A CounterPunch Special Report on Military Spending
The Pentagon Pathology
by GABRIEL KOLKO

US Air Force
The allocation of money within the American military system is reflected in which weapons are chosen—and why.  What is at stake are rivalries among military branches, which have influence and connections with arms producers, the Congress, and the entire complex matrix of factors that determine who wins and loses in the Pentagon budget process.  The United States has, by far, the largest military budget of any nation on earth but it also loses wars, cannot procure everything the military services dream up, and ultimately it too must choose between weapons at the expense of the priorities and demands of other services.

In plain English, if the Air Force gets an ultra-modern aircraft which may cost many billions, even trillions, and takes years to iron out the technology (and may ultimately even never operate) there will be less money for the Army and Navy to attain its dreams—or visa versa.

Here some historical background is in order.

In April 1950 the U. S. National Security Council (NSC) produced a policy paper, which remained top secret until 1975, which discussed a wide range of crucial national security problems, and among many things led to the creation of H-bombs. One of its major conclusions was that the American and Western European economies faced the danger of a slowdown unless the governments spent more.  The Congress still had members who wanted to balance the budget, and it and the public did not adequately appreciate that the Cold War would continue and require yet greater efforts. There are many contingencies at play, ranging from a roll-back of Communism in Eastern Europe to the need for the U.S. to be ready to negotiate with the Soviets under certain circumstances.  There was an excessively simplistic view of what the U.S.S.R’s ultimate objectives were, an utterly inadequate view of the Sino-Soviet relationship, and the weaknesses in the Soviet system that ultimately led to the complete disappearance of the U.S.S.R. in 1991. The NSC report advocated “a substantial increase in expenditures for military purposes,” and up to $50 billion was later agreed upon.   The original Pentagon budget for 1950 was $13 billion. The outbreak of the Korean War the following June reinforced the NSC’s worst assumptions about Soviet intentions, blaming it for the war but ignoring the extent to which the North Koreans, like Tito in Yugoslavia or the Chinese, were independent actors. The Pentagon’s budget became the backbone of the American economy in the late 1940s, and has been crucial ever since.

In this context, the controversy over the Air Force’s B-36 bomber broke out, pitting the Air Force against the Navy, which wanted the money the Air Force was getting for the B-36 to build super-carriers.  The fight between the Air Force and Navy went public, with the Navy even arguing that the B-36, which carried nuclear weapons, was “morally reprehensible,” an argument that the Air Force called cynical, since super-carriers could also deliver nuclear weapons and even then the Navy was developing the Polaris submarine, which carried mainly strategic nuclear bombs. The Navy–with the help of some elements of the Air Force, who wanted the bomber money for tactical fighters, and competitive airframe producers–played too dirty for the Truman Administration.  Some of its spokesmen pointed out that the contract for the B-36 airframe would go to Consolidated Vultee Aircraft Company, which needed the contract to bail out its sinking economic fortunes. The Secretary of Defense at the time had once been a member of Vultee’s board of directors. Truman was eventually to fire at least one senior Naval officer over this affair.

Are the military officers merely fronts for competitive aerospace firms anxious to get contracts? Private corporations often take the initiative, investing their own funds in the process, for military innovations they then present to the services, which then underwrite the development of some of them.  The B-36 eventually ended as scrap after billions were spent developing it. Closing its bases—any bases for that matter—had to confront the resistance of Congressmen from the districts the bases were located in.  There were 225 military bases in the U.S. at the beginning of the 1960s, about a quarter of which the Department of Defense deemed useless.  Resistance to closing them was intense; most have remained operational.

Right before September 11, 2001, China was slated to be the main problem facing the U.S., but after the attacks China became far less important than “terrorism,” a nebulous category that displace “Communism” from being the main American enemy. This move produced some confusion in the ranks. The Pentagon needs an enemy to justify its vast spending, and “terrorism” sufficed until the past few years, when the U.S. military declared it had won victories in Iraq and Afghanistan—which it, of course, did not—and began pulling out.

