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2 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Picking up a $170 billion
tab By David Vine
"Are
you monitoring the construction?" asked the
middle-aged man on a bike accompanied by his
dog. "Ah, si," I replied in my barely passable
Italian. "Bene," he answered. Good.
In
front of us, a backhoe's guttural engine whined
into action and empty dump trucks rattled along a
dirt track. The shouts of men vied for attention
with the metallic whirring of drills and saws
ringing in the distance. Nineteen immense cranes
spread across the landscape, with the foothills of
Italy's Southern Alps in the background. More than
100 pieces of earthmoving equipment, 250 workers,
and grids of scaffolding wrapped around what soon
would be 34 new buildings.
We were
standing in front of a massive 145-acre (57
hectare) construction site for a "little America"
rising in Vicenza, an
architecturally renowned
Italian city and UNESCO world heritage site near
Venice. This was Dal Molin, the new military base
the US Army has been readying for the relocation
of as many as 2,000 soldiers from Germany in 2013.
Since 1955, Vicenza has also been home to
another major US base, Camp Ederle. They're among
the more than 1,000 bases the United States uses
to ring the globe (with about 4,000 more in the 50
states and Washington, DC). This complex of
military installations, unprecedented in history,
has been a major, if little noticed, aspect of US
power since World War II.
During the Cold
War, such bases became the foundation for a
"forward strategy" meant to surround the Soviet
Union and push US military power as close to its
borders as possible. These days, despite the
absence of a superpower rival, the Pentagon has
been intent on dotting the globe with scores of
relatively small "lily pad" bases, while
continuing to build and maintain some large bases
like Dal Molin.
Americans rarely think
about these bases, let alone how much of their tax
money - and debt - is going to build and maintain
them. For Dal Molin and related construction
nearby, including a brigade headquarters, two sets
of barracks, a natural-gas-powered energy plant, a
hospital, two schools, a fitness center, dining
facilities, and a mini-mall, taxpayers are likely
to shell out at least half a billion dollars. (All
the while, a majority of locals passionately and
vocally oppose the new base.)
How much
does the United States spend each year occupying
the planet with its bases and troops? How much
does it spend on its global presence? Forced by
congress to account for its spending overseas, the
Pentagon has put that figure at US$22.1 billion a
year. It turns out that even a conservative
estimate of the true costs of garrisoning the
globe comes to an annual total of about $170
billion. In fact, it may be considerably higher.
Since the onset of "the Global War on Terror" in
2001, the total cost for our garrisoning policies,
for our presence abroad, has probably reached $1.8
trillion to $2.1 trillion.
How much do
we spend? By law, the Pentagon must produce
an annual "Overseas Cost Summary" (OCS) putting a
price on the military's activities abroad, from
bases to embassies and beyond. This means
calculating all the costs of military
construction, regular facility repairs, and
maintenance, plus the costs of maintaining one
million US military and Defense Department
personnel and their families abroad - the pay
checks, housing, schools, vehicles, equipment, and
the transportation of personnel and materials
overseas and back, and far, far more.
The
latest OCS, for the 2012 fiscal year ending
September 30th, documented $22.1 billion in
spending, although, at congress's direction, this
doesn't include any of the more than $118 billion
spent that year on the wars in Afghanistan and
elsewhere around the globe.
While $22.1
billion is a considerable sum, representing about
as much as the budgets for the Departments of
Justice and Agriculture and about half the State
Department's 2012 budget, it contrasts sharply
with economist Anita Dancs's estimate of $250
billion. She included war spending in her total,
but even without it, her figure comes to around
$140 billion - still $120 billion more than the
Pentagon suggests.
Wanting to figure out
myself the real costs of garrisoning the planet,
for more than three years, as part of a global
investigation of bases abroad, I've talked to
budget experts, current and former Pentagon
officials, and base budget officers. Many politely
suggested that this was a fool's errand given the
number of bases involved, the complexity of
distinguishing overseas from domestic spending,
the secrecy of Pentagon budgets, and the
"frequently fictional" nature of Pentagon figures.
(The Department of Defense remains the only
federal agency unable to pass a financial audit.)
Ever the fool, and armed only with the
power of searchable PDFs, I nonetheless plunged
into the bizarro world of Pentagon accounting,
where ledgers are sometimes still handwritten and
$1 billion can be a rounding error. I reviewed
thousands of pages of budget documents, government
and independent reports, and hundreds of line
items for everything from shopping malls to
military intelligence to postal subsidies.
Wanting to err on the conservative side, I
decided to follow the methodology congress
mandated for the OCS, while also looking for
overseas costs the Pentagon or congress might have
ignored. It hardly made sense to exclude, for
example, the healthcare costs the Department of
Defense pays for troops on overseas bases,
spending for personnel in Kosovo, or the price tag
for supporting the 550 bases we have in
Afghanistan.
