{"id":8232,"date":"2011-01-10T13:12:48","date_gmt":"2011-01-10T21:42:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dmzhawaii.org\/?p=8232"},"modified":"2011-01-10T13:12:48","modified_gmt":"2011-01-10T21:42:48","slug":"tomgram-nick-turse-the-pentagons-planet-of-bases","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dmzhawaii.org\/?p=8232","title":{"rendered":"Tomgram: Nick Turse, The Pentagon’s Planet of Bases"},"content":{"rendered":"
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http:\/\/www.tomdispatch.com\/post\/175338\/tomgram:_nick_turse,_the_pentagon<\/a><\/p>\n

Tomgram: Nick Turse, The Pentagon’s Planet of Bases<\/h2>\n
Posted by Nick Turse<\/a> at 5:13pm, January 9, 2011.<\/div>\n
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[TomDispatch recommendations:<\/strong> If you have a chance, check out “The Tyranny of Defense Inc.,” <\/em>the latest piece<\/a> by Andrew Bacevich, author of the bestselling <\/em>Washington Rules<\/a>, at the <\/em>Atlantic.\u00a0 It was written to commemorate the 50th\u00a0anniversary of President Dwight D. Eisenhower\u2019s Farewell Address (in which he coined the phrase \u201cthe military-industrial complex\u201d), but you also find out about an Eisenhower speech you never knew existed.\u00a0 Don\u2019t miss it.\u00a0 In addition, let me recommend the Coen brothers\u2019s new film, <\/em>True Grit.\u00a0 Having grown up on Westerns, I\u2019m with the\u00a0between-the-coasts crowd<\/a> 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.\u00a0 I find that moving and apt.\u00a0 Tom<\/em>]<\/p>\n

India, a rising power, almost had one (but the Tajiks\u00a0said no<\/a>).\u00a0 China, which last year\u00a0became<\/a> the world\u2019s second largest economy as well as the planet\u2019s\u00a0leading energy consumer<\/a>, and is expanding abroad like mad (largely\u00a0via trade<\/a> and the power of the purse), still has none.\u00a0 The Russians have a few (in Central Asia where \u201cthe great game\u201d is ongoing), as do those former colonial powers\u00a0Great Britain<\/a> and\u00a0France<\/a>, as do certain NATO countries in Afghanistan.\u00a0\u00a0Sooner or later<\/a>, Japan may even have one.<\/p>\n

All of them together — and maybe you’ve already guessed that I\u2019m talking about military bases not on one\u2019s own territory — add up to a relatively modest (if unknown) total.\u00a0 The U.S., on the other hand, has enough bases abroad to sink the world.\u00a0 You almost have the feeling that a single American mega-base like Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan could swallow them all up.\u00a0 It\u2019s so large that a special Air Force \u201cteam\u201d has to be assigned to it just to deal with the mail arriving every day,\u00a0360,000 pounds<\/a> of it in November 2010 alone.\u00a0 At the same base, the U.S. has\u00a0just spent<\/a> $130 million building \u201ca better gas station for aircraft… <\/strong>[a] new refueling system, which features a pair of 1.1-million gallon tanks and two miles of pipes.\u201d \u00a0Imagine that: two miles of pipes, thousands of miles from home — and that\u2019s just to scratch the surface of Bagram’s enormity.<\/p>\n

Spencer Ackerman of\u00a0Wired\u2019s<\/em> Danger Room blog\u00a0visited the base<\/a> last August, found that construction was underway everywhere (think hundreds of millions of dollars more from the pockets of U.S. taxpayers), and wrote: \u201cMore 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 Yet, as various authors at this site have\u00a0long noted<\/a>, the staggering size, scope, and strangeness of all this is seldom considered, analyzed, or debated in the American mainstream.\u00a0 It\u2019s a given, like the sun rising in the east.\u00a0 And yet, what exactly is that given?\u00a0 As Nick Turse, who has been\u00a0following<\/a> American\u00a0basing plans<\/a> for this site over the years, points out, it\u2019s not as easy to answer that question as you might imagine.\u00a0 (To catch Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast audio interview in which Turse discusses how to count up America\u2019s empire of bases,\u00a0click here<\/a> or, to download it to your iPod,\u00a0here<\/a>.)\u00a0Tom<\/em><\/p>\n

Empire of Bases 2.0<\/h2>\n

Does the Pentagon Really Have 1,180 Foreign Bases?<\/strong><\/p>\n

By Nick Turse<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

In a world of statistics and precision, a world in which \u201caccountability\u201d is now a Washington buzzword, a world where all information is available at the click of a mouse, there\u2019s one number no American knows. Not the president. Not the Pentagon. Not the experts. No one.<\/p>\n

The man who wrote the definitive book on it didn\u2019t know for sure. The Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 1,088. Or, if you count differently, 1,169. Or even 1,180. Actually, the number might even be higher. Nobody knows for sure.<\/p>\n

READ THE FULL ARTICLE<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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.\u00a0 It was written to commemorate the 50th\u00a0anniversary of … <\/p>\n

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