The Pentagon's New Generation of Secret Military Bases

[globaleconomicollaps]

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/...s-tom-dispatch

Despite the tone of the article, I think the take home here is the downsizing of the military.

[BadJuju]

Re: The Pentagon's New Generation of Secret Military Bases

That is what I got it from it as well. The US is moving to a leaner, more mobile, less entrenched military.

[don]

Re: The Pentagon's New Generation of Secret Military Bases

That is what I got it from it as well. The US is moving to a leaner, more mobile, less entrenched military.

Out of fiscal necessity? Too early for that, methinks.

[vinoveri]

Re: The Pentagon's New Generation of Secret Military Bases

That is what I got it from it as well. The US is moving to a leaner, more mobile, less entrenched military.

offset with contractors (mercs)

[don]

Re: The Pentagon's New Generation of Secret Military Bases

offset with contractors (mercs)

When the Army Was Democratic

William Pfaff


Interim Archives/Getty Images
(a Getty Image? Sure looks like a US Armed Service shot. Is Getty buying our national photos now)

Somewhere north of the Chongchon River, while fighting with the 2nd Infantry Division, Sergeant First Class Major Cleveland, weapons squad leader, points out a communist-led North Korean position to his machine gun crew, Korea, November 1950


At a recent event in Aspen, Colorado, General Stanley McChrystal, former commander of the international force in Afghanistan, said that the United States should go back to the draft in order to continue waging its wars. “I think we need a national service,” he said. McChrystal argued that a professional army is unrepresentative of the citizenry, and if a government goes to war, “everybody [should have] skin in the game…every city, every town, needs to be at risk.”

As someone who served in the conscript army back when the draft was a part of life for nearly every young American male, I understand the general’s sentiment and feel some sympathy for it. But I cannot think that he is so far out of touch with his country as to fail to understand that the restoration of American national morale, unity, and sense of solidarity and patriotism he wants to see would come not as the result of universal national military service, but as the condition that makes universal service possible.

McChrystal made his comments during a debate over polarization and social division in the United States, discontented and alienated youth, inequality, and loss of national unity. According to an account in the Financial Times, the audience—the kind of people who go to Aspen conferences—stood up and cheered, and McChrystal got more applause at the end of the session than any speaker on the platform. But short of an attack on the country from Mars, or from those hordes of New Caliphate Muslim jihadists some conservative circles fear as a menace to all of Western Civilization, restored military conscription is impossible in today’s United States.

The US had national service from September 1940, just before World War II, until 1971, when the Vietnam War was ending. It was accepted with patriotic resolution at its start, and hated by its end. I am of an age to have put on my country’s uniform in high school ROTC in 1942, when I was fourteen years old. I put it on again for the Korean War, and did not take it off for the last time until 1958, after limited active reserve service. That was a total of sixteen years.

I can’t say that I enjoyed military service, but I learned a lot, about myself and about others—including the young black men who made up a good half of my all-southern, and mostly rural, basic training company (where I was not only the sole college graduate but probably the only high school graduate). This was just two and a half years after President Harry Truman had ordered the army desegregated. The regular army—which has always been essentially a southern institution—hated and feared the consequences of that order, but said “yes, sir” and did it, producing undoubtedly the biggest and most successful program of social engineering the United States had ever experienced. It also created what remains today the most successful route of social and professional ascension for talented young black males from poor communities that the country has ever known.

The army, in my opinion, did more to desegregate the United States than the civil rights movement of the 1960s. From 1948 on, nearly every able-bodied young man in the United States served and lived side by side with Americans of all colors, all in strict alphabetical order, in old-fashioned unpartitioned barracks, sleeping bunk to bunk, sharing shelter-halves on bivouac, in what amounted to brotherly endurance of the cold, heat, discomfort, and misery of military training—and following that, of service. The kids I trained with—and they were kids—were nearly all of them scheduled to become infantry replacements in what was commonly called Frozen Chosin.

When their war was over, the survivors, white and black, didn’t go home to Georgia and hang out together on Saturday nights. They hardly saw one another again. But those two years changed them. It certainly changed many of the younger generation of white southerners who served and who a decade and a half later were ready to accept desegregation, even though they disliked it. A man-to-man respect existed for their black contemporaries.

Of course you can get killed in the army. That’s the down side of it. You can get parts of you blown off. Today you can get PTSD, which we didn’t know about then, but experienced, as has every army in history. I was a military romantic, but the unthinking benevolence, or inefficiency, of an Adjutant General’s service clerk spared me the logical result of some things I did, for which I am now grateful that I have no old soldier’s tales to tell.

