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2 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA The lily-pad
strategy 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 was 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 US 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 US
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 21st century US 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
US 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 US 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 US 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 US global dominance by doing far more
with less in an increasingly competitive, ever
more multi-polar world. Central as it is becoming
to the long-term US stance, this global-basing
reset policy has, remarkably, received almost no
public attention, nor significant congressional
oversight. Meanwhile, as the arrival of the first
casualties from Africa shows, the US 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 US 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 is 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 US-led
international force still occupies more than 450
bases. In total, the US 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 US$250 billion annually maintaining
bases and troops overseas.
Some
bases, like Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, date to the late
19th century. Most were built or occupied during
or just after World War II on every continent,
including Antarctica. Although the US 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
George W 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, US 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 US
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 US use of Clark and Subic, as well as
other repair and supply hubs from the Vietnam War
era. In a sign of changing times, US 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 is 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 US
missile defense system and to which US 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 US bases that have
encircled China for decades in Japan, South Korea,
Guam, and Hawaii.
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