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2 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Picking up a $170 billion
tab By David
Vine
Although the OCS must report the costs
of all military operations abroad, the Pentagon
omits $550 million for counter-narcotics
operations and $108 million for humanitarian and
civic aid. Both have, as a budget document
explains about humanitarian aid, helped "maintain
a robust overseas presence", while the military
"obtains access to regions important to US
interests". The Pentagon also spent $24 million on
environmental projects abroad to monitor and
reduce on-base pollution, dispose of hazardous and
other waste, and for "initiatives... in support of
global basing/operations." So the bill now grows
by $682 million for counternarcotics,
humanitarian, and environmental programs.
The Pentagon tally of the price of
occupying the planet also
ignores the costs of
secret bases and classified programs overseas. Out
of a total Pentagon classified budget of $51
billion for 2012, I conservatively use only the
estimated overseas portion of operations and
maintenance spending, which adds $2.4 billion.
Then there's the $15.7 billion Military
Intelligence Program. Given that US law generally
bars the military from engaging in domestic
spying, I estimate that half this spending, $7.9
billion, took place overseas.
Next, we
have to add in the CIA's paramilitary budget,
funding activities including secret bases in
places like Somalia, Libya, and elsewhere in the
Middle East, and its drone assassination program,
which has grown precipitously since the onset of
the war on terror. With thousands dead (including
hundreds of civilians), how can we not consider
these military costs? In an e-mail, John Pike,
director of GlobalSecurity.org, told me that
"possibly a third" of the CIA's estimated budget
of $10 billion may now go to paramilitary costs,
yielding $13.6 billion for classified
programs, military intelligence, and CIA
paramilitary activities.
Last but
certainly not least comes the real biggie: the
costs of the 550 bases the US built in
Afghanistan, as well as the last three months of
life for our bases in Iraq, which once numbered
505 before the US pullout from that country (that
is, the first three months of fiscal year 2012).
While the Pentagon and congress exclude these
costs, that's like calculating the New York
Yankees' payroll while excluding salaries for each
year's huge free-agent signings.
Conservatively following the OCS
methodology used for other countries, but
including costs for healthcare, military pay in
the base budget, rent, and "other programs," we
add an estimated: $104.9 billion for bases
and military presence in Afghanistan and other war
zones.
Having started with the OCS
figure of $22.1 billion, the grand total now has
reached: $168 billion
($169,963,153,283 to be exact).
That's nearly an extra
$150 billion. Even if you exclude war costs - and
I think the Yankees show why that's a bad idea -
the total still reaches $65.1 billion, or nearly
three times the Pentagon's calculation.
But don't for a second think that that's
the end of our garrisoning costs. In addition to
spending likely hidden in the nooks and crannies
of its budget, there are other irregularities in
the Pentagon's accounting. Costs for 16 countries
hosting US bases but left out of the OCS entirely,
including Colombia, El Salvador, and Norway, may
total more than $350 million.
The costs of
the military presence in Colombia alone could
reach into the tens of millions in the context of
more than $8.5 billion in Plan Colombia funding
since 2000. The Pentagon also reports costs of
less than $5 million each for Yemen, Israel,
Uganda, and the Seychelles Islands, which seems
unlikely and could add millions more.
When
it comes to the general US presence abroad, other
costs are too difficult to estimate reliably,
including the price of Pentagon offices in the
United States, embassies, and other government
agencies that support bases and troops overseas.
So, too, US training facilities, depots,
hospitals, and even cemeteries allow overseas
bases to function.
Other spending includes
currency-exchange costs, attorneys' fees and
damages won in lawsuits against military personnel
abroad, short-term "temporary duty assignments",
US-based troops participating in exercises
overseas, and perhaps even some of NASA's military
functions, space-based weapons, a percentage of
recruiting costs required to staff bases abroad,
interest paid on the debt attributable to the past
costs of overseas bases, and Veterans
Administration costs and other retirement spending
for military personnel who served abroad.
