As TomDispatch’s Nick
Turse reminds us today, the United States remains an imperial military presence
unlike any other -- not just in this moment but in the history of empire. Never
has a single country had so many military bases on so many parts of Planet
Earth. Consider that a striking fact of 2019, as it was, say, of the 1950s or
the post-Cold-War 1990s. How many such bases? As Turse makes clear, no one
really knows, possibly not even the Pentagon. And more curious yet, that vast
global infrastructure, that “empire of bases” (in Chalmers Johnson’s eloquent phrase), is
hardly noticed in what, since 9/11, has been known as “the homeland.” Few here
think much about those global garrisons (although hundreds of thousands of
Americans have in recent years been deployed to them); the media that cover
every presidential tweet as if it were a missive from the emperor almost never
mention them, much less report on them; and no one -- Turse and a few scholars aside -- seems to have the
slightest interest in counting them up, much less considering their cost or
even the global role they’ve been playing all these years. In domestic terms,
they are essentially missing in action, which means a vision of how the United
States has positioned itself on this planet is missing in action as well.
With that in
mind, let’s acknowledge something else in this strange moment of ours: while
that massive (and massively expensive) base structure remains firmly in place,
American imperial power is increasingly another matter. It should be clear
enough by now that, despite The Donald’s recent dark-of-night selfie drop-in on American troops at
al-Assad Air Base in Iraq -- as CNN put it, “the dicey security
situation still restrict[ed] Trump to a clandestine visit more than 15 years
after the American invasion” -- he seems to be almost singlehandedly launching
the process by which the American imperial system, built up over the last
three-quarters of a century, could be dismantled. The Syrian withdrawal and
possible Afghan drawdown of
troops may just be straws in the wind -- but one day, what a wind that could
turn out to be!
It’s obvious
that the man who ran as the first declinist candidate for
president, the only one willing to acknowledge in 2016 that America was no
longer quite so “great,” seems intent, however blindly, on beginning that
dismantling process. He clearly has an urge to tear down international
institutions and dismiss the network of subservient allies Washington had
carefully built up for decades to bolster its global power.
Still, don’t
label him the dismantler-in-chief quite yet. In the end, Donald Trump may indeed
prove to be the American equivalent of one of the mad emperors that helped take
down the Roman empire -- a Queens-born Caligula.
For the time being, however, think of him instead as an envoy for and a message
from the unknown gods of the twenty-first century, a symptom of a process that
has been going on just out of sight for years. After all, he bears no
responsibility for the fact that the self-proclaimed greatest
military power ever, in fighting post-9/11 wars without end, has found itself,
despite that empire of bases, ever less able to impose its will militarily or
otherwise on increasingly large parts of the planet. Tom
The U.S.
military is finally withdrawing (or not) from its base at
al-Tanf. You know, the place that the Syrian government long
claimed was a training ground for Islamic State (ISIS)
fighters; the land corridor just inside Syria, near both the Iraqi and
Jordanian borders, that Russia has
called a terrorist hotbed (while
floating the idea of jointly administering it
with the United States); the location of a camp where hundreds of U.S.
Marines joined Special Operations forces last year; an outpost that U.S.
officials claimed was the key
not only to defeating ISIS, but
also, according to General Joseph Votel, the commander of U.S. forces in the
Middle East, to countering “the malign activities that Iran and their various
proxies and surrogates would like to pursue.” You know, that al-Tanf.
Within
hours of President Trump’s announcement of a withdrawal of U.S. forces from
Syria, equipment at that base was already being inventoried for removal. And
just like that, arguably the most important American garrison in Syria was (maybe) being struck from
the Pentagon’s books -- except, as it happens, al-Tanf was never actually on
the Pentagon’s books. Opened in 2015and, until
recently, home to hundreds of U.S. troops, it was one of the many military
bases that exist somewhere between light and shadow, an acknowledged foreign
outpost that somehow never actually made it onto the Pentagon’s official
inventory of bases.
Officially,
the Department of Defense (DoD) maintains 4,775 “sites,” spread across all 50
states, eight U.S. territories, and 45 foreign countries. A total of 514 of
these outposts are located overseas, according to the Pentagon’s worldwide property portfolio.