Only in 2012, when it was far more powerful and had much more economic as well as military might, was China revived as a potential enemy with President Obama’s “pivot” towards Asia.  The very same people who conjured up the alleged Chinese menace for Rumsfeld did so for Obama.  Many in the Pentagon. particularly in the Army and Marines, who fear the strategy being conjured up for a potential conflict with China will sidelined them, deplore it as one that would result in “incalculable human and economic destruction.”  The Air Force and Navy see it as justification for their very expensive projects. Merely considering the concept of a contest with China is like playing with fire; but because it brings in money then the Navy and Air Force have promoted it.  It is probable that a conflict elsewhere will make the assumptions underlying an Air-Sea Battle (which is war with China), a notion that becomes abstract, of lower priority.  On the other hand, the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessments is run by Andrew Marshall, who was the leading hawk on China for Bush and now is advising the Obama Administration. Marshall has the power to allocate up to $19 million in study grants to assorted think tanks, who thereby have a huge financial incentive to tell him what he wants to hear and keep the money coming.  Some of these outside “thinkers,” get enormous incomes.

War with China is a quixotic idea, and it could go nuclear.  The Navy has a super-modern destroyer on the drawing boards, already in production but the technology in it is only partially developed (and like other technologically ultra-modern projects is likely to take years to perfect in some form or another), the DDG-1000, which is also very expensive (up to seven billion dollars each if research and development is included), and has already been cut from the 32 that originally were to be ordered to seven, and now only three are being built. Some defense experts think it’s a waste of money that could be better allocated elsewhere in the Navy.  A senior Chinese Navy officer has already dismissed the DDG-1000 and outlined a way to sink it.  But China I have predicted that the so-called Pacific pivot–which is supposed to take 10 years to complete–is simply talk and China is unlikely to be the U.S.’ main focus in 2022. The U.S. is now active in the Middle East, Africa, and many places besides the Pacific.  Where will it be 10 years from now? No one knows, the Pentagon included.  If a nation has global ambitions then it could become involved in a crisis anywhere.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld thought that a modern American military’s “shock and awe” capacity would prevail—but he was oblivious to the political aspects of all conflicts. And the political context of a war can be decisive.  The U.S. always has superior military power, even if it pays far too much for it, but military superiority is irrelevant to inherited ethnic tensions in nations or with decentralized subsistence economies.  The existence of threats, whether Communist or “terrorist”  is essential to justify the Pentagon’s vast budgets. By now, that budget, however its divided, is an aspect of the basic American identity.  It has too many well-connected basic interests supporting it, ranging from members of the House and Senate, companies dependent on military contracts and unions in arms factories.

The B-36 was supposed to be super-modern and do things that earlier bombers could not. For about a decade it was the backbone of the Strategic Air Command, when almost all of the 384 built were scrapped. The B-36 was conceived in early 1941, intended to bomb Nazi Germany, but after 1945 it was intended to bomb the U.S.S.R.  Fortunately it never dropped any nuclear devices or did any of the things it was designed for.  Some experts thought it “arguably obsolete from the outset.” The bomber had terrible accidents, including some crashes in which nuclear weapons were involved.  It was a total waste of money but the Air Force would not admit it, so the B-36 stayed in service for 10 years. Until the intercontinental strategic missile was developed, it was the only means the Air Force had to drop nuclear weapons on the Soviet Union.

The problem of super-modern planes—such as the F-35, also called the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF), of which Lockheed-Martin is the principal contractor and cost from $197 to  $238 million each (depending on the model)—is that they often incorporate technology that has yet to be developed or they have performance kinks which emerge that must be investigated.  Some are resolved fairly quickly, but the F-35 remains plagued by problems. The Air Forces plans to buy about 2,400 jets for the U.S. alone, serving as the nations’ main tactical fighter until about 2040. It is also set to become NATO’s main tactical fighter. Over its 50-year lifetime, the U S alone will pay about one trillion dollars for all the F-35s, perhaps more.

There is a Pentagon study that the maintenance cost alone of the F-35 over its lifetime may be another one trillion dollars.  Even the Pentagon would like to reduce this immense figure. It is an astonishing sum for a tactical fighter that cannot do much more than those the Air Force already has and may turn out to be completely useless.  But the Air Force in this case reflects a pathology and culture that is expressed in spending more money regardless.  All that is certain is that the F-35 will run up the U. S. debt.

The JSF has been criticized as too heavy, too expensive (its price is always rising), unable to cope with modern air defenses, and the like.  Some have argued that the existing fleet of tactical aircraft is quite adequate. It has not been produced for actual use yet–late 2015 is the earliest date given for delivery—and that date is probably too optimistic.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in January 2011 depricated “the culture of endless money“ that the ever-more expensive JSF fighter reflected, and talked about the possibility of canceling the whole program. But Gates’ successor, Leon  Panetta, thought the JSF2–the most disputed and technically sophisticated of the variations of the basic JSF –had made “sufficient progress.”

