Part 1 - Starting with a solid
base By David Isenberg
Somewhere on the Yale University campus, Paul
Michael Kennedy must be smiling. Remember Paul Kennedy?
Back in 1987 the then relatively unknown history
professor published the book The Rise and Fall of the
Great Powers, and almost instantaneously introduced
the expression "imperial overstretch" into popular
discourse. Although it did not take long for right-wing
commentators to attack him, saying that it was the
Soviet, not the US empire that had overstretched, his
basic point remains the same.
As he wrote 10
years later in Atlantic Magazine: "The United States now
runs the risk, so familiar to historians of the rise and
fall of Great Powers, of what might be called 'imperial
overstretch': that is to say, decision-makers in
Washington must face the awkward and enduring fact that
the total of the United States's global interests and
obligations is nowadays far too large for the country to
be able to defend them all simultaneously."
Well, now talk of empire is back in vogue since
the war in Iraq has focused the attention of the
American public, normally caught up in the soma of
reality television, to an unusual degree on the burdens
and costs of empire.
But while empire in all its
imperial, multicolored, geopolitical hues may be an
alluring sight, there is one thing to keep in mind. The
process of creating and maintaining an empire, like
making sausage or passing congressional legislation, is
not a pretty process. In fact, it is costly, very
costly, in terms of lives, money and liberty. It
requires a large military establishment, which can
consume a substantial, if not disproportionate amount of
the national treasury. And it requires stationing and
deploying forces around the world.
A base for
every need It is not easy being a global military
power. It takes a lot of behind the scenes work to allow
the F-15s and F-16s to fly over Iraq airspace, for the
soldiers and Marines to deploy to Japan and South Korea,
and to get the M-1 tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles
and a myriad of other military equipment to the
far-flung corners of the empire. Despite the rush to
outsource federal programs, this is not yet a job that
the Pentagon is willing to entrust to Federal Express or
DHL.
Even in the 21st century, with jet and
space travel, the world is a large place. The division
of the world into military fiefdoms, or what US military
planners euphemistically call the Unified Command Plan,
requires something very old-fashioned: a network of
overseas military bases.
True, the contours of
the network change, waxing and waning over time. Many
overseas US military bases overseas have closed since
the end of the Cold War, and the number of US troops
permanently stationed overseas has dropped by more than
250,000 since the Berlin Wall fell. But preparations to
deploy American legions remain a primary Pentagon
concern.
In fact, a number of individuals who
now are part of the Bush administration (including Vice
President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld) produced in the fall of 2000 a 90-page
blueprint for transforming the US military and the
nation's global role. The report, "Rebuilding America's
Defenses: Strategy, Forces, and Resources for a New
Century" released by the Project for the New American
Century, argued that the US should not only attain and
maintain military dominance, but should also project it
with a worldwide network of forward operating bases over
and above the country's already extensive overseas
deployments.
That is why the Pentagon plans to
dramatically change the shape of US military basing
abroad. Unlike the Cold War era with its large permanent
garrisons - like the over 200,000 troops that were kept
in Germany - the fashion nowadays is for more temporary
forward deployments to Spartan bases. While such plans
were in the works before President George W Bush took
office, September 11, 2001, did much to accelerate them.
The goal is to create a web of far-flung, lean,
forward-operating bases, maintained in peacetime only by
small permanent support units, with fighting forces
deployed from the US when necessary. To that end, a
large reduction of the traditional US military presence
in Europe is necessary.
The Pentagon is quite
open and candid about it. In a speech last December 3,
Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith
said: "President Bush and Secretary Rumsfeld likewise
are thinking about the relatively distant future. In
developing plans to realign our forces abroad they're
not focused on the diplomatic issues of the moment but
on the strategic requirements and opportunities of the
coming decades. Let's be clear about what we are and
what we're not aiming to achieve through transforming
our global defense posture.
"We are not aiming
at retrenching it, curtailing US commitments,
isolationism or unilateralism. On the contrary, our
realignment plans are motivated by appreciation of the
strategic value of defense alliances and partnerships
with other states. We are aiming to increase our ability
to fulfill our international commitments more
effectively. We're aiming to ensure that our alliances
are capable, affordable, sustainable and relevant in the
future. We're not focused narrowly on force levels that
are addressing force capabilities. We are not talking
about fighting in place but moving to the fight. We are
not talking only about basing, we're talking about the
ability to move forces when and where needed.
"In transforming the US global defense posture
we want to make our forces more responsive, given the
world's many strategic uncertainties. We want to benefit
as much as possible from the strategic pre-positioning
of equipment and support. We want to make better use of
our capabilities by thinking of our forces globally
rather than as simply regional assets. We want to be
able to bring more combat capabilities to bear in less
time that is, we want to have the ability to surge our
forces to crisis spots from wherever those forces might
be."
