January 15, 2004
Nation Institute

America's Empire of Bases

by Chalmers Johnson

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 . . .

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. . . .

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 $591.5 billion 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. . . .

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. . . .

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.

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[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.]

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"U.S. Military Bases Worldwide," militarybases.com

Jon Basil Utley, "A Beacon, Not An Empire," The Wisdom Fund, June 14, 2001

Zoltan Grossman, "A CENTURY OF U.S. MILITARY INTERVENTIONS," zmag.org, September 20, 2001

POWERPOINT: Zoltan Grossman, "New US Military Bases: Side Effects or Causes of War," counterpunch.org, February 2, 2002

Standard Schaeffer, "'Al Qaeda Itself Does Not Exist'," CounterPunch, June 21, 2003

M. Shahid Alam, "Bernard Lewis and the New Orientalism ," The Wisdom Fund, June 29, 2003

Edward Said, "Orientalists' Altruistic Empire," The Guardian, August 2, 2003

[Late Republican Senator Jesse Helms used to call Israel "America's aircraft carrier in the Middle East," when explaining why the US viewed Israel as such a strategic ally--"Top Secret American Military Installations in Israel," Arutz7 News, January 28, 2004]

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[. . . the Defense Department has gone out of its way to avoid using the term "military base." . . . to avoid giving the impression that the United States is seeking a permanent, colonial-like presence in the countries it views as possible hosts for such installations.--Michael T. Klare, "Imperial Reach," The Nation, April 25, 2005]

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[Japan's southern island has long accommodated - unwillingly - three quarters of the US military's 45,000 Japanese complement spread over 90 bases and installations.--Chirstopher Reed, "Washington Gives the Green Light: Japan's Neo-Militarists," counterpunch.org, February 23, 2006]

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[With U.S. markets crashing and wealth vanishing, what are we doing with 750 bases and troops in over 100 countries?--Patrick J. Buchanan, "Liquidating the Empire," antiwar.com, October 14, 2008]

[The Pentagon's most recent inventory of bases lists a total of 716 overseas sites. . . . one conspicuously absent site is al-Udeid air base, a billion-dollar facility in nearby Qatar, where the US Air Force secretly oversees its ongoing unmanned drone wars.

. . . close to 700 US, allied, and Afghan military bases dot Afghanistan. Until now, however, they have existed as black sites known to few Americans outside the Pentagon.--Nick Turse, "Black sites in the empire of bases," atimes.com, February 11, 2010]

[By one Pentagon count there are 865 foreign facilities. But that doesn't count bases in Afghanistan and Iraq, which probably pushes the total past 1000.--Doug Bandow, "Just What Is America Doing all Over the World?," campaignforliberty.com, July 15, 2010]

Andrew Bacevich, "Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War," Metropolitan Books (August 3, 2010)

David Vine, "Picking up a $170 billion tab," atimes.com, December 13, 2012