But the JSF project has been characterized by delays. The first jet rolled off the production line in February 2006. But like most sophisticated, complex technologies, the production runs and redesigns take many years to complete projects, during which time the world political-military context can change radically and render the assumptions used to procure a specific weapon outdated.  Because of delays, a weapon that costs a fortune can be useless even before it is finished. The B-36 is a good example.

Predictably, serious cost overruns and delays have caused some nations who originally intended taking the JSF in some form to balk at the increased costs inherent in fighters that incorporate technology that still doesn’t exist, also revealing the disunity inherent in the U. S.’s strategic alliances.

It is an ingrained Air Force habit to innovate by relying on ultra-modern technologies, which have frequently yet to be made functional, and to spend money rather than being practical.  The Pentagon looses major wars, politically if not militarily. It requires another mindset.  But if the past is any precedent, it will certainly not find one.

The U.S. has imperial ambitions and illusions, which are used to justify spending money, but the service branches also have interests in getting weapons at each other’s expense. Ultimately, however, even Pentagon spending  has it limits.  These constraints foster inter-service rivalries. There is never enough money to satisfy all of their dreams, which often requires new technologies. There is a complexity about U.S. military policy, mainly caused by a combination of technological fetishism and American chauvinism, that befuddles anyone who tries to assess it and determine the real causes of actions—it often perplexes me too.  The U. S. military has immense confidence in the prowess of advanced arms and its abilities, and its failures in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan have not altered the Pentagon’s belief in its own superiority.  But the U.S. military brass refuses to really internalize the fact that other nations are ahead of it in some of the most important aspects of modern warfare. China may already match or exceed it. For example, the U. S. has about 1,000 cyber-security experts but needs at least twenty times that number.

This complexity affects those who are critics of America’s policies but also produces fatal illusions among those who have power, illusions which often require a great deal of money.  Determining what the Pentagon branches do that is self-serving or based on false premises—or even both—is very difficult.  The only consequence for critics is that they may be inaccurate.  People in power can load the system with more debts, false premises that lead to yet more mistaken decisions, military engagements, or even both—and have much more serious consequences.

In any case, priorities are determined by who has power, and here I want to show how this process leads to the neglect of obtaining weapons that are more functional than those the Pentagon actually buys.  Priorities are often decided by forces–political, interests, arms lobbies, etc.–and who has the clout required for obtaining what they think important. Rationality is impossible when a system, in this case the Pentagon, makes crucial decisions because a service branch has influence in Congress, vested corporate interests and arms manufacturers who lobby and oppose budget cuts, and the like to back up its expensive fantasies.  The result is that the United States still undertakes military engagements based on the naïve premise that its weapons superiority can overcome the political weaknesses that bedeviled it in Korea, Vietnam, and now Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Impossibility of Practicality

On the whole, the Army is the least able of the three major services to obtain the funding it wants or needs. It is the very nature of the services that the largest development funding goes to the Air Force and Navy, where technological innovations are more common.  The U.S. Army’s ultimate function is to win wars, including killing those who get in its way or want to thwart it.   Yet, it has not won a war since 1946. It fought to a draw in Korea and lost in Vietnam. Wars are very complex and conventional armies alone tend not to win them.  The U.S. Army is very conventional,

The basic American weapon, the assault rifle, now the M-16 and its variants. is not a functional gun. The Army has spent less money than the Air Force and Navy on expensive weapons, but this is only relative.  It still has invested vast sums in other ground weapons, but its basic combat weapon is poor.  Those in the Defense Department who write about the M-16’s inadequacies have not been able to get the Army to adopt a better weapon or bullets—the M-16, according to a writer in an official Army publication, has become like the “Holy Grail,” not to be criticized even though the Soviet-built AK-47, is better suited to fight in the very diverse environments that exist in Third World nations, where the U.S. fights most of its wars.

The U. S. Army has altered the basic infantry M-16 rifle and bullet, and tried to improve it, but these changes have still been unable to match the Soviet-designed AK-47 or its improvements, and both in Vietnam and Afghanistan some American soldiers have resorted to using captured AK-47s to get around the M-16’s liabilities—which include a propensity to jam because of a basic design flaw.