In the spirit of "monitoring
the construction", let me lead you on an
abbreviated account of my quest to come up with
the real costs of occupying planet Earth.
Missing costs Although the
Overseas Cost Summary initially might seem quite
thorough, you'll soon notice that countries well
known to host US bases have gone
missing-in-action. In fact, at least 18 countries
and foreign territories on the Pentagon's own list
of overseas bases go unnamed.
Particularly
surprising is the absence of Kosovo and Bosnia.
The military has had large bases and hundreds of
troops there for more than a decade, with another
Pentagon report showing 2012 costs of $313.8
million. According to that report, the OCS also
understates costs for bases in Honduras and
Guantแnamo Bay by about a third, or $85 million.
And then other oddities appear: in places
like Australia and Qatar, the Pentagon says it has
funds to pay troops but no money for "operations
and maintenance" to turn the lights on, feed
people, or do regular repairs. Adjusting for these
costs adds an estimated $36 million.
As a
start, I found $436 million for missing
countries and costs.
That's not
much compared to $22 billion and chump change in
the context of the whole Pentagon budget, but it's
just a beginning.
At congress's direction,
the Pentagon also omits the costs of bases in the
oft-forgotten US territories - Puerto Rico, Guam,
American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, and
the US Virgin Islands. This is strange because the
Pentagon considers them "overseas". More
important, as economist Dancs says, "The United
States retains territories... primarily for the
purposes of the military and projecting military
power." Plus, they are, well, literally overseas.
Conservatively, this adds $3 billion
in total military spending to the OCS.
However, there are more quasi-US
territories in the form of truly forgotten Pacific
Ocean island nations in "compacts of free
association" with the United States - the Marshall
Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, and
Palau. Ever since it controlled these islands as
"strategic trust territories" after World War II,
the US has enjoyed the right to establish military
facilities on them, including the nuclear test
site on the Bikini Atoll and the Ronald Reagan
Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site elsewhere in
the Marshalls.
This comes in exchange for
yearly aid payments from the Office of Insular
Affairs, adding another $571 million and yielding
total costs of $3.6 billion for territories
and Pacific island nations.
Speaking of the oceans, at congress's
instruction, the Pentagon excludes the cost of
maintaining naval vessels overseas. But Navy and
Marine Corps vessels are essentially floating (and
submersible) bases used to maintain a powerful
military presence on (and under) the seas. A
very conservative estimate for these costs adds
another $3.8 billion.
Then there
are the costs of Navy prepositioned ships at
anchor around the world. Think of them as
warehouse-bases at sea, stocked with weaponry, war
materiel, and other supplies. And don't forget
Army prepositioned stocks. Together, they come to
an estimated $604 million a year. In addition, the
Pentagon appears to omit some $861 million for
overseas "sealift" and "airlift" and "other
mobilization" expenses. All told, the bill grows
by: $5.3 billion for Navy vessels and
personnel plus seaborne and airborne
assets.
Also strangely missing
from the Cost Summary is that little matter of
healthcare costs. Overseas costs for the Defense
Health Program and other benefits for personnel
abroad add an estimated $11.7 billion yearly. And
then there's $538 million in military and family
housing construction that the Pentagon also
appears to overlook in its tally.
So too,
we can't forget about shopping on base, because we
the taxpayers are subsidizing those iconic
Walmart-like PX (Post Exchange) shopping malls on
bases worldwide. Although the military is fond of
saying that the PX system pays for itself because
it helps fund on-base recreation programs,
Pentagon leaders neglect to mention that the PXs
get free buildings and land, free utilities, and
free transportation of goods to overseas
locations. They also operate tax-free.
While there's no estimate for the value of
the buildings, land, and utilities that taxpayers
provide, the exchanges reported $267 million in
various subsidies for 2011. (Foregone federal
taxes might add $30 million or more to that
figure.) Add in as well postal subsidies of at
least $71 million and you have $12.6 billion
for health care, military and family housing,
shopping and postal subsidies.
Another Pentagon exclusion is rent paid to
other countries for the land we garrison. Although
a few countries like Japan, Kuwait, and South
Korea actually pay the United States to subsidize
our garrisons - to the tune of $1.1 billion in
2012 - far more common, according to base expert
Kent Calder, "are the cases where the United
States pays nations to host bases".
Given
the secretive nature of basing agreements and the
complex economic and political trade-offs involved
in base negotiations, precise figures are
impossible to find. However, Pentagon-funded
research indicates that 18% of total foreign
military and economic aid goes toward buying base
access. That swells our invoice by around $6.3
billion. Payments to NATO of $1.7 billion "for the
acquisition and construction of military
facilities and installations" and other purposes,
brings us to: $6.9 billion in net "rent"
payments and NATO contributions.
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