A few years later, I saw something of that army again in Vietnam (as traveler and writer), which is where national military service was destroyed.

What destroyed it? In World War II and the Korean War everybody served. It was a draft, it was patriotic, but it was also the manly thing to do. In Vietnam, by the time the Americans’ war had been going for a few years, the army had many fewer white faces in them than had been the case in the Korean War. By the time I was there, cynicism about the war was part of nearly every conversation, not only among troops and non-coms but also with junior officers and, off the record, with many who were not so junior. Nobody really believed that the war was being won. Why were we there?

Cynicism was spread by the fact that soldiers who had a daddy in Congress or other elective office in America, or in the executive branch of the US government, were few to be seen. Others missing were those university students who had decided to sign up for that divinity doctorate he hadn’t considered before, or who had a marriageable girlfriend who would get pregnant fast, or whose father or uncle was a big man in a small town and knew the members of the draft board, or was a big man in corporate America who knew a congressman—or who simply had a sympathetic doctor, or, like the honorable vice president of the United States from 2000 to 2008, found himself with “other priorities,” or who, like the president of the United States in that same administration, had found an ironclad stateside National Guard berth for the duration.

Counterinsurgency war is inherently corrupting of soldiers. It by definition is waged against militant civilians operating in a civilian environment. For the soldier it is a war against civilians and civilians automatically are seen as potential enemies. Women and children were part of it. When I was there, the war was one of body counts—a policy of high cynicism that inspired hypocrisy among our troops. We were using high technology—ruthless bombing, napalm, Agent Orange to clear fields of action—against peasants. As Iraq and Afghanistan have since demonstrated, counterinsurgency breeds cold-blooded assassinations (the Phoenix operation in Vietnam), torture, atrocity, and increasingly cynical or defiant justifications of all this from people in higher—even the highest—places.

All of this killed national service. The reality of Vietnam was responsible for the fragging, the over-aggressive infantry leaders found with the fatal wounds in the back rather than the front, the desertions. A perverse public opinion that blamed the war on the soldiers that fought it made service seem dishonorable. This too killed national service.

That’s why when peace came, the West Point army demanded an all-professional army, and got it. If it had to fight another war, it wanted no disciplinary problems, no malingering, no fragging. It wanted an educated, well-trained professional force, that would accept multiple deployments, do as it was told, and create no scandals for the press.

It got the all-volunteer peacetime army, and for many years, during which military service usually consisted of manning Cold War defenses in Germany, Korea, and Japan, it seemed to work. What the Pentagon did not fully appreciate at the time was that the all-volunteer peacetime army was just the thing to become a new wartime army, capable of fighting a war, largely to public and political indifference, as in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Up to Vietnam, the United States Army had been a people’s army. When the country thought it had to fight a war, it raised an army of citizens. The citizens defended the country and its beliefs, often making family and economic sacrifices to support the war effort. They enabled America’s wars. They also prevented them. The army was a democratic army, and the government was compelled to recognize and respect the popular will and the will of the civilian soldiers and ROTC and OCS officers who manned it. What fundamentally was destroyed in Vietnam was the democratic army. The all-volunteer professional army enables undemocratic wars, ideological in nature and inspiration, and, it would seem, without real end.

July 16, 2012, 2:05 p.m.

[BadJuju]

Re: The Pentagon's New Generation of Secret Military Bases

“everybody [should have] skin in the game…every city, every town, needs to be at risk.”

.

Everyone except for the people that put us into wars in the first place.

[doom&gloom]

Re: The Pentagon's New Generation of Secret Military Bases

Everyone except for the people that put us into wars in the first place.

yup. Something tells me you will never see Obamas daughters in a front line position, if even in the service. Same can probably be said for Romney.

[lakedaemonian]

Re: The Pentagon's New Generation of Secret Military Bases

yup. Something tells me you will never see Obamas daughters in a front line position, if even in the service. Same can probably be said for Romney.

1 of the very few things I respect about John McCain and his family is their history of national service.

I don't recall his family whipping that out and throwing it around much for votes......but that might be because his son was actually down range in the sandbox....and could/would have been targeted.

People are going to complain no matter what the US does.

I would love to get a coalface sense of how things go at the ultralocal economic level in places like Germany upon the mass downsizing of the US cold war legacy heavy forces there.

LOTS of money pumped into the local economies.....lots of opposition to the presence growing over the years....it will be interesting to see if it has a significant ultralocal economic effect.

I'm all for the US shifting towards more "bases" with fewer total pers stationed overseas.

US force structure hasn't just been reduced in total numbers......but in unit organization......there was a big shift in the past decade away from heavy armored/mech divisions to fight the Rooskies in the Fulda Gap to smaller regiment sized multi-tool units.....and I think that will continue, particularly with specialist forces down to the more granular levels.