All factors considered, including the fact that the AK-47 is much cheaper than the M-l6 and its variants, there are now around 100 million AK-47s and variants of it in the world and only about eight million M-16 and its variants.  Each has assets and liabilities, but the M-16s has major jamming problems that have often been fatal to American troops.  It is far more complex than the AK-47. Though inferior to the M-16 in certain regards, the AK-47 is far easier to use. It is produced in countless nations, from Bangladesh to Togo, and even in the U. S. it has over a dozen manufacturers.  “Good enough” is the justification for the AK-47’s simplicity and reliability.  It is ubiquitous and is the weapon of choice of the U.S.’s enemies or potential opponents.  “We are clearly outgunned,” a Defense Department analyst concludes in a recent issue of the Army’s MILITARY REVIEW.

Why is this? One would think that a military that spends so much money would have the best weapon possible.  Technical fetishism? A lack of intelligence or bureaucratic inertia? All of them? Perhaps something else, like a lack of a firm with a sufficient vested interest and political influence to see a better weapon produced?  Some critics of the Army who are within the Pentagon say that good replacements for the standard battle weapon already exist. Rather than dwell on this conundrum it is sufficient to remark that at the same time the U.S. has super-modern weapons its basic weapon is not adequate for its very ambitious goals.

This fact is a bit fantastic, and hard to believe.  The U. S. wants to police the world and is building super-modern weapons, many of which either don’t work or they have design flaws that neutralize their effectiveness.  The Pentagon’s budget is helping to bankrupt America, but it lacks a good basic weapon for its soldiers.

Myths run throughout America’s leadership, many reinforced by Congressional hawks who insist the Pentagon spend money, especially on weapons built by companies within their districts.  There are Pentagon hawks too who need no pushing. But often Congress is even more hawkish than the military leaders. For example, the idea that the U. S. should be able to fight two wars simultaneously is a cherished notion of hawkish Congressmen, but President George W. Bush was compelled to add the Reserves to fight in Iraq.  The American military in Iraq and Afghanistan never attained victory. The theory that they should do so in the future remains just a theory, if not a fantasy.

The problem is dealing with nuance: sometimes the advocates of higher spending are the defense industry and their lobbyists, sometimes the Congress—House and Senate. The defense industry is opposed to cuts because they want to sell arms.  Boeing is predicting disaster if the Congress cuts military spending by a tenth, and the top five arms firms increased their spending on lobbying 11.5 percent in the first quarter of 2012 over the first quarter of 2011. But if we are compelled to categorize President Obama, he too is a hawk.  In his January 5, 2012 speech in the Pentagon’s briefing room he talked of saving $450 billion from their budget over the next decade but also maintaining the ability to cope with any challenge.  To Obama, this means investing in intelligence, surveillance, counterterrorism, and prevailing in all domains, assuring that the U. S. has a military that is “…ready for the full range of contingencies.”

This strategy is largely dependent on finding new technologies and that means more long-term contracts for defense firms.  Aside from taking an unpredictable amount of time to develop (the American defense industry usually requires much time to create sophisticated technology, which generally cost much more than originally predicted), it also assumes that those who the U.S. deems potential enemies have no ability to find effective measures to get around the new American devices–the principles of which have been well advertised in advance.

The enduring problem is that the U.S. has retained its overweening ambitions and learned nothing from its failures over the past decades.  If this seems a bit surrealistic it is because it is.

GABRIEL KOLKO is the leading historian of modern warfare. He is the author of the classic Century of War: Politics, Conflicts and Society Since 1914 and Another Century of War?. He has also written the best history of the Vietnam War, Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the US and the Modern Historical Experience. He can be reached at: kolko@counterpunch.org.

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Lily Pad Roll, (Trepper & Katz Impact Books/ Punto Press), a spy/military thriller by Gaither Stewart, our European correspondent and a writer of considerable knowledge on the same topic. —P. Greanville

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Tomgram: David Vine, U.S. Empire of Bases Grows

Crosspost with Countercurrents.org
and Tomdispatch.com

It was January 15, 2004, and TomDispatch had only been in existence for a year when Chalmers Johnson, author of the prophetic book Blowback (published in 2000 and a bestseller after the 9/11 attacks), did a piece for this site entitled “America’s Empire of Bases.”  He wrote then: “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.”

It was a benchmark essay for TomDispatch and a theme — the unprecedented way Washington was garrisoning the planet — that Johnson would return to repeatedly and that others of us would take up.  This mattered because, despite the crucial role that Washington’s empire of bases played in the American way of war and its dreams of global dominance, bases were then, and remain today, a phenomenon largely ignored in the mainstream media.