Just to start down a long list, these include bases on the Indian Ocean island
of Diego Garcia, in Djibouti on the Horn of Africa, as well as in Peru and
Portugal, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom. But the most recent
version of that portfolio, issued in early 2018 and known as the Base Structure
Report (BSR), doesn’t include any mention of al-Tanf. Or, for that matter, any
other base in Syria. Or Iraq. Or Afghanistan. Or Niger. Or Tunisia. Or
Cameroon. Or Somalia. Or any number of locales where such military outposts are
known to exist and even, unlike in Syria, to be expanding.
According to David Vine, author of Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World,
there could be hundreds of similar off-the-books bases around the world. “The
missing sites are a reflection of the lack of transparency involved in the
system of what I still estimate to be around 800 U.S. bases outside the 50
states and Washington, D.C., that have been encircling the globe since World
War II,” says Vine, who is also a founding member of the recently
established Overseas Base Realignment and Closure Coalition,
a group of military analysts from across the ideological spectrum who advocate
shrinking the U.S. military’s global “footprint.”
Such
off-the-books bases are off the books for a reason. The Pentagon doesn’t want
to talk about them. “I spoke to the press officer who is responsible for the
Base Structure Report and she has nothing to add and no one available to
discuss further at this time,” Pentagon spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel
Michelle Baldanza told TomDispatch when asked about the
Defense Department’s many mystery bases.
“Undocumented
bases are immune to oversight by the public and often even Congress,” Vine
explains. “Bases are a physical manifestation of U.S. foreign and military
policy, so off-the-books bases mean the military and executive branch are
deciding such policy without public debate, frequently spending hundreds of
millions or billions of dollars and potentially getting the U.S. involved in
wars and conflicts about which most of the country knows nothing.”
Where
Are They?
The
Overseas Base Realignment and Closure Coalition notes that the United States possesses
up to 95% of the world’s foreign military bases, while countries like France,
Russia, and the United Kingdom have perhaps 10-20 foreign outposts each. China
has just one.
The
Department of Defense even boasts that its
“locations” include 164 countries. Put another way, it has a military presence
of some sort in approximately 84% of the nations on this planet -- or at
least the DoD briefly claimed this. After TomDispatch inquired
about the number on a new webpage designed to tell the Pentagon’s “story” to
the general public, it was quickly changed. “We appreciate your diligence in
getting to the bottom of this,” said Lieutenant Colonel Baldanza. “Thanks to
your observations, we have updated defense.gov to say ‘more than 160.’”
The progressive changes made to the Defense Department’s "Our Story" webpage as a result of questions from TomDispatch.
What the
Pentagon still doesn’t say is how it defines a “location.” The number 164 does
roughly track with the Department of Defense’s current manpower statistics,
which show personnel deployments of varying sizes in 166 “overseas” locales --
including some nations with token numbers of U.S. military personnel and
others, like Iraq and Syria, where the size of the force was obviously far
larger, even if unlisted at the time of the assessment. (The Pentagon recently
claimed that there were 5,200 troops in Iraq and at least 2,000 troops in Syria
although that number should now markedly shrink.) The
Defense Department’s “overseas” tally, however, also lists troops in U.S.
territories like American Samoa, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Wake
Island. Dozens of soldiers, according to the Pentagon, are also deployed to the
country of “Akrotiri” (which is actually a village on the island of Santorini in Greece) and thousands more
are based in “unknown” locations.
In the
latest report, the number of those “unknown” troops exceeds 44,000.
Official Defense Department manpower statistics show U.S. forces deployed to the nation of "Akrotiri."
The annual
cost of deploying U.S. military personnel overseas, as well as maintaining and
running those foreign bases, tops out at an estimated $150 billion annually,
according to the Overseas Bases Realignment and Closure Coalition. The price
tag for the outposts alone adds up to about one-third of that total. “U.S.
bases abroad cost upwards of $50 billion per year to build and maintain, which
is money that could be used to address pressing needs at home in education,
health care, housing, and infrastructure,” Vine points out.