I suspect within the next 5-10 years we will see the quiet forward deployment of US SF/SOF forces in small numbers distributed more often to more regular/semi-permanent locations.

They've been doing it quietly for 60 years to pretty much every corner of the earth, mostly in a non-kinetic way(meaning not killing people)......I suspect they will be doing even more of it in the next 5-10...whether it will be quiet or not is another story...sounds like this time they will simply have better facilities and accommodation instead of staying in motels, rented apartments, or under tentage.

I figure a bit part of the shift will be away from Europe and towards Africa(possibly HQ'd in Ethiopia) and Asia.....South/Central America will probably continue to be busy too unless a new counterdrug policy to solve the narco-crime problem is implemented.

Fewer US pers working outside the US, lower profile US pers working outside the US....and people are still complaining.....I thought the trend was your friend?

[doom&gloom]

Re: The Pentagon's New Generation of Secret Military Bases

I used to be one of those gung-ho Republicans who thought all wars were moral and the US was always on the side of 'right'. No longer. I have figured out the mess we continue to make in the world as we try to be the puppet masters of all, and I expect over time, and more especially with the oncoming 'peak cheap oil', that the blowback could become much more severe.

But it no longer sems to be enough for us to mess with the freedoms of other governments to do as they please, we now mess with our own personal rights and freedoms via such laws as 'The Patriot Act' and the NDAA and a host of other dubious legislation. the security state we seek to impart on the world is slowly being imparted upon us as well.

The trend may be to more and smaller bases, but it is also to drone spying and warfare which necessitates less personnel but wider geographic dispersion of bases to carry it out. My personal view is that we will see the same practices we have been imparting upon others 'come home' to us as the costs of drone 'warfare' are cheap, and the technology makes delivering payloads much much easier. It doesn't take much for a dedicated terrorist or government to send a bunch of drones our way as we have been doing to them.

[don]

Re: The Pentagon's New Generation of Secret Military Bases

here's the Vine piece in full . . .

The lily-pad strategy
By David Vine

The first thing I saw last month when I walked into the belly of the dark grey C-17 Air Force cargo plane was a void - something was missing. A missing left arm, to be exact, severed at the shoulder, temporarily patched and held together. Thick, pale flesh, flecked with bright red at the edges. It looked like meat sliced open. The face and what remained of the rest of the man were obscured by blankets, an American flag quilt, and a jumble of tubes and tape, wires, drip bags, and medical monitors.

That man and two other critically wounded soldiers - one with two stumps where legs had been, the other missing a leg below the thigh - were intubated, unconscious, and lying on stretchers hooked to the walls of the plane that had just landed at Ramstein Air Base in Germany. A tattoo on the soldier's remaining arm read, "DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR."

I asked a member of the Air Force medical team about the casualties they see like these. Many, as with this flight, were coming from Afghanistan, he told me. "A lot from the Horn of Africa," he added. "You don't really hear about that in the media."

"Where in Africa?" I asked. He said he didn't know exactly, but generally from the Horn, often with critical injuries. "A lot out of Djibouti," he added, referring to Camp Lemonnier, the main US military base in Africa, but from "elsewhere" in the region, too.

Since the "Black Hawk Down" deaths in Somalia almost 20 years ago, we've heard little, if anything, about American military casualties in Africa (other than a strange report last week about three special operations commandos killed, along with three women identified by US military sources as "Moroccan prostitutes", in a mysterious car accident in Mali). The growing number of patients arriving at Ramstein from Africa pulls back a curtain on a significant transformation in 21st century US military strategy.

These casualties are likely to be the vanguard of growing numbers of wounded troops coming from places far removed from Afghanistan or Iraq. They reflect the increased use of relatively small bases like Camp Lemonnier, which military planners see as a model for future US bases "scattered", as one academic explains, "across regions in which the United States has previously not maintained a military presence".

Disappearing are the days when Ramstein was the signature US base, an American-town-sized behemoth filled with thousands or tens of thousands of Americans, PXs, Pizza Huts, and other amenities of home. But don't for a second think that the Pentagon is packing up, downsizing its global mission, and heading home. In fact, based on developments in recent years, the opposite may be true. While the collection of Cold War-era giant bases around the world is shrinking, the global infrastructure of bases overseas has exploded in size and scope.

Unknown to most Americans, Washington's garrisoning of the planet is on the rise, thanks to a new generation of bases the military calls "lily pads" (as in a frog jumping across a pond toward its prey). These are small, secretive, inaccessible facilities with limited numbers of troops, spartan amenities, and prepositioned weaponry and supplies.

