It may not be wrong to say that military bases of the United States are the key
pieces of the global war machine, but people don’t hear about these very often.
It is estimated 800 US military bases are located around the globe that play an
essential role in turning the whole world into a bloody battlefield. These
bases are located in more than seventy countries around the world and represent
a mighty military presence, yet rarely acknowledged in US political discourse.
The Marine Corps Air Station Futenma in Okinawa might
occasionally grab a headline thanks to sustained and vigorous
anti-base protests, and US military bases in Guam might briefly make news
due to public opposition to “Valiant Shield” war exercises that have
taken place on the US colony during the pandemic. But, overwhelmingly, foreign
bases simply are not discussed.
They are immutable, unremarkable facts, rarely considered
even during elections that repeatedly invokes concepts like “democracy” and “endless
war” and, thanks to a raging pandemic and climate crisis, raises existential
questions about what United States is and should be.
The people living in the countries and US colonies impacted
by these bases — the workers who build their plumbing systems, latrines, and
labor in the sex trades that often spring up around them, the residents
subjected to environmental toxins and war exercises — simply do not exist.
These military bases hold the key to understanding why the
United States has consistently been in some state of war or military invasion
for nearly every year of its existence as a country.
US military bases around the world, from Diego Garcia to
Djibouti, are nuts and bolts in the war machine itself. Military bases provide
the logistical, supply, and combat support that has allowed the United States
to turn the whole world into its battlefield. They make conflict more likely,
and then more wars lead to more military bases, in a vicious cycle of expansion
and empire. Put another way, “bases frequently beget wars, which can beget more
bases, which can beget more wars, and so on.”
While the idea that the global expansion of military bases
corresponds with the rise of US empire may seem obvious, it is both consequence
and cause. The way global military positions spread — which are always sold to
the public as defensive — are by their very nature, offensive and
become their own, self-fulfilling ecosystems of conquest.
Just as the induced demand principle shows, building more
lanes on highways actually increases traffic, United States of
War makes the argument that military bases themselves incentivize and
perpetuate military aggression, coups, and meddling.
The trajectory toward empire started with white settler
expansion within the United States. In 1785, the US Army initiated what “would
become a century-long continent-wide fort-construction program. These forts
were used to launch violent invasions of Native American lands, to protect
white settler towns and cities, and to force Native Americans further and
further away from the East Coast.
They were also used to expand the fur trade, which, in turn,
encouraged other settlers to keep moving west, with some forts functioning in
part as trading posts. The famed expedition of Lewis and Clark was a military
mission to collect geographic data that would be used for more “fort
construction, natural resource exploitation and westward colonization by
settlers.”
While the United States was expanding its frontier, its Navy
was also pursuing fort construction overseas, from North Africa’s Barbary Coast
to Chile, often for the purpose of securing trade advantages. In the thirty
years following the war of 1812 — primarily a war of US expansion — settlers
pushed westward within the United States, building infrastructure as they went:
roads, trails, and more than sixty major forts west of the Mississippi River by
the 1850s. After the United States went to war with Mexico, army bases were
constructed in the annexed territory. Forts in Wyoming protected wagon trails, allowing
settlers to expand through the western United States.
The violent conquest and massacre of Native Americans did
not stop during the Civil War, and it escalated from 1865 to 1898, when the US
Army fought no fewer than 943 distinct engagements against Native peoples,
ranging from skirmishes to full-scale battles in twelve separate campaigns. White
supremacist policies were particularly pronounced in California, but took place
across the West. After 1876, when President Ulysses S. Grant turned over Native
Americans to the War Department, Fort Leavenworth was transformed into a
prisoner of war camp for the Nimi’ipuu tribe.
Over almost 115 consecutive years of US wars against indigenous
nations, US military forts played a consistent role in protecting white settler
pillaging and conquest.
The War of 1898 was the start of a new form of overseas
empire which saw the country expanded across the continent with the help of US
Army forts and near-continuous war. In some cases, it’s possible to draw a
direct line between expansion within the United States and conquest abroad.
US Army waged brutal battles against the Kiowa, Comanche,
Sioux, Nez Perce, and Apache tribes, then ordered cavalry to massacre as many
as three hundred Lakota Sioux in 1890, and then violently put down the Pullman,
Illinois railroad workers strike in 1894.
A bloody counterinsurgency war in the Philippines was aimed
at defeating its independence movement. Similar continuity between domestic and
global repression can be found today as counterinsurgency tactics and
military weapons and equipment are used by US police departments.