Beyond my conservative estimate, the true
bill for garrisoning the planet might be closer to
$200 billion a year.
'Spillover
costs' Those, by the way, are just the
costs in the US government's budget. The total
economic costs to the US economy are higher still.
Consider where the taxpayer-funded salaries of the
troops at those bases go when they eat or drink at
a local restaurant or bar, shop for clothing, rent
a local home, or pay local sales taxes in Germany,
Italy, or Japan. These are what economists call
"spillover" or "multiplier effects". When I
visited Okinawa in 2010, for example, Marine Corps
representatives bragged about how their presence
contributes $1.9 billion annually to the local
economy through base contracts, jobs, local
purchases, and other spending. Although the
figures may be overstated, it's no wonder members
of congress like Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison have
called for a new "Build in America" policy to
protect "the fiscal health of our nation".
And the costs are still broader when one
considers the trade-offs, or opportunity costs,
involved. Military spending creates fewer jobs per
million dollars expended than the same million
invested in education, healthcare, or energy
efficiency - barely half as many as investing in
schools.
Even worse, while military
spending clearly provides direct benefits to the
Lockheed Martins and KBRs of the
military-industrial complex, these investments
don't, as economist James Heintz says, boost the
"long-run productivity of the rest of the private
sector" the way infrastructure investments do.
To adapt a famous line from president
Dwight Eisenhower: every base that is built
signifies in the final sense a theft. Indeed,
think about what Dal Molin's half a billion
dollars in infrastructure could have done if put
to civilian uses. Again echoing Ike, the cost of
one modern base is this: 260,000 low-income
children getting healthcare for one year or 65,000
going to a year of Head Start or 65,000 veterans
receiving VA care for a year.
A
different kind of 'spillover' Bases also
create a different "spillover" in the financial
and non-financial costs host countries bear. In
2004, for example, on top of direct "burden
sharing" payments, host countries made in-kind
contributions of $4.3 billion to support US bases.
In addition to agreeing to spend billions of
dollars to move thousands of US Marines and their
families from Okinawa to Guam, the Japanese
government has paid nearly $1 billion to
soundproof civilian homes near US air bases on
Okinawa and millions in damages for successful
noise pollution lawsuits.
Similarly, as
base expert Mark Gillem reports, between 1992 and
2003, the Korean and US governments paid $27.3
million in damages because of crimes committed by
US troops stationed in Korea. In a single
three-year period, US personnel "committed 1,246
criminal acts, from misdemeanors to felonies".
As these crimes indicate, costs for local
communities extend far beyond the economic.
Okinawans have recently been outraged by what
appears to be another in a long series of rapes
committed by US troops. Which is just one example
of how, from Japan to Italy, there are what Anita
Dancs calls the "costs of rising hostility" over
bases. Environmental damage pushes the financial
and non-financial toll even higher. The creation
of a base on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean sent
all of the local Chagossian people into exile.
So, too, US troops and their families bear
some of those non-financial costs due to frequent
moves and separation during unaccompanied tours
abroad, along with attendant high rates of
divorce, domestic violence, substance abuse,
sexual assault, and suicide.
"No one, no
one likes it," a stubbly-faced old man told me as
I was leaving the construction site. He remembered
the Americans arriving in 1955 and now lives
within sight of the Dal Molin base. "If it were
for the good of the people, okay, but it's not for
the good of the people."
"Who pays? Who
pays?" he asked. "Noi," he said. We do.
Indeed, from that $170 billion to the
costs we can't quantify, we all do.
David Vine, a Tom Dispatch
regular, is assistant professor of anthropology at
American University, in Washington, DC. He is the
author of Island of Shame: The Secret History
of the US Military Base on Diego Garcia
(Princeton University Press, 2009). He has
written for the New York Times, the Washington
Post, the Guardian, and Mother Jones, among other
places. He is currently completing a book about
the more than 1,000 US military bases located
outside the United States. To read a detailed
description of the calculations described in this
article and view a chart of the costs of the US
military presence abroad, visitwww.davidvine.net.
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