Page 2 of 2 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Planet Pentagon: The Earth,
seas and skies By Nick Turse
excess
commodities since 1993, the DNSC claims that there
is "no private sector company in the world that
sells this wide range of commodities and
materials".
All told, the DoD owns up to
having "[o]ver $1 trillion in assets [and] $1.6
trillion in liabilities". This is, no doubt, a
gross underestimate given the DoD's historic
penchant for flawed book-keeping and the fact
that, according to a study by its own
inspector general, it cannot
even account for at least $1 trillion dollars in
money spent - or perhaps, according to former
defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, as much as $2.3
trillion.
Cooking the books and stashing
cash is fitting enough for an American
organization, in the age of Enron, that thinks of
itself not just as a government agency but, in its
own words, as "America's oldest company, largest
company, busiest company and most successful
company". In fact, on its website, the DoD makes
the point that it easily bests Wal-Mart,
ExxonMobil and General Motors in terms of budget
and staff.
It's got the whole world in
its hands In addition to assembling a
dizzying array of assets, from tungsten to tubas -
in 2005 alone, it spent more than $6 million on
sheet music, musical instruments, and accessories
- the Pentagon owns a great deal of housing:
300,000 units worldwide. By its own admission, it
is also a slumlord par excellence - with an
inventory of "180,000 inadequate family housing
units". According to the Office of the Deputy
Under Secretary of Defense (Installations &
Environment):
Approximately 33% of all [military]
families live on-base, in housing that is often
dilapidated, too small, lacking in modern
facilities - almost 49% (or 83,000 units) are
substandard.
Meanwhile, the Department
of Defense's own home, the Pentagon, bests the
Sultan of Brunei's Istana Nurul Iman palace, the
largest private residence in the world - 3,705,793
to 2,152,782 square feet of occupiable space.
The DoD likes to boast that the Pentagon
is "virtually a city in itself" - with 30 miles of
access highways, 200 acres of lawn space. It
includes a five-acre center courtyard, 17.5 miles
of corridors, 16 parking lots (with an estimated
8,770 parking spaces), seven snack bars, two
cafeterias, one dining room, a post office,
"credit union, travel agency, dental offices,
ticket offices, blood donor center, housing
referral office, and 30 other retail shops and
services", a chapel, a heliport, and numerous
libraries. Moreover, says the DoD, the Pentagon
consumed a huge portion of its natural
environment, its concrete reportedly contains
"680,000 tons of sand and gravel from the nearby
Potomac River".
In value, the Pentagon's
other properties are almost as impressive. The
combined worth of the world's two most expensive
homes, the $138 million 103-room "Updown Court" in
Windlesham, Surrey in the United Kingdom and Saudi
Prince Bandar bin Sultan's $135 million Aspen ski
lodge don't even come close to the price tag on
Ascension Auxiliary Airfield, located on a small
island off the coast of St. Helena (the place of
Napoleon Bonaparte's exile and death).
It
has an estimated replacement value of over $337
million. Other high-priced facilities include Camp
Ederle in Italy at $544 million; Incirlik Air Base
in Turkey at almost $1.2 billion; and Thule Air
Base in Greenland at $2.8 billion; while the US
Naval Air Station in Keflavik, Iceland is
appraised at $3.4 billion and the various military
facilities in Guam are valued at more than $11
billion.
Still, to begin to grasp the
Pentagon's global immensity, it helps to look,
again, at its land holdings - all 120,191 square
kilometers which are almost exactly the size of
North Korea (120,538 square kilometers). These
holdings are larger than any of the following
nations: Liberia, Bulgaria, Guatemala, South
Korea, Hungary, Portugal, Jordan, Kuwait, Israel,
Denmark, Georgia, or Austria. The 7,518 square
kilometers of 20 micro-states - the Vatican,
Monaco, Nauru, Tuvalu, San Marino, Liechtenstein,
Saint Kitts and Nevis, Maldives, Malta, Saint
Vincent and the Grenadines, Barbados, Antigua and
Barbuda, Seychelles, Andorra, Bahrain, Saint
Lucia, Singapore, the Federated States of
Micronesia, Kiribati and Tonga - combined pales in
comparison to the 9,307 square kilometers of just
one military base, White Sands Missile Range.
Downsizing? While it has been
setting up hundreds of bases across the globe to
support ongoing wars, the Pentagon has also been
restructuring its forces in an effort to reduce
troop levels at old Cold War mega-bases and close
down less strategically useful sites. Does this
mean less Pentagon control in the world?
Don't bet on it. In fact, the US military
is exploring long-term options to dominate the
planet as never before. Previously, the DoD has
only maintained a moving presence on the high
seas. This may change. The Pentagon is now
considering - and planning for - future
"sea-basing". No longer just a ship, a fleet, or
"prepositioned material" stationed on the world's
oceans, sea-bases will be "a hybrid
system-of-systems consisting of concepts of
operations, ships, forces, offensive and defensive
weapons, aircraft, communications and logistics"/
The notion of such bases is increasingly
popular within the military due to the fact that
they "will help to assure access to areas where US
military forces may be denied access to support
[land] facilities". After all, as a report by the
Defense Science Board pointed out, "[S]eabases are
sovereign [and] not subject to alliance vagaries."
Imagine a future where the people of countries at
odds with U.S. policies suddenly find America's
"massive seaborne platforms" floating just outside
their territorial waters.
With a
real-estate portfolio that includes the earth and
the sea, the sky would, quite literally, be the
limit for the DoD. According to Noah Shachtman,
editor of Wired's "Danger Room" blog, the "US Air
Force transformation flight plan" of 2004 outlined
what "analysts call the most detailed picture
since the end of the Cold War of the Pentagon's
efforts to turn outer space into a battlefield ...
the report makes US dominance of the heavens a top
Pentagon priority in the new century". As the US
military's outer-space policy statement puts it,
"Freedom of action in space is as important to the
United States as air power and sea power."
When you're focused on effectively
controlling a planet, the idea of occupying Iraq,
a country about the size of the state of
California, for the next decade or five, must seem
like a small thing. In practice, however, the
global landlord on the Potomac has found property
values in Iraq steep indeed. As all now know, it
has been fought to a standstill there by
modest-sized bands of guerillas lacking air power,
sea power, or high-tech spy satellites in outer
space.
The Pentagon may be landlord to
massive swaths of the globe, but from Vietnam to
Laos, Beruit to Somalia, US forces have also found
themselves evicted by neighborhood residents from
properties they were prepared to consider their
own. The question remains: Will Iraq be added to
the list of permanently occupied territories and
take on the look of long-garrisoned South Korea as
Secretary of Defense Gates and President Bush have
urged - or will it be added to a growing list of
places that have effectively resisted paying the
rent on Planet Pentagon?
Nick
Turse is the associate editor and research
director of Tomdispatch.com. He has written for
the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco
Chronicle, the Nation, the Village Voice, and
regularly for Tomdispatch.com. His first book,
The Complex, an exploration of the new
military-corporate complex in America, is due
out in the American Empire Project Series by
Metropolitan Books in 2008.
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