In 2004, the Pentagon was, for instance, already building the first of its 505 bases, the biggest among them meant to be “enduring,” in Iraq — American ziggurats, I called them at the time.  Some of these were large enough to qualify as full-scale American towns, with PXs, fire departments, bus routes, the usual range of fast-food joints, internet cafes, and the like — and yet it was the rare American reporter who saw a story of any sort in them, even when visiting one of them.  The same was true in Afghanistan, where the U.S. was building (and is still upgrading) 400 or more bases.  No one even bothered to try to count them up until Nick Turse did so in February 2010 for this site.  (Ann Jones took TomDispatch readers onto one of them in August of that same year.)

In his books and at TomDispatch, Johnson put significant effort into trying to come up with a number for the bases the Pentagon garrisoned outside the United States.  In January 2011, Turse returned to that task and found that number to be well over 1,100.  Again, it’s not a figure you normally see reported in the mainstream.  In March 2010, John Feffer reminded TD readers of just how far the Pentagon would go to hang onto a single major base, among so many, on the Japanese island of Okinawa.

One of the last essays Chalmers Johnson published at this site before his death in 2010 was entitled “Dismantling the Empire” and it was concerned with just how the U.S. could downsize its global mission and end its empire of bases.  David Vine, anthropologist and author of Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia, has been touring American bases for the past three years.  In a major survey of the changing shape of our Baseworld, he suggests that unfortunately it isn’t shrinking at all, and that “dismantling” isn’t yet on the American horizon.  This means that — until the mainstream finally stumbles upon the import of this story — TomDispatch has little choice but to stay on the bases beat for the foreseeable future. (To catch Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Vine discusses his experiences with the Pentagon’s empire of bases, click here or download it to your iPod here.)
—Tom

The Lily-Pad Strategy
How the Pentagon Is Quietly Transforming Its Overseas Base Empire and Creating a Dangerous New Way of War
By David Vine

The first thing I saw last month when I walked into the belly of the dark grey C-17 Air Force cargo plane was a void — something missing. A missing left arm, to be exact, severed at the shoulder, temporarily patched and held together.  Thick, pale flesh, flecked with bright red at the edges. It looked like meat sliced open. The face and what remained of the rest of the man were obscured by blankets, an American flag quilt, and a jumble of tubes and tape, wires, drip bags, and medical monitors.

That man and two other critically wounded soldiers — one with two stumps where legs had been, the other missing a leg below the thigh — were intubated, unconscious, and lying on stretchers hooked to the walls of the plane that had just landed at Ramstein Air Base in Germany. A tattoo on the soldier’s remaining arm read, “DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR.”

I asked a member of the Air Force medical team about the casualties they see like these. Many, as with this flight, were coming from Afghanistan, he told me. “A lot from the Horn of Africa,” he added. “You don’t really hear about that in the media.”

“Where in Africa?” I asked.  He said he didn’t know exactly, but generally from the Horn, often with critical injuries. “A lot out of Djibouti,” he added, referring to Camp Lemonnier, the main U.S. military base in Africa, but from “elsewhere” in the region, too.

Since the “Black Hawk Down” deaths in Somalia almost 20 years ago, we’ve heard little, if anything, about American military casualties in Africa (other than a strange report last week about three special operations commandos killed, along with three women identified by U.S. military sources as “Moroccan prostitutes,” in a mysterious car accident in Mali). The growing number of patients arriving at Ramstein from Africa pulls back a curtain on a significant transformation in twenty-first-century U.S. military strategy.

These casualties are likely to be the vanguard of growing numbers of wounded troops coming from places far removed from Afghanistan or Iraq. They reflect the increased use of relatively small bases like Camp Lemonnier, which military planners see as a model for future U.S. bases “scattered,” as one academic explains, “across regions in which the United States has previously not maintained a military presence.”

Disappearing are the days when Ramstein was the signature U.S. base, an American-town-sized behemoth filled with thousands or tens of thousands of Americans, PXs, Pizza Huts, and other amenities of home. But don’t for a second think that the Pentagon is packing up, downsizing its global mission, and heading home. In fact, based on developments in recent years, the opposite may be true. While the collection of Cold War-era giant bases around the world is shrinking, the global infrastructure of bases overseas has exploded in size and scope.

Unknown to most Americans, Washington’s garrisoning of the planet is on the rise, thanks to a new generation of bases the military calls “lily pads” (as in a frog jumping across a pond toward its prey). These are small, secretive, inaccessible facilities with limited numbers of troops, spartan amenities, and prepositioned weaponry and supplies.

