typical American squadron consists of twenty-four aircraft). With the end of the fighting in 1991, it was allowed to go fallow until the Khobar Towers bombing put it back on the map.
Prince Sultan, surrounded by flat desert with open lines of fire, was a perfect spot to “hide” the American presence. In addition, the air force assigned 10 percent of the 6,000 troops based there after 1996 to “perimeter security.” Even so, F-15s and F-16s on takeoff were under orders to climb as fast as possible to avoid potential attack by surface-to-air missiles. The American troops who served on ninety-day tours almost never left the base. The transfer of U.S. operations to Prince Sultan cost some $500 million. Both before and during the second Iraq war, it was the main base for American surveillance operations using AWACs (airborne warning and control) aircraft and U-2 spy planes.
From the summer of 1996 to 2002, construction at Prince Sultan was continuous. In 1997, the Saudi Ministry of Defense and Aviation awarded Northrop Aviation’s Electronic Sensors and Systems Division a contract worth $60.7 million to set up and integrate new air traffic control, navigation, meteorological, and communications systems. In early 1999, the troops, who had been living in air-conditioned tents, moved into a new 4,257-bed housing facility two miles from the base. The Saudi government paid $112 million for it; hence it remained Saudi government property even when run and maintained by the U.S. Air Force. Facilities included community dining halls with names like Camel Lot and Mirage, a base theater, a gymnasium, a recreation center, an outdoor swimming pool permanently
The major new military construction at Prince Sultan, completed just prior to the war in Afghanistan, was a Combined Air Operations Center (CAOC) with state-of-the-art command and control systems and a Joint Intelligence Center, including three different Internet networks—for unclassified, secret, and allied forces traffic. The air force dedicated the center in June 2001, and in October the Saudi government permitted its use in coordinating air operations against targets in Afghanistan. The hypersecret Air Force Communications Agency supervised its design and installation. The new CAOC at Prince Sultan coordinated air operations with new air bases the United States was just then building in Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. But as the second Iraq war approached, it became unclear whether and for what functions the Saudi government would allow the Americans to use Prince Sultan, so the Pentagon promptly built an elaborate alternative air command center at al- Udeid Air Base in Qatar.31
Typical of life in the spreading empire of bases in the oil lands, days at Prince Sultan were often spent swimming and watching football on TV when not working. Still, the isolation did not necessarily go down well with the troops. In one notorious instance, Lieutenant Colonel Martha McSally, the highest-ranking female pilot in the air force, took the Defense Department to court for requiring her to put on an
The U.S. government has always understood that the presence of our forces in Saudi Arabia was a root cause of al-Qaeda’s terrorist activities against both the monarchy and American targets within and outside the country. Rather than move those forces promptly after 9/11, however, the Bush administration waited until it could disguise what it was doing under cover of normal military redeployments. On April 29, 2003, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his Saudi counterpart, Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, finally announced in Riyadh that the fall of Saddam Hussein meant that America’s military mission in the country was over and that “all combat forces” would be withdrawn. Even so, the Bush administration seemed to have delayed too long. On May 12,2003, terrorists attacked four walled and guarded compounds for foreigners in Riyadh, killing over thirty Americans and Saudis. Moreover, the United States is not actually leaving Prince Sultan or the country—it has retained a small maintenance unit at the air base and the Vinnell Corporation’s training of the Saudi National Guard continues. The U.S. withdrawal was announced with great fanfare on Saudi television, but it is unlikely that anyone believed that American imperialists had actually lost interest in the world’s richest oil-producing nation. As the English historian of imperialism Niall Ferguson observed in an interview with the
Prince Sultan was for some years the base of bases in the Middle East, but the United States had built such a military overcapacity in the gulf region that the post-Iraq war decision to withdraw almost all military personnel from Saudi Arabia had little effect on America’s war-making capability. The proliferation of bases in neighboring Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar alone exceeds any military need the United States might face. And there are still more bases in Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Egypt, Israel, and Djibouti, plus those recently acquired in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan. Before 2003 is over, there will probably be four new American bases in Iraq. The navy also can deploy up to five carrier battle groups, each with approximately seventy-five aircraft, cruise missiles, and atomic weapons, in the Arabian Sea, the Red Sea, and the Persian Gulf. A carrier battle group is composed of the aircraft carrier itself, two cruisers, two to three destroyers, a frigate, an attack submarine, and a combat support ship and is, in essence, a floating base.
On the eve of the second Iraq war, Camp Doha, the army’s major base in Kuwait, was the jumping-off point for a huge ground force waiting for orders to surge across the Iraq border, including the army’s V Corps from Heidelberg, Germany; the First Marine Expeditionary Force from Camp Pendleton, California; the Third Infantry Division (Mechanized) from Fort Stewart, Georgia; three squadrons of Apache attack helicopters; a Special Forces unit; and an advance party of the British First Armored Division. The principal weaponry of these units were 230 Abrams main battle tanks, 120 Bradley fighting vehicles, and 40 Paladin self-propelled 155 mm artillery pieces. General Dynamics manufactures the Abrams tank, which weighs 68.7 tons and costs $4.3 million each. The Bradley vehicle is a 50,000-pound armored “battle taxi” equipped with modern machine guns, antitank rockets, and smoke grenades that is used to ferry troops into combat behind the tanks. The Paladin is the most advanced gun in the army’s arsenal, weighing some 32 tons.
Since the Khobar Towers bombing, one of the army’s main goals has been to replace Camp Doha, which is too close to the capital, Kuwait City, with a more modern prepositioning facility fully protected from possible terrorist attacks. In July 1999, the government of Kuwait began work on that new base, a $200 million facility named Camp Arifjan, located in the desert south of the capital. During 2002, about 10,000 noncombat army personnel were transferred there from Camp Doha. At Arifjan, virtually all the prepositioned equipment for a full army brigade is stored in large warehouses rather than exposed to the desert environment, as at Camp Doha. The Army Corps of Engineers designed the base, which includes modern barracks with shatterproof Mylar glass on all windows and special maintenance bays for tanks. Most of Camp Arifjan was completed during 2002, with only some roads and utilities still to be built. Camp Doha, continuously in use since the first Gulf War, was always understood to be a temporary facility, but Arifjan is evidence that the Americans intend to stay a long time.
Throughout the late 1990s, the army flew a new brigade from the United States or Europe into Kuwait every four months for training. The airfield it used was Ahmed al Jaber Air Base, located just seventy-five miles south of the Iraq border; although the base belongs to the Kuwait air force, it has an area set aside only for U.S. Air Force operations. Until late 1996, our air force deployed its F-15 and F-16 fighters at Kuwait City’s international airport, but after the terrorist attacks in Riyadh and Dhahran, it moved everything to what the troops inevitably call “the Jab.” According to the Global Security Organization, “Ahmed al Jaber Air Base is one hard target. The Air Force