Around the world, from Djibouti to the jungles of Honduras, the deserts of Mauritania to Australia's tiny Cocos Islands, the Pentagon has been pursuing as many lily pads as it can, in as many countries as it can, as fast as it can. Although statistics are hard to assemble, given the often-secretive nature of such bases, the Pentagon has probably built upwards of 50 lily pads and other small bases since around 2000, while exploring the construction of dozens more.

As Mark Gillem, author of America Town: Building the Outposts of Empire, explains, "avoidance" of local populations, publicity, and potential opposition is the new aim. "To project its power," he says, the United States wants "secluded and self-contained outposts strategically located" around the world. According to some of the strategy's strongest proponents at the American Enterprise Institute, the goal should be "to create a worldwide network of frontier forts", with the US military "the 'global cavalry' of the twenty-first century".

Such lily-pad bases have become a critical part of an evolving Washington military strategy aimed at maintaining US global dominance by doing far more with less in an increasingly competitive, ever more multi-polar world. Central as it is becoming to the long-term US stance, this global-basing reset policy has, remarkably, received almost no public attention, nor significant congressional oversight. Meanwhile, as the arrival of the first casualties from Africa shows, the US military is getting involved in new areas of the world and new conflicts, with potentially disastrous consequences.

Transforming the base empire
You might think that the US military is in the process of shrinking, rather than expanding, its little noticed but enormous collection of bases abroad. After all, it was forced to close the full panoply of 505 bases, mega to micro, that it built in Iraq, and it is now beginning the process of drawing down forces in Afghanistan. In Europe, the Pentagon is continuing to close its massive bases in Germany and will soon remove two combat brigades from that country. Global troop numbers are set to shrink by around 100,000.

Yet Washington still easily maintains the largest collection of foreign bases in world history: more than 1,000 military installations outside the 50 states and Washington, DC. They include everything from decades-old bases in Germany and Japan to brand-new drone bases in Ethiopia and the Seychelles islands in the Indian Ocean and even resorts for military vacationers in Italy and South Korea.

In Afghanistan, the US-led international force still occupies more than 450 bases. In total, the US military has some form of troop presence in approximately 150 foreign countries, not to mention 11 aircraft carrier task forces - essentially floating bases - and a significant, and growing, military presence in space. The United States currently spends an estimated US$250 billion annually maintaining bases and troops overseas.

Some bases, like Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, date to the late 19th century. Most were built or occupied during or just after World War II on every continent, including Antarctica. Although the US military vacated around 60% of its foreign bases following the Soviet Union's collapse, the Cold War base infrastructure remained relatively intact, with 60,000 American troops remaining in Germany alone, despite the absence of a superpower adversary.

However, in the early months of 2001, even before the attacks of 9/11, the George W Bush administration launched a major global realignment of bases and troops that's continuing today with Obama's "Asia pivot". Bush's original plan was to close more than one-third of the nation's overseas bases and shift troops east and south, closer to predicted conflict zones in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

The Pentagon began to focus on creating smaller and more flexible "forward operating bases" and even smaller "cooperative security locations" or "lily pads". Major troop concentrations were to be restricted to a reduced number of "main operating bases" (MOBs) - like Ramstein, Guam in the Pacific, and Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean - which were to be expanded.

Despite the rhetoric of consolidation and closure that went with this plan, in the post-9/11 era the Pentagon has actually been expanding its base infrastructure dramatically, including dozens of major bases in every Persian Gulf country save Iran, and in several Central Asian countries critical to the war in Afghanistan.

Hitting the base reset button
Obama's recently announced "Asia pivot" signals that East Asia will be at the center of the explosion of lily-pad bases and related developments. Already in Australia, US marines are settling into a shared base in Darwin. Elsewhere, the Pentagon is pursuing plans for a drone and surveillance base in Australia's Cocos Islands and deployments to Brisbane and Perth. In Thailand, the Pentagon has negotiated rights for new Navy port visits and a "disaster-relief hub" at U-Tapao.

In the Philippines, whose government evicted the US from the massive Clark Air Base and Subic Bay Naval Base in the early 1990s, as many as 600 special forces troops have quietly been operating in the country's south since January 2002. Last month, the two governments reached an agreement on the future US use of Clark and Subic, as well as other repair and supply hubs from the Vietnam War era. In a sign of changing times, US officials even signed a 2011 defense agreement with former enemy Vietnam and have begun negotiations over the Navy's increased use of Vietnamese ports.