Around the world, from Djibouti to the jungles of Honduras, the deserts of Mauritania to Australia’s tiny Cocos Islands, the Pentagon has been pursuing as many lily pads as it can, in as many countries as it can, as fast as it can. Although statistics are hard to assemble, given the often-secretive nature of such bases, the Pentagon has probably built upwards of 50 lily pads and other small bases since around 2000, while exploring the construction of dozens more.

As Mark Gillem, author of America Town: Building the Outposts of Empire, explains, “avoidance” of local populations, publicity, and potential opposition is the new aim. “To project its power,” he says, the United States wants “secluded and self-contained outposts strategically located” around the world. According to some of the strategy’s strongest proponents at the American Enterprise Institute, the goal should be “to create a worldwide network of frontier forts,” with the U.S. military “the ‘global cavalry’ of the twenty-first century.”

Such lily-pad bases have become a critical part of an evolving Washington military strategy aimed at maintaining U.S. global dominance by doing far more with less in an increasingly competitive, ever more multi-polar world. Central as it’s becoming to the long-term U.S. stance, this global-basing reset policy has, remarkably enough, received almost no public attention, nor significant Congressional oversight. Meanwhile, as the arrival of the first casualties from Africa shows, the U.S. military is getting involved in new areas of the world and new conflicts, with potentially disastrous consequences.

Transforming the Base Empire

You might think that the U.S. military is in the process of shrinking, rather than expanding, its little noticed but enormous collection of bases abroad. After all, it was forced to close the full panoply of 505 bases, mega to micro, that it built in Iraq, and it’s now beginning the process of drawing down forces in Afghanistan. In Europe, the Pentagon is continuing to close its massive bases in Germany and will soon remove two combat brigades from that country. Global troop numbers are set to shrink by around 100,000.

Yet Washington still easily maintains the largest collection of foreign bases in world history: more than 1,000 military installations outside the 50 states and Washington, DC. They include everything from decades-old bases in Germany and Japan to brand-new drone bases in Ethiopia and the Seychelles islands in the Indian Ocean and even resorts for military vacationers in Italy and South Korea.

In Afghanistan, the U.S.-led international force still occupies more than 450 bases. In total, the U.S. military has some form of troop presence in approximately 150 foreign countries, not to mention 11 aircraft carrier task forces — essentially floating bases — and a significant, and growing, military presence in space. The United States currently spends an estimated $250 billion annually maintaining bases and troops overseas.

Some bases, like Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, date to the late nineteenth century. Most were built or occupied during or just after World War II on every continent, including Antarctica. Although the U.S. military vacated around 60% of its foreign bases following the Soviet Union’s collapse, the Cold War base infrastructure remained relatively intact, with 60,000 American troops remaining in Germany alone, despite the absence of a superpower adversary.

However, in the early months of 2001, even before the attacks of 9/11, the Bush administration launched a major global realignment of bases and troops that’s continuing today with Obama’s “Asia pivot.” Bush’s original plan was to close more than one-third of the nation’s overseas bases and shift troops east and south, closer to predicted conflict zones in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The Pentagon began to focus on creating smaller and more flexible “forward operating bases” and even smaller “cooperative security locations” or “lily pads.” Major troop concentrations were to be restricted to a reduced number of “main operating bases” (MOBs) — like Ramstein, Guam in the Pacific, and Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean — which were to be expanded.

Despite the rhetoric of consolidation and closure that went with this plan, in the post-9/11 era the Pentagon has actually been expanding its base infrastructure dramatically, including dozens of major bases in every Persian Gulf country save Iran, and in several Central Asian countries critical to the war in Afghanistan.

Hitting the Base Reset Button

Obama’s recently announced “Asia pivot” signals that East Asia will be at the center of the explosion of lily-pad bases and related developments. Already in Australia, U.S. marines are settling into a shared base in Darwin. Elsewhere, the Pentagon is pursuing plans for a drone and surveillance base in Australia’s Cocos Islands and deployments to Brisbane and Perth. In Thailand, the Pentagon has negotiated rights for new Navy port visits and a “disaster-relief hub” at U-Tapao.

In the Philippines, whose government evicted the U.S. from the massive Clark Air Base and Subic Bay Naval Base in the early 1990s, as many as 600 special forces troops have quietly been operating in the country’s south since January 2002. Last month, the two governments reached an agreement on the future U.S. use of Clark and Subic, as well as other repair and supply hubs from the Vietnam War era. In a sign of changing times, U.S. officials even signed a 2011 defense agreement with former enemy Vietnam and have begun negotiations over the Navy’s increased use of Vietnamese ports.