Perhaps
you won’t be surprised to learn that the Pentagon is also somewhat fuzzy about
just where its troops are stationed. The new Defense Department website, for
instance, offered a count of “4,800+ defense sites”
around the world. After TomDispatch inquired about this
total and how it related to the official count of 4,775 sites listed in the
BSR, the website was changed to read “approximately 4,800 Defense Sites.”
“Thank you
for pointing out the discrepancy. As we transition to the new site, we are
working on updating information,” wrote Lieutenant Colonel Baldanza. “Please
refer to the Base Structure Report which has the latest numbers.”
In the
most literal sense, the Base Structure Report does indeed have the latest
numbers -- but their accuracy is another matter. “The number of bases listed in
the BSR has long born little relation to the actual number of U.S. bases
outside the United States,” says Vine. “Many, many well-known and secretive
bases have long been left off the list.”
One prime
example is the constellation of outposts that the U.S.
has built across Africa. The official BSR inventory lists only a handful of
sites there -- on Ascension Island as well as in Djibouti, Egypt, and Kenya. In
reality, though, there are many more outposts in many more African countries.
A recent investigation by
the Intercept, based on documents obtained from U.S. Africa
Command (AFRICOM) via the Freedom of Information Act, revealed a network of 34
bases heavily clustered in the north and west of that continent as well as in
the Horn of Africa. AFRICOM’s “strategic posture” consists of larger “enduring”
outposts, including two forward operating sites (FOSes), 12 cooperative
security locations (CSLs), and 20 more austere sites known as contingency
locations (CLs).
The
Pentagon’s official inventory does include the two FOSes: Ascension Island and
the crown jewel of Washington’s African bases, Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti,
which expanded from 88
acres in the early 2000s to nearly 600 acres today. The Base Structure Report
is, however, missing a CSL in that same country, Chabelley Airfield, a
lower-profile outpost located about 10 kilometers away that has served as a
drone hub for operations in Africa and the Middle East.
The
official Pentagon tally also mentions a site that goes by the confusing moniker
of “NSA Bahrain-Kenya.” AFRICOM had previously described it as a collection of
warehouses built in the 1980s at the airport and seaport of Mombasa, Kenya, but
it now appears on that command’s 2018 list as a CSL. Missing, however, is
another Kenyan base, Camp Simba, mentioned in
a 2013 internal Pentagon study of secret drone operations in Somalia and Yemen.
At least two manned surveillance aircraft were based there at the time. Simba,
a longtime Navy-run facility, is
currently operated by the Air Force’s 475th Expeditionary Air Base
Squadron, part of the 435th Air Expeditionary Wing.
Personnel
from that same air wing can be found at yet another outpost that doesn’t appear
in the Base Structure Report, this one on the opposite side of the continent.
The BSR states that it doesn’t list specific information on “non-U.S.
locations” not at least 10 acres in size or worth at least $10 million.
However, the base in question -- Air Base 201 in
Agadez, Niger -- already has a $100 million construction
price tag, a sum soon to be eclipsed by the cost of operating the facility:
about $30 million a year. By 2024, when the present 10-year agreement for use
of the base ends, its construction and operating costs will have reached about
$280 million.
Also
missing from the BSR are outposts in nearby Cameroon, including a longtime base
in Douala, a drone airfield
in the remote town of Garoua, and a facility
known as Salak. That site, according to a 2017 investigation by
theIntercept, the research firm Forensic Architecture, and Amnesty International,
has been used by U.S. personnel and private contractors for drone surveillance
and training missions and by allied Cameroonian forces for illegal imprisonment
and torture.
According
to Vine, keeping America’s African bases secret is advantageous to Washington.
It protects allies on that continent from possible domestic opposition to the
presence of American troops, he points out, while helping to ensure that there
will be no domestic debate in the U.S. over such spending and the military
commitments involved. “It’s important for U.S. citizens to know where their
troops are based in Africa and elsewhere around the world,” he told TomDispatch,
“because that troop presence costs the U.S. billions of dollars every year and
because the U.S. is involved, or potentially involved, in wars and conflicts
that could spiral out of control.”
