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2 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Planet Pentagon: The Earth, seas
and skies By Nick Turse
Recently, the Wall Street Journal reported
on a proposal, championed by Defense Secretary
Robert Gates, to reduce the number of US troops in
Iraq in exchange for bipartisan Congressional
support for the long-term (read: more or less
permanent) garrisoning of that country.
The troops are to be tucked away on "large
bases far from Iraq's major cities". This plan
sounded suspiciously similar to one
revealed by Thom Shanker and
Eric Schmitt in the New York Times on April 19,
2003, just as US troops were preparing to enter
Baghdad. Headlined "Pentagon expects long-term
access to four key bases in Iraq", it laid out a
US plan for:
a long-term military relationship
with the emerging government of Iraq, one that
would grant the Pentagon access to ... perhaps
four bases in Iraq that could be used in the
future: one at the international airport just
outside Baghdad; another at Tallil, near
Nasiriya in the south; the third at an isolated
airstrip called H-1 in the western desert, along
the old oil pipeline that runs to Jordan; and
the last at the Bashur air field in the Kurdish
north.
Shortly thereafter,
then-defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld denied any
such plans: "I have never, that I can recall,
heard the subject of a permanent base in Iraq
discussed in any meeting ... " and, while the
bases were being built, the story largely
disappeared from the mainstream media.
Even with the
multi-square-kilometer, multibillion-dollar, state-of-the-art Balad Air
Base and Camp Victory thrown in, however, the
bases in Gates' new plan will be but a drop in the
bucket for an organization that may well be the
world's largest landlord. For many years, the US
military has been gobbling up large swaths of the
planet and huge amounts of just about everything
on (or in) it. So, with the latest Pentagon Iraq
plans in mind, take a quick spin with me around
this Pentagon planet.
Garrisoning the
globe In 2003, Forbes magazine revealed
that media mogul Ted Turner was America's top land
baron - with a total of 1.8 million acres across
the US. The nation's 10 largest landowners, Forbes
reported, "own 10.6 million acres, or one out of
every 217 acres in the country". Impressive as
this total was, the Pentagon puts Turner and the
entire pack of mega-landlords to shame with over
29 million acres in US landholdings. Abroad, the
Pentagon's "footprint" is also that of a giant.
For example, the Department of Defense controls
20% of the Japanese island of Okinawa and,
according to Stars and Stripes, "owns about 25% of
Guam". Mere land ownership, however, is just the
tip of the iceberg.
In his 2004 book,
The Sorrows of Empire, Chalmers Johnson
opened the world's eyes to the size of the
Pentagon's global footprint, noting that the
Department of Defense (DoD) was deploying nearly
255,000 military personnel at 725 bases in 38
countries. Since then, the total number of
overseas bases has increased to at least 766 and,
according to a report by the Congressional
Research Service, may actually be as high as 850.
Still, even these numbers don't begin to capture
the global sprawl of the organization that
unabashedly refers to itself as "one of the
world's largest 'landlords'."
The DoD's
"real property portfolio", according to 2006
figures, consists of a total of 3,731 sites. Over
20% of these sites are located on more than
711,000 acres outside of the US and its
territories. Yet even these numbers turn out to be
a drastic undercount. For example, while a 2005
Pentagon report listed US military sites from
Antigua to Kenya and Peru, some countries with
significant numbers of US bases go entirely
unmentioned - Afghanistan and Iraq, for example.
In Iraq, alone, in mid-2005, US forces
were deployed at some 106 bases, from the massive
Camp Victory, headquarters of the US high command,
to small 500-troop outposts in the country's
hinterlands. None of them made the Pentagon's
list. Nor was there any mention of bases in Jordan
on that list - or in the 2001-2005 reports either.
Yet that nation, as military analyst
William Arkin has pointed out, allowed the
garrisoning of 5,000 US troops at various bases
around the country during the build-up to the war
in Iraq. In addition, some 76 nations have given
the US military access to airports and airfields -
in addition to who knows where else that the
Pentagon forgot to acknowledge or considers
inappropriate for inclusion in its list.
Even without Jordan, Iraq, Afghanistan,
and the more than 20 other nations that, Arkin
noted in early 2004, were "secretly or quietly
providing bases and facilities", the available
statistics do offer a window into a bloated
organization bent on setting up franchises across
the globe. According to 2005 documents, the
Pentagon acknowledges 39 nations with at least one
US base, stations personnel in over 140 countries
around the world, and boasts a physical plant of
at least 571,900 facilities, though some Pentagon
figures show 587,000 "buildings and structures".
Of these, 466,599 are located in the United States
or its territories. In fact, the Department of
Defense owns or leases more than 75% of all
federal buildings in the US.
According to
2006 figures, the army controls the lion's share
of DoD land (52%), with the air force coming in
second (33%), the marines (8%) and the navy (7 %)
bringing up the rear. The army is also tops in
total number of sites (1,742) and total number of
installations (1,659). But when it comes to "large
installations," those whose value tops $1,584
billion, the army is trumped by the air force,
which boasts 43 mega-bases compared to the army's
39. The navy and marines possess only 29 and 10,
respectively. What the navy lacks in big bases of
its own, however, it more than makes up for in
borrowed foreign naval bases and ports - some 251
across the globe.
Diversification
Land and large installations, however, are
not all that the Defense Department owns. Until
relatively recently, the US Navy operated its own
dairy, complete with a herd of Holsteins. Even
though it did get rid of those cows in 1998, it
kept the 865-acre farm tract in Gambrills,
Maryland, and now leases it to Horizon Organic
Dairy.
While it doesn't have a dairy, the
army still operates stables - such as the John C
McKinney Memorial Stables where many of the 44
horses from its ceremonial Caisson Platoon live.
It also has a big farm (the Large Animal Research
Facility). In fact, the Pentagon owns hundreds of
thousands of animals - from rats to dogs to
monkeys. In addition to an unknown number of
animals used for unexplained "other purposes", in
2001 alone, the DoD utilized 330,149 creatures for
various types of experimentation.
Then,
there's the equipment the DoD owns, loads of it.
For instance, it is the unlikely owner of "over
2,050 railcars, know[n] as the Defense Freight
Rail Interchange Fleet". The DoD also reportedly
ships 100,000 sea containers each year and spends
$800 million annually on domestic cargo, primarily
truck and rail shipments. And when it comes to
trucks, the army, alone, has a fleet of 12,700
heavy expanded mobility tactical trucks (huge,
eight-wheeled vehicles used to supply ammunition,
petroleum, oils, and lubricants to other combat
vehicles and weapons systems in the field) and
120,000 Humvees.
All told, according to a
2006 Pentagon report, the DoD had a total of at
least "280 ships, 14,000 aircraft, 900 strategic
missiles, and 330,000 ground combat and tactical
vehicles".
The Defense Logistics Agency
(DLA), the DoD's largest combat support agency
(with operations in 48 of the 50 states and 28
foreign countries) boasts: "If America's forces
eat it, wear it, maintain equipment with it, or
burn it as fuel ... DLA probably provides it". In
fact, the DLA claims that it "manages" some 5.2
million items and maintains an inventory, in its
Defense Distribution Depots (which stretch from
Italy and Japan to Korea and Kuwait), valued at
$94.1 billion.
The DLA runs the Defense
National Stockpile Center (DNSC) which stores 42
"strategic and critical materials" - from zinc,
lead, cobalt, chromium, and mercury (more than 9.7
million pounds of it in 2005) to precious metals
such as platinum, palladium, and even industrial
diamonds - at 20 locations across the US. With a
stockpile valued at over $1.5 billion and $5.7
billion in sales of
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