Elsewhere in Asia, the Pentagon has rebuilt a runway on tiny Tinian island near Guam, and it’s considering future bases in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei, while pushing stronger military ties with India. Every year in the region, the military conducts around 170 military exercises and 250 port visits. On South Korea’s Jeju island, the Korean military is building a base that will be part of the U.S. missile defense system and to which U.S. forces will have regular access.

“We just can’t be in one place to do what we’ve got to do,” Pacific Command commander Admiral Samuel Locklear III has said. For military planners, “what we’ve got to do” is clearly defined as isolating and (in the terminology of the Cold War) “containing” the new power in the region, China. This evidently means “peppering” new bases throughout the region, adding to the more than 200 U.S. bases that have encircled China for decades in Japan, South Korea, Guam, and Hawaii.

And Asia is just the beginning. In Africa, the Pentagon has quietly created “about a dozen air bases” for drones and surveillance since 2007. In addition to Camp Lemonnier, we know that the military has created or will soon create installations in Burkina Faso, Burundi, the Central African Republic, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mauritania, São Tomé and Príncipe, Senegal, Seychelles, South Sudan, and Uganda. The Pentagon has also investigated building bases in Algeria, Gabon, Ghana, Mali, and Nigeria, among other places.

Next year, a brigade-sized force of 3,000 troops, and “likely more,” will arrive for exercises and training missions across the continent. In the nearby Persian Gulf, the Navy is developing an “afloat forward-staging base,” or “mothership,” to serve as a sea-borne “lily pad” for helicopters and patrol craft, and has been involved in a massive build-up of forces in the region.

In Latin America, following the military’s eviction from Panama in 1999 and Ecuador in 2009, the Pentagon has created or upgraded new bases in Aruba and Curaçao, Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, and Peru.  Elsewhere, the Pentagon has funded the creation of military and police bases capable of hosting U.S. forces in Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Costa Rica, and even Ecuador. In 2008, the Navy reactivated its Fourth Fleet, inactive since 1950, to patrol the region. The military may want a base in Brazil and unsuccessfully tried to create bases, ostensibly for humanitarian and emergency relief, in Paraguay and Argentina.

Finally, in Europe, after arriving in the Balkans during 1990’s interventions, U.S. bases have moved eastward into some of the former Eastern Bloc states of the Soviet empire. The Pentagon is now developing installations capable of supporting rotating, brigade-sized deployments in Romania and Bulgaria, and a missile defense base and aviation facilities in Poland. Previously, the Bush administration maintained two CIA black sites (secret prisons) in Lithuania and another in Poland. Citizens of the Czech Republic rejected a planned radar base for the Pentagon’s still unproven missile defense system, and now Romania will host ground-based missiles.

A New American Way of War

A lily pad on one of the Gulf of Guinea islands of S­ão Tomé and Príncipe, off the oil-rich west coast of Africa, helps explain what’s going on. A U.S. official has described the base as “another Diego Garcia,” referring to the Indian Ocean base that’s helped ensure decades of U.S. domination over Middle Eastern energy supplies. Without the freedom to create new large bases in Africa, the Pentagon is using S­ão Tomé and a growing collection of other lily pads on the continent in an attempt to control another crucial oil-rich region.

Far beyond West Africa, the nineteenth century “Great Game” competition for Central Asia has returned with a passion — and this time gone global.  It’s spreading to resource-rich lands in Africa, Asia, and South America, as the United States, China, Russia, and members of the European Union find themselves locked in an increasingly intense competition for economic and geopolitical supremacy.

While Beijing, in particular, has pursued this competition in a largely economic fashion, dotting the globe with strategic investments, Washington has focused relentlessly on military might as its global trump card, dotting the planet with new bases and other forms of military power. “Forget full-scale invasions and large-footprint occupations on the Eurasian mainland,” Nick Turse has written of this new twenty-first century military strategy. “Instead, think: special operations forces… proxy armies… the militarization of spying and intelligence… drone aircraft… cyber-attacks, and joint Pentagon operations with increasingly militarized ‘civilian’ government agencies.”

