Tomgram: Nick Turse, The Pentagon’s Planet of Bases

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175338/tomgram:_nick_turse,_the_pentagon

Tomgram: Nick Turse, The Pentagon’s Planet of Bases

Posted by Nick Turse at 5:13pm, January 9, 2011.

[TomDispatch recommendations: If you have a chance, check out “The Tyranny of Defense Inc.,” the latest piece by Andrew Bacevich, author of the bestselling Washington Rules, at the Atlantic.  It was written to commemorate the 50th anniversary of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Farewell Address (in which he coined the phrase “the military-industrial complex”), but you also find out about an Eisenhower speech you never knew existed.  Don’t miss it.  In addition, let me recommend the Coen brothers’s new film, True Grit.  Having grown up on Westerns, I’m with the between-the-coasts crowd on this one, and thematically I think it fits in perfectly with TomDispatch: a drunken lout of a U.S. Marshall/nation ready to pull a gun on and shoot anyone, and hard to distinguish from the worst of rogues, could nonetheless still be capable of truly heroic acts.  I find that moving and apt.  Tom]

India, a rising power, almost had one (but the Tajiks said no).  China, which last year became the world’s second largest economy as well as the planet’s leading energy consumer, and is expanding abroad like mad (largely via trade and the power of the purse), still has none.  The Russians have a few (in Central Asia where “the great game” is ongoing), as do those former colonial powers Great Britain and France, as do certain NATO countries in Afghanistan.  Sooner or later, Japan may even have one.

All of them together — and maybe you’ve already guessed that I’m talking about military bases not on one’s own territory — add up to a relatively modest (if unknown) total.  The U.S., on the other hand, has enough bases abroad to sink the world.  You almost have the feeling that a single American mega-base like Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan could swallow them all up.  It’s so large that a special Air Force “team” has to be assigned to it just to deal with the mail arriving every day, 360,000 pounds of it in November 2010 alone.  At the same base, the U.S. has just spent $130 million building “a better gas station for aircraft… [a] new refueling system, which features a pair of 1.1-million gallon tanks and two miles of pipes.”  Imagine that: two miles of pipes, thousands of miles from home — and that’s just to scratch the surface of Bagram’s enormity.

Spencer Ackerman of Wired’s Danger Room blog visited the base last August, found that construction was underway everywhere (think hundreds of millions of dollars more from the pockets of U.S. taxpayers), and wrote: “More notable than the overstuffed runways is the over-driven road. [The Western part of] Disney Drive, the main thoroughfare that rings the eight-square-mile base,[…] is a two-lane parking lot of Humvees, flamboyant cargo big-rigs from Pakistan known as jingle trucks, yellow DHL shipping vans, contractor vehicles, and mud-caked flatbeds. If the Navy could figure out a way to bring a littoral-combat ship to a landlocked country, it would idle on Disney.”

Serving 20,000 or more U.S. troops, and with the usual assortment of Burger Kings and Popeyes, the place is nothing short of a U.S. town, bustling in a way increasingly rare for actual American towns these days, part of a planetary military deployment of a sort never before seen in history.  Yet, as various authors at this site have long noted, the staggering size, scope, and strangeness of all this is seldom considered, analyzed, or debated in the American mainstream.  It’s a given, like the sun rising in the east.  And yet, what exactly is that given?  As Nick Turse, who has been following American basing plans for this site over the years, points out, it’s not as easy to answer that question as you might imagine.  (To catch Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast audio interview in which Turse discusses how to count up America’s empire of bases, click here or, to download it to your iPod, here.) Tom

Empire of Bases 2.0

Does the Pentagon Really Have 1,180 Foreign Bases?

By Nick Turse

The United States has 460 bases overseas! It has 507 permanent bases! What is the U.S doing with more than 560 foreign bases? Why does it have 662 bases abroad? Does the United States really have more than 1,000 military bases across the globe?

In a world of statistics and precision, a world in which “accountability” is now a Washington buzzword, a world where all information is available at the click of a mouse, there’s one number no American knows. Not the president. Not the Pentagon. Not the experts. No one.

The man who wrote the definitive book on it didn’t know for sure. The Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist didn’t even come close. Yours truly has written numerous articles on U.S. military bases and even part of a book on the subject, but failed like the rest.

There are more than 1,000 U.S. military bases dotting the globe. To be specific, the most accurate count is 1,077. Unless it’s 1,088. Or, if you count differently, 1,169. Or even 1,180. Actually, the number might even be higher. Nobody knows for sure.

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