmen in Germany alone occupy and how expensive
it would be to reposition most of them and build even slightly
comparable bases, together with the necessary infrastructure,
in former Communist countries like Romania, one of Europe's
poorest countries. Lt. Col. Amy Ehmann in Hanau, Germany, has
said to the press "There's no place to put these people" in
Romania, Bulgaria, or Djibouti, and she predicts that 80% of
them will in the end stay in Germany. It's also certain that
generals of the high command have no intention of living in
backwaters like Constanta, Romania, and will keep the U.S.
military headquarters in Stuttgart while holding on to
Ramstein Air Force Base, Spangdahlem Air Force Base, and the
Grafenwöhr Training Area.

One reason why the Pentagon is considering moving out of rich
democracies like Germany and South Korea and looks covetously
at military dictatorships and poverty-stricken dependencies is
to take advantage of what the Pentagon calls their "more
permissive environmental regulations." The Pentagon always
imposes on countries in which it deploys our forces so-called
Status of Forces Agreements, which usually exempt the United
States from cleaning up or paying for the environmental damage
it causes. This is a standing grievance in Okinawa, where the
American environmental record has been nothing short of
abominable. Part of this attitude is simply the desire of the
Pentagon to put itself beyond any of the restraints that
govern civilian life, an attitude increasingly at play in the
"homeland" as well. For example, the 2004 defense
authorization bill of $401.3 billion that President Bush
signed into law in November 2003 exempts the military from
abiding by the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal
Protection Act.

While there is every reason to believe that the impulse to
create ever more lily pads in the Third World remains
unchecked, there are several reasons to doubt that some of the
more grandiose plans, for either expansion or downsizing, will
ever be put into effect or, if they are, that they will do
anything other than make the problem of terrorism worse than
it is. For one thing, Russia is opposed to the expansion of
U.S. military power on its borders and is already moving to
checkmate American basing sorties into places like Georgia,
Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan. The first post-Soviet-era Russian
airbase in Kyrgyzstan has just been completed forty miles from
the U.S. base at Bishkek, and in December 2003, the dictator
of Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov, declared that he would not
permit a permanent deployment of U.S. forces in his country
even though we already have a base there.

When it comes to downsizing, on the other hand, domestic
politics may come into play. By law the Pentagon's Base
Realignment and Closing Commission must submit its fifth and
final list of domestic bases to be shut down to the White
House by September 8, 2005. As an efficiency measure,
Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld has said he'd like to be rid of
at least one-third of domestic Army bases and one-quarter of
domestic Air Force bases, which is sure to produce a political
firestorm on Capitol Hill. In order to protect their
respective states' bases, the two mother hens of the Senate's
Military Construction Appropriations Subcommittee, Kay Bailey
Hutchison (R-TX) and Dianne Feinstein, are demanding that the
Pentagon close overseas bases first and bring the troops now
stationed there home to domestic bases, which could then
remain open. Hutchison and Feinstein included in the Military
Appropriations Act of 2004 money for an independent commission
to investigate and report on overseas bases that are no longer
needed. The Bush administration opposed this provision of the
Act but it passed anyway and the president signed it into law
on November 22, 2003. The Pentagon is probably adept enough to
hamstring the commission, but a domestic base-closing furor
clearly looms on the horizon.

By far the greatest defect in the "global cavalry" strategy,
however, is that it accentuates Washington's impulse to apply
irrelevant military remedies to terrorism. As the prominent
British military historian, Correlli Barnett, has observed,
the U.S. attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq only increased the
threat of al-Qaeda. From 1993 through the 9/11 assaults of
2001, there were five major al-Qaeda attacks worldwide; in the
two years since then there have been seventeen such bombings,
including the Istanbul suicide assaults on the British
consulate and an HSBC Bank. Military operations against
terrorists are not the solution. As Barnett puts it, "Rather
than kicking down front doors and barging into ancient and
complex societies with simple nostrums of 'freedom and
democracy,' we need tactics of cunning and subtlety, based on
a profound understanding of the people and cultures we are
dealing with -- an understanding up till now entirely lacking
in the top-level policy-makers in Washington, especially in
the Pentagon."

In his notorious "long, hard slog" memo on Iraq of October 16,
2003, Defense secretary Rumsfeld wrote, "Today, we lack
metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on
terror." Correlli-Barnett's "metrics" indicate otherwise. But
the "war on terrorism" is at best only a small part of the
reason for all our military strategizing. The real reason for
constructing this new ring of American bases along the equator
is to expand our empire and reinforce our military domination
of the world.

Chalmers Johnson's latest book is ' The Sorrows of Empire:
Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic'
(Metropolitan). His previous book, 'Blowback: The Costs and
Consequences of American Empire,' has just been updated with a
new introduction.