Add to this unparalleled long-range air and naval power; arms sales besting any nation on Earth; humanitarian and disaster relief missions that clearly serve military intelligence, patrol, and “hearts and minds” functions; the rotational deployment of regular U.S. forces globally; port visits and an expanding array of joint military exercises and training missions that give the U.S. military de facto “presence” worldwide and help turn foreign militaries into proxy forces.

And lots and lots of lily-pad bases.

Military planners see a future of endless small-scale interventions in which a large, geographically dispersed collection of bases will always be primed for instant operational access. With bases in as many places as possible, military planners want to be able to turn to another conveniently close country if the United States is ever prevented from using a base, as it was by Turkey prior to the invasion of Iraq. In other words, Pentagon officials dream of nearly limitless flexibility, the ability to react with remarkable rapidity to developments anywhere on Earth, and thus, something approaching total military control over the planet.

Beyond their military utility, the lily pads and other forms of power projection are also political and economic tools used to build and maintain alliances and provide privileged U.S. access to overseas markets, resources, and investment opportunities. Washington is planning to use lily-pad bases and other military projects to bind countries in Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America as closely as possible to the U.S. military — and so to continued U.S. political-economic hegemony. In short, American officials are hoping military might will entrench their influence and keep as many countries as possible within an American orbit at a time when some are asserting their independence ever more forcefully or gravitating toward China and other rising powers.

Those Dangerous Lily Pads

While relying on smaller bases may sound smarter and more cost effective than maintaining huge bases that have often caused anger in places like Okinawa and South Korea, lily pads threaten U.S. and global security in several ways:

First, the “lily pad” language can be misleading, since by design or otherwise, such installations are capable of quickly growing into bloated behemoths.

Second, despite the rhetoric about spreading democracy that still lingers in Washington, building more lily pads actually guarantees collaboration with an increasing number of despotic, corrupt, and murderous regimes.

Third, there is a well-documented pattern of damage that military facilities of various sizes inflict on local communities. Although lily pads seem to promise insulation from local opposition, over time even small bases have often led to anger and protest movements.

Finally, a proliferation of lily pads means the creeping militarization of large swaths of the globe. Like real lily pads — which are actually aquatic weeds — bases have a way of growing and reproducing uncontrollably. Indeed, bases tend to beget bases, creating “base races” with other nations, heightening military tensions, and discouraging diplomatic solutions to conflicts. After all, how would the United States respond if China, Russia, or Iran were to build even a single lily-pad base of its own in Mexico or the Caribbean?

For China and Russia in particular, ever more U.S. bases near their borders threaten to set off new cold wars. Most troublingly, the creation of new bases to protect against an alleged future Chinese military threat may prove to be a self-fulfilling prophecy: such bases in Asia are likely to create the threat they are supposedly designed to protect against, making a catastrophic war with China more, not less, likely.

Encouragingly, however, overseas bases have recently begun to generate critical scrutiny across the political spectrum from Republican Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison and Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul to Democratic Senator Jon Tester and New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. With everyone looking for ways to trim the deficit, closing overseas bases offers easy savings. Indeed, increasingly influential types are recognizing that the country simply can’t afford more than 1,000 bases abroad.

Great Britain, like empires before it, had to close most of its remaining foreign bases in the midst of an economic crisis in the 1960s and 1970s. The United States is undoubtedly headed in that direction sooner or later. The only question is whether the country will give up its bases and downsize its global mission by choice, or if it will follow Britain’s path as a fading power forced to give up its bases from a position of weakness.

Of course, the consequences of not choosing another path extend beyond economics. If the proliferation of lily pads, special operations forces, and drone wars continues, the United States is likely to be drawn into new conflicts and new wars, generating unknown forms of blowback, and untold death and destruction. In that case, we’d better prepare for a lot more incoming flights — from the Horn of Africa to Honduras — carrying not just amputees but caskets.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Vine is Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, with American University, in Washington, DC. He is also
the author of Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia (Princeton, 2009), David Vine’s work focuses on issues including U.S. foreign and military policy, military bases, forced displacement, and human rights. He is the co-author, with the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, of the Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual, or Notes on Demilitarizing American Society (Prickly Paradigm, 2009). His other writing has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian (London), Mother Jones, Foreign Policy in Focus, Chronicle of Higher Education, and International Migration, among others. Island of Shame exposes the history of the U.S. military base on the Indian Ocean island Diego Garcia and the expulsion of its indigenous people. David is now working on a new book about the global network of U.S. military bases overseas. In addition to more than a decade of research about Diego Garcia and U.S. bases abroad,

Copyright 2012 David Vine

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