Feith reiterated the point during a speech
a week later in Romania. He said: "What we are
interested in doing as we realign our global posture is
taking advantage of the opportunity, with a much lighter
footprint, to have the kinds of capabilities around the
world that will allow us to react quickly with easily
deployed forces, with lighter forces, to provide
security and shore up our commitments around the world."
Last year saw the removal of some US troops from
Germany and the establishment of new bases in, as
Rumsfeld phrased it, "New Europe", the new North
Atlantic Treaty Organization members Romania and
Bulgaria.
Also it was reported that the 1st
Armored Division, half the US Army's Europe combat
force, traditionally based in Europe, would not return
to its German bases. During the invasion of Iraq, air
bases opened up for US use in Bulgaria's Sarajevo
airfield, where refueling aircraft were based; the
Bulgarian port of Burgas, the Romanian port Constanta
and the Romanian military airfield of Mihail
Kogalniceanu.
US military plans also include
huge ex-Warsaw Pact training ranges and other bases in
Poland and Hungary. Thousands of American and British
troops have been conducting exercises on the Drawsko
Pomorskiy and Wedrzyn training areas since 1996, taking
advantage of the lack of restrictions compared to
Germany. Use of the Krzesiny airbase outside Poznan,
Poland, is also anticipated. In January Poland's Defense
Minister Jerzy Szmajdzinski announced that Poland had
launched negotiations with Washington on hosting US
military bases on its territory.
The Taszar
airbase in Hungary is also a possible candidate for an
increased US presence, as it has supported US operations
in the region since the US entry into Bosnia in 1995.
During his recent Asian tour, General Richard
Meyers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that
the US is likely to use the joint military training
facility it is seeking to establish in northern
Australia to pre-position equipment and material.
The Air Force wants to return to the Cold
War-era practice of basing fighter jets and other strike
and support planes on Guam, the Pacific island that is
in ready striking distance of the Korean peninsula,
according to General William J Begert, commander of
Pacific Air Forces.
An empire that spans
the world Despite this restructuring, the US
military empire is still staggeringly large. The global
"footprint" as it is called, conjuring up interesting
images of just who and what the US treads on, spans the
world.
Currently Pentagon officials are in the
final throes of crafting an updated National Military
Strategy that is expected to acknowledge a need to
redistribute US forces and revamp their chains of
command throughout the globe. "Global sourcing", a term
used to describe the distribution of US forces across
the Earth, is also an issue to be addressed in the new
national military strategy. The new posture is expected
to carry with it a new lingo for bases, including "power
projection hubs", main operating bases and more flexible
and agile "forward operating sites".
Under the
plan, US troops, rather than inhabiting a small number
of large garrisons, would rotate through dozens of small
bases throughout the world on exercises, staying for
only a few weeks or months at a time. Those bases could
serve as launching points for military strikes to
protect US interests or quickly strike out at
terrorists.
Part of this redistribution is what
author Chalmers Johnson calls "Baseworld". Johnson
writes: "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 US military real estate, the Pentagon currently
owns or rents 702 overseas bases in about 130 countries
and has another 6,000 bases in the US and its
territories. Pentagon bureaucrats calculate that it
would require at least [US]$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 $592 billion to replace all
of them. The military high command deploys to its
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 that
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 US military has established
colossal base structures throughout the so-called arc of
instability in the two-and-a-half years since September
11."
Nor does it include new facilities being
built. In Iraq engineers from the 1st Armored Division
are midway through a $800 million project to build half
a dozen camps for the incoming 1st Cavalry Division. The
new outposts, dubbed enduring camps, will improve living
quarters for soldiers and allow the military to return
key infrastructure sites within the Iraqi capital to the
emerging government. According to GlobalSecurity.org
these include such places as Camps Anaconda, Dogwood and
Falcon, just to name a few.
The largest of the
new camps, Camp Victory North, will be twice the size of
Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo - currently one of the largest
overseas posts built since the Vietnam War.
Also
bear in mind that the deployment of military forces
abroad means negotiating complicated legal arrangements,
euphemistically called Status of Forces agreements, so
that US forces remain largely immune from host country
laws. The United States has yet to begin serious
negotiations with Iraqis on an agreement to guarantee
that American troops in Iraq will remain immune from
arrest and prosecution by local authorities once a new
Baghdad government takes over in June.
This was
a way of life for 19th century imperialists, who, for
example, carved out little extraterritorial enclaves all
along the coast of China. This was certainly the case of
the collapsed empire of the Soviet Union, whose military
men led privileged lives elsewhere in the communist
bloc. This is the peacetime way of life of the US
military, whose forces abroad are largely shielded from
local judgments. Increasingly, if the Bush
administration has its way (thanks to bilateral
agreements forced on other nations), American soldiers
in wartime will be responsible to no other body,
certainly not to the new International Criminal Court,
for crimes of war or crimes against humanity.
David Isenberg, a senior analyst with
the Washington-based British American Security
Information Council (BASIC), has a wide background in
arms control and national security issues.
TOMORROW: Counting the cost in dollars and
cents
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Feb 13, 2004
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