millions of dollars. Second, it gives details on some 725 foreign bases in thirty-eight countries, of which it defines 17 as “large installations” (having a PRV greater than $1.5 billion), 18 as “medium installations” (having a PRV between $800 million and $1.5 billion), and 690 as “small installations” (having a PRV of less than $800 million). According to the Department of Defense, “The PRV represents the reported cost of replacing the facility and its supporting infrastructure using today’s costs (labor and material) and standards (methods and codes).”
Although one must doubt the accuracy of any such estimates, particularly given the Pentagon’s record of incompetent accounting, they are nonetheless useful for making comparisons. Thus, according to Pentagon specialists, Ramstein Air Force Base near Kaiserslautern, Germany, the largest NATO air base in Europe, has a PRV of $2,458.8 million; whereas Kadena Air Force Base in Okinawa, the largest U.S. facility in East Asia, has a PRV nearly twice as large, at $4,758.5 million (and its adjoining Kadena Ammunition Storage Annex adds another $964.3 million). These are astronomical sums even though they probably underestimate real replacement values. In its detailed reports by country, the BSR lists foreign bases only if they are larger than ten acres and have a PRV greater than $10 million. Sites that do not meet these criteria are aggregated for each country as “other.” Only places with null or zero PRVs are not counted at all. These include small sites such as single, unmanned navigational aids or air force strategic missile emplacements. The 725 foreign bases, including the installations listed as “other,” have a total replacement value, according to the Pentagon, of $118 billion. This is a mind-boggling aggregation of foreign real estate and buildings possessed by the United States.
By contrast, the DoD’s Manpower Report does not list individual bases, only countries. It found that in September 2001, the United States was deploying a total of 254,788 military personnel in 153 countries. When civilians and dependents are included, the number doubles to 531,227. Since the Manpower Report does not say what the assignments are within a particular foreign country, one cannot distinguish between a country with American bases and a country with merely some embassy guards, a few special forces on a training mission, and perhaps some communications clerks. Therefore, it seems useful to consider only those countries with at least a hundred active-duty military personnel. These are likely to be assigned to bases. The total then, according to the DoD’s Manpower Report, is thirty-three, which comes close to the BSR’s list of significant bases in thirty-eight countries.
There are some major discrepancies between the BSR and the Manpower Report that are not easily explained. To give one important example, the BSR for September 2001 does not have any entries for Bosnia-Herzegovina or for Yugoslavia, Serbia, or Kosovo. The Manpower Report for the same month gives 3,100 for the number of army troops in Bosnia and 5, 675 for the number of army troops in the Serbian province of Kosovo. It is possible that Camp Eagle in Bosnia (built in 1995-96) and Camps Bondsteel and Monteith in Kosovo (both of which went up in 1999) were omitted intentionally in order to disguise their purpose—of protecting oil pipelines rather than contributing to international peacekeeping operations.
With such caveats, the table on pages 156-160 offers a snapshot of the American empire in terms of military personnel deployed overseas just before September 11, 2001. In the months following, the United States radically expanded its deployments everywhere but particularly in Afghanistan, elsewhere in Central Asia, and in the Persian Gulf.
Numerous bases are “secret” or else disguised in ways designed to keep them off the official books, but we know with certainty that they exist, where many of them are, and more or less what they do. They are either DoD- operated listening posts of the National Security Agency (NSA) and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), both among the most secretive of our intelligence organizations, or covert outposts of the military-petroleum complex. Officials never discuss either of these subjects with any degree of candor, but that does not alter the point that spying and oil are obsessive interests of theirs.
The United States operates so many overseas espionage bases that Michael Moran of NBC News once suggested, “Today, one could throw a dart at a map of the world and it would likely land within a few hundred miles of a quietly established U.S. intelligence-gathering operation....
FOREIGN DEPLOYMENTS OF U.S. MILITARY PERSONNEL AT THE TIME OF THE
TERRORIST ATTACKS ON THE WORLD TRADE CENTER AND THE PENTAGON
Only those countries with at least 100 active-duty U. S. military personnel are listed. Totals of the listed countries do not add up to the regional totals because the latter include all countries with any U.S. troops, regardless of the size of the contingent.
America’s surveillance network has grown so vast and formidable that in some respects it is feared as much as U.S. weaponry itself.”6 Because of secrecy the total number of these bases is impossible to know, but we are able to gain some idea of their extent and identify the most important ones. They are almost invariably located on foreign military installations, staffed by our military personnel but disguised as belonging to the country in which they are sited. They are normally listening and retrieval posts that transmit raw intercepts back to NSA headquarters at Fort George Meade, Maryland, or to the NSA’s top spy base, RAF Menwith Hill, located on the moorlands near Harrogate in North Yorkshire, England (“the largest spy station in the world,” as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament calls it).
There are three main forms of telecommunications. The first consists of telephone calls, faxes, e-mail, Internet connections, telegrams, and telexes sent and received via communications satellites owned and operated by the International Telecommunications Satellite organization (Intelsat), which is a treaty-based international organization. These satellites are in geostationary orbits so that they always maintain the same position in space relative to the earth. Created in 1964, Intelsat orbited its first satellite in 1967; as of 1999, it operated nineteen satellites. By 2002, 24 percent of its stock was owned by the Lockheed Martin Corporation. It is fairly simple, if expensive, to train an antenna from a ground listening post on an Intelsat or other communications satellite and eavesdrop on what it is sending and receiving. To get full coverage, however, listening posts need to be placed at strategic points all over the globe.
The volume of messages thus intercepted is huge. According to the director of the NSA, Lieutenant General Michael V. Hayden of the air force, during the 1990s international telephone traffic rose from an already impressive 38 billion minutes a year to over 100 billion a year. During 2002, the world’s population will spend over 180 billion minutes on the phone in
