Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic

collapse of the Baathist regime in Baghdad also emboldened Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld to use “transformation” to penalize nations that had been, at best, lukewarm about America’s unilateralism—Germany, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, and Turkey—and to reward those whose leaders had welcomed Operation Iraqi Freedom, including such old allies as Japan and Italy but also former communist countries such as Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria. The result was the Department of Defense’s Integrated Global Presence and Basing Strategy, known informally as the “Global Posture Review.”¹⁰ President Bush first mentioned it in a statement on November 21, 2003, in which he pledged to “realign the global posture” of the United States. He reiterated the phrase and elaborated on it on August 16, 2004, in a speech to the annual convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Cincinnati.

Because Bush’s Cincinnati address was part of the 2004 presidential election campaign, his comments were not taken very seriously at the time. While he did say that the United States would reduce its troop strength in Europe and Asia by 60,000 to 70,000, he assured his listeners that this would take a decade to accomplish—well beyond his term in office—and made a series of promises that sounded more like a reenlistment pitch than a statement of strategy. “Over the coming decade, we’ll deploy a more agile and more flexible force, which means that more of our troops will be stationed and deployed from here at home. We’ll move some of our troops and capabilities to new locations, so they can surge quickly to deal with unexpected threats.... It will reduce the stress on our troops and our military families. . . . See, our service members will have more time on the home front, and more predictability and fewer moves over a career. Our military spouses will have fewer job changes, greater stability, more time for their kids and to spend with their families at home.”¹¹

On September 23, 2004, however, Secretary Rumsfeld disclosed the first concrete details of the plan to the Senate Armed Services Committee.¹² With characteristic grandiosity, he described it as “the biggest re-structuring of America’s global forces since 1945.” Quoting then undersecretary Douglas Feith, he added, “During the Cold War we had a strong sense that we knew where the major risks and fights were going to be, so we could deploy people right there. We’re operating now [with] an entirely different concept. We need to be able to do [the] whole range of military operations, from combat to peacekeeping, anywhere in the world pretty quickly.”¹³

Though this may sound plausible enough, in basing terms it opens up a vast landscape of diplomatic and bureaucratic minefields that Rumsfeld’s militarists surely underestimated. In order to expand into new areas, the Departments of State and Defense must negotiate with the host countries such things as Status of Forces Agreements, or SOFAs, which are discussed in detail in the next chapter. In addition, they must conclude many other required protocols, such as access rights for our aircraft and ships into foreign territory and airspace, and Article 98 Agreements. The latter refer to article 98 of the International Criminal Court’s Rome Statute, which allows countries to exempt U.S. citizens on their territory from the ICC’s jurisdiction. Such immunity agreements were congressionally mandated by the American Service-Members’ Protection Act of 2002, even though the European Union holds that they are illegal. Still other necessary accords are acquisitions and cross-servicing agreements or ACSAs, which concern the supply and storage of jet fuel, ammunition, and so forth; terms of leases on real property; levels of bilateral political and economic aid to the United States (so-called host-nation support); training and exercise arrangements (Are night landings allowed? Live firing drills?); and environmental pollution liabilities. When the United States is not present in a country as its conqueror or military savior, as it was in Germany, Japan, and Italy after World War II and in South Korea after the 1953 Korean War armistice, it is much more difficult to secure the kinds of agreements that allow the Pentagon to do anything it wants and that cause a host nation to pick up a large part of the costs of doing so. When not based on conquest, the structure of the American empire of bases comes to look exceedingly fragile.

In its Global Posture Review, the Pentagon now divides its military installations into three types. First are Main Operating Bases (MOBs), which have permanently stationed combat forces, extensive infrastructure (barracks, runways, hangars, port facilities, ammunition dumps), command and control headquarters, and accommodations for families (housing, schools, hospitals, and recreational conveniences). Examples include Ramstein Air Base in Germany (with a 2005 plant replacement value of $3.4 billion and 10,744 uniformed troops and Department of Defense civilians in residence); Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Japan (with a PRV of $4.7 billion and 9,693 personnel); Aviano Air Base in Italy (with a PRV of $807.5 million and 4,786 personnel); and the Yongsan Garrison, in Seoul, South Korea (with a PRV of $1.3 billion and 12,178 personnel), soon to be replaced by Camp Humphreys, located farther south in Korea and so out of missile range of North Korea (with a PRV of $954.3 million and 5,622 personnel).

These bases are often known colloquially as “little Americas,” but the culture they replicate is not that of mainstream America but rather places like South Dakota, Gulf Coast Mississippi, and Las Vegas. For example, even though more than one hundred thousand women live on our overseas bases, including women in the services, spouses, and relatives of military personnel, obtaining an abortion—a constitutionally protected right of American citizens—is prohibited in military hospitals. Since some fourteen thousand sexual assaults or attempted sexual assaults are reported in the military each year, women who become pregnant overseas and want an abortion have no choice but to try the local services, which cannot be either easy or pleasant in parts of our empire these days. Sometimes they must fly home at their own expense.¹⁴

Another difference between the bases abroad and those at home is the presence of military-owned slot machines in officers’ clubs, bowling alleys, and activities centers at overseas facilities. The military takes in more than $120 million per year on a total slot machine cash flow of about $2 billion. According to Diana B. Henriques of the New York Times, “Slot machines have been a fixture of military life for decades. They were banned from domestic military bases in 1951, after a series of scandals. They were removed from Army and Air Force bases in 1972, after more than a dozen people were court martialed for skimming cash from slot machines in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War... . Today, there are approximately 4,150 modern video slot machines at military bases in nine countries.”¹⁵ For example, the enlisted club at Ramstein Air Base is loaded with them. The result has been a serious rise in compulsive gambling and family bankruptcies among our forces deployed abroad.

The second type of overseas bases are called Forward Operation Sites (FOSs). These are major military installations whose importance the Pentagon goes out of its way to play down. Knowing full well that many foreigners see American military facilities as permanent imperialist enclaves, Rumsfeld has said, “We’re trying to find the right phraseology. We know the word ‘base’ is not right for what we do.”¹⁶ Essentially FOSs are smaller MOBs, except that families are not allowed and the troops are supposed to be rotated in and out on six-month, not three-year, tours as at the larger installations.

Examples are the Sembawang port facility in Singapore for our visiting aircraft carriers (with a PRV of $115.9 million and 173 personnel) and Soto Cano Air Base in Honduras, unlisted in the 2005 Base Structure Reportbut one of the U.S. Southern Command’s main operational centers for exercising hegemony over Latin America. Other examples are the British-owned Diego Garcia naval and air base in the Indian Ocean where B-2 bombers are stationed (with a PRV of $2.3 billion and 521 personnel); the thirty-seven-acre Manas Air Base near Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan’s capital, with facilities for 3,000 troops and a 13,800-foot runway originally built for Soviet bombers; and the former French Foreign Legion base in Djibouti at the southern entrance to the Red Sea, known as Camp Lemonier, housing 1,800 mostly Special Forces troops. (In 1962, I visited Djibouti when it was still a Foreign Legion base. It was a hellhole then and, according to American GIs, still is. Today, it contains a “Sensitized Compartmentalized Information Facility”—a billion-dollar civil-military eavesdropping and intelligence center.)¹⁷ In the past, these kinds of bases have usually ended up as permanent enclaves of the United States regardless of what the Defense Department calls them.

The third type of overseas base is the smallest and most austere. The Pentagon has termed these Cooperative Security Locations (CSLs), failing to specify in what sense they are “cooperative” or to whose security they