Organized labor, immigrants, recently freed slaves and indigenous
peoples at home and abroad were all subdued by the same military and police
forces making way for white settlement and capital expansion.
After seizing Spanish colonies during the 1898 war, the US
began to pursue a new form of imperialism that was less dependent on the
creation of new formal colonies and more dependent on informal, less overtly
violent — but violent nonetheless — political and economic tools backed by
military might, including bases abroad. The US built up the military presence
in the Philippines to seventy thousand troops, using these forces to help put
down China’s Boxer rebellion, and used its military might to intervene
ruthlessly in Panama.
World War II saw the dramatic expansion of military bases,
an era commencing in 1940, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a deal
with Prime Minister Winston Churchill to trade naval destroyers for
ninety-nine-year leases in eight British colonies, all located in the Western
Hemisphere. In the immediate aftermath of the war, the US temporarily shrank
military personnel spending, and returned roughly half its foreign bases.
Yet the basic global infrastructure of bases remained
entrenched and a permanent war system was established. During the post–World
War II era of decolonization, the US used its military base network and
economic influence, buttressed by new institutions like the World Bank and
International Monetary Fund, to protect its preeminence.
During the Cold War, overseas base expansion became central
to the goals of containment and forward positioning, premised on the idea that
global bases allow quick response to threats and rapid interventions and
deployments in crises. While giving the illusion of increased safety, these
bases actually made foreign wars more likely because they made it easier to
wage such wars. In turn, conflict increased construction of US bases.
The Korean War, which killed between three and four million
people, prompted a 40 percent increase in the number of US bases abroad, and
increasing concern about maintaining bases in the Pacific Ocean. Bases also
spread across Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East.
CIA stations expanded alongside military bases, and
clandestine meddling and supporting coups became a preferred tool of US Empire.
When the US waged brutal war in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, it was assisted by
hundreds of bases in Japan, Okinawa, the Philippines, and Guam.
The fate of the roughly one thousand Chagossians (descendants
of Indian indentured workers and enslaved Africans) from Diego Garcia, an
island in the Indian Ocean, spotlights the remarkable cruelty the US during
this period of strategic island approach, whereby the US established control
over small, colonial islands.
After making a secret agreement with Britain in 1966 to
purchase basing rights, the US and UK governments expelled its residents
between 1967 to 1973, leaving them trapped on Mauritius and Seychelles, without
jobs or homes, many of their possessions lost to them forever.
During some phases of the expulsion, residents were forced
onto cargo ships, their dogs killed. By 1973, the US was using this base to
support Israel in its 1973 war with Arab nations. To this day,” Vine notes, Chagossians
and many others among the displaced are struggling to return home, to win some
justice and recompense for what they have suffered.”
The United States used bases from Diego Garcia to Oman to
invade Afghanistan in 2001 and, once there, established more bases, and took
over former Soviet ones. Likewise, bases from Kuwait to Jordan to Bahrain to
Diego Garcia were critical for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, where the US
immediately began building bases and installations post-invasion.
While the Bush-Cheney administration closed some bases in
Europe, overall spending on bases reached record highs during their time in
office. The war with ISIS has seen troops return to Iraq, and the acquisition
of bases, even after the Iraqi parliament in 2011 rejected a deal to keep
fifty-eight bases in the country.
Since September 11, 2001, the US has also expanded its
presence in Africa, building “lily pads” across the continent — smaller
profile, somewhat secretive installations, suggesting a frog jumping from lily
pad to lily pad toward its prey. US bases have been central to waging the
2011 NATO war in Libya, drone strikes in Yemen, military intervention in
Somalia and Cameroon. The military has been conducting a variety of operations
regularly in at least 49 African countries.
Meanwhile, base spending has played a key role in the steady
uptick of overall military spending. In addition to the direct harm they do
through enabling war, bases are associated with incredible fraud and waste, and
base contractors renowned for their significant political contributions. This
political force, and self-contained logic of sustenance and expansion, is the
key to understanding how the Military Industrial Complex can be like
Frankenstein’s monster, taking on a life of its own thanks to the spending it
commands.
The War on Terror ethos, in which the whole world is
considered a US battlefield and the US grants itself broad latitude to wage
preemptive war, has come to define US foreign policy. George W. Bush talked
about the importance of having a military ready to strike at a moment’s notice
in any dark corner of the world to the Middle East, Africa, and Muslim areas of
Asia.
Today, the war on ISIS — responsible for significant civilian
deaths — continues, so does brinkmanship with Iran, hedging against China,
brutal war in Afghanistan, and US support for the war on Yemen, which has
unleashed a profound humanitarian crisis.