Those
Missing Bases
Africa is
hardly the only place where the Pentagon’s official list doesn’t match up well
with reality. For close to two decades, the Base Structure Report has ignored
bases of all sorts in America’s active war zones. At the height of the American
occupation of Iraq, for instance, the United States had 505 bases there,
ranging from small outposts to mega-sized facilities. None appeared on the
Pentagon’s official rolls.
In
Afghanistan, the numbers were even higher. As TomDispatch reported
in 2012, the U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) had
about 550 bases in that country. If you had
added ISAF checkpoints -- small baselets used to secure roads and villages --
to the count of mega-bases, forward operating bases, combat outposts, and
patrol bases, the number reached an astounding 750. And counting all foreign
military installations of every type -- including logistical, administrative,
and support facilities -- hiked ISAF Joint Command’s official count to 1,500 sites. America’s significant share of
them was, however, also mysteriously absent from the Defense Department’s
official tally.
There are
now far fewer such facilities in Afghanistan -- and the numbers may drop
further in the months ahead as troop levels decrease.
But the existence of Camp Morehead, Forward Operating Base Fenty, Tarin Kowt Airfield, Camp Dahlke West,
and Bost Airfield, as well
as Camp Shorab, a small
installation occupying what was once the site of much larger twin bases known
as Camp Leatherneck and Camp Bastion, is indisputable. Yet none of them has
ever appeared in the Base Structure Report.
Similarly,
while there are no longer 500-plus U.S. bases in Iraq, in recent years, as
American troops returned to that country, some garrisons have either been
reconstituted or built from scratch. These include the Besmaya Range Complex, Firebase Sakheem, Firebase Um Jorais, and
Al Asad Air Base, as well as Qayyarah Airfield West --
a base 40 miles south of Mosul that’s better known as “Q-West.” Again,
you won’t find any of them listed in the Pentagon’s official count.
These
days, it’s even difficult to obtain accurate manpower numbers for the military
personnel in America’s war zones, let alone the number of bases in each of
them. As Vine explains, “The military keeps the figures secret to some extent
to hide the base presence from its adversaries. Because it is probably not hard
to spot these bases in places like Syria and Iraq, however, the secrecy is
mostly to prevent domestic debate about the money, danger, and death involved,
as well as to avoid diplomatic tensions and international inquiries.”
If stifling
domestic debate through information control is the Pentagon’s aim, it’s been
doing a fine job for years of deflecting questions about its global posture, or
what the late TomDispatch regular Chalmers Johnson called
America’s “empire of bases.”
In
mid-October, TomDispatch asked Heather Babb, another Pentagon
spokesperson, for details about the outposts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria
that were absent from the Base Structure Report, as well as about those missing
African bases. Among the other questions put to Babb: Could the Pentagon offer
a simple count -- if not a list -- of all its outposts? Did it have a true
count of overseas facilities, even if it hadn’t been released to the public --
a list, that is, which actually did what the Base Structure Report only
purports to do? October and November passed without answers.
In
December, in response to follow-up requests for information, Babb responded in
a fashion firmly in line with the Pentagon’s well-worn policy of keeping
American taxpayers in the dark about the bases they pay for -- no matter the
theoretical difficulty of denying the existence of outposts that stretch from
Agadez in Niger to Mosul in Iraq. “I have nothing to add,” she explained, “to
the information and criteria that is included in the report.”
President
Trump’s decision to withdraw American troops from Syria means that the 2019
Base Structure Report will likely be the most accurate in years. For the first
time since 2015, the Pentagon’s inventory of outposts will no longer be missing
the al-Tanf garrison (or then again, maybe it will). But
that still potentially leaves hundreds of off-the-books bases absent from the
official rolls. Consider it one outpost down and who knows how many to go.
Nick
Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch and
a contributing writer for the Intercept. His latest book
is Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in
South Sudan. His website is NickTurse.com.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and
join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books,
John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in
the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly
Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and
Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War,
as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American
Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John
Dower's The Violent American Century: War
and Terror Since World War II.
Copyright
2019 Nick Turse
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176513/tomgram%3A_nick_turse%2C_one_down%2C_who_knows_how_many_to_go/#more