Elsewhere in Asia, the Pentagon has rebuilt a runway on tiny Tinian island near Guam, and it is considering future bases in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei, while pushing stronger military ties with India. Every year in the region, the military conducts around 170 military exercises and 250 port visits. On South Korea's Jeju island, the Korean military is building a base that will be part of the US missile defense system and to which US forces will have regular access.

"We just can't be in one place to do what we've got to do," Pacific Command commander Admiral Samuel Locklear III has said. For military planners, "what we've got to do" is clearly defined as isolating and (in the terminology of the Cold War) "containing" the new power in the region, China. This evidently means "peppering" new bases throughout the region, adding to the more than 200 US bases that have encircled China for decades in Japan, South Korea, Guam, and Hawaii.

Asia is just the beginning. In Africa, the Pentagon has quietly created "about a dozen air bases" for drones and surveillance since 2007. In addition to Camp Lemonnier, we know that the military has created or will soon create installations in Burkina Faso, Burundi, the Central African Republic, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mauritania, Sao Tome and Prํncipe, Senegal, Seychelles, South Sudan, and Uganda. The Pentagon has also investigated building bases in Algeria, Gabon, Ghana, Mali, and Nigeria, among other places.

Next year, a brigade-sized force of 3,000 troops, and "likely more", will arrive for exercises and training missions across the continent. In the nearby Persian Gulf, the Navy is developing an "afloat forward-staging base", or "mothership", to serve as a sea-borne "lily pad" for helicopters and patrol craft, and has been involved in a massive build-up of forces in the region.

In Latin America, following the military's eviction from Panama in 1999 and Ecuador in 2009, the Pentagon has created or upgraded new bases in Aruba and Curacao, Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, and Peru. Elsewhere, the Pentagon has funded the creation of military and police bases capable of hosting US forces in Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Costa Rica, and even Ecuador. In 2008, the Navy reactivated its Fourth Fleet, inactive since 1950, to patrol the region. The military may want a base in Brazil and unsuccessfully tried to create bases, ostensibly for humanitarian and emergency relief, in Paraguay and Argentina.

Finally, in Europe, after arriving in the Balkans during 1990s' interventions, US bases have moved eastward into some of the former Eastern Bloc states of the Soviet empire. The Pentagon is developing installations capable of supporting rotating, brigade-sized deployments in Romania and Bulgaria, and a missile defense base and aviation facilities in Poland. Previously, the Bush administration maintained two CIA black sites (secret prisons) in Lithuania and another in Poland. Citizens of the Czech Republic rejected a planned radar base for the Pentagon's still unproven missile defense system, and now Romania will host ground-based missiles.

A new American way of war
A lily pad on one of the Gulf of Guinea islands of Sao Tome and Prํncipe, off the oil-rich west coast of Africa, helps explain what's going on. A US official has described the base as "another Diego Garcia", referring to the Indian Ocean base that has helped ensure decades of US domination over Middle Eastern energy supplies. Without the freedom to create new large bases in Africa, the Pentagon is using Sao Tome and a growing collection of other lily pads on the continent in an attempt to control another crucial oil-rich region.

Far beyond West Africa, the 19th century "Great Game" competition for Central Asia has returned with a passion - and this time it has gone global. It's spreading to resource-rich lands in Africa, Asia, and South America, as the United States, China, Russia, and members of the European Union find themselves locked in an increasingly intense competition for economic and geopolitical supremacy.

While Beijing, in particular, has pursued this competition in a largely economic fashion, dotting the globe with strategic investments, Washington has focused relentlessly on military might as its global trump card, dotting the planet with new bases and other forms of military power.

"Forget full-scale invasions and large-footprint occupations on the Eurasian mainland," Nick Turse has written of this new 21st century military strategy. "Instead, think special operations forces... proxy armies... the militarization of spying and intelligence ... drone aircraft ... cyber-attacks, and joint Pentagon operations with increasingly militarized 'civilian' government agencies."

Add to this unparalleled long-range air and naval power; arms sales besting any nation on Earth; humanitarian and disaster relief missions that clearly serve military intelligence, patrol, and "hearts and minds" functions; the rotational deployment of regular US forces globally; port visits and an expanding array of joint military exercises and training missions that give the US military de facto "presence" worldwide and help turn foreign militaries into proxy forces.

And lots and lots of lily-pad bases.

Military planners see a future of endless small-scale interventions in which a large, geographically dispersed collection of bases will always be primed for instant operational access. With bases in as many places as possible, military planners want to be able to turn to another conveniently close country if the United States is ever prevented from using a base, as it was by Turkey prior to the invasion of Iraq.

In other words, Pentagon officials dream of nearly limitless flexibility, the ability to react with remarkable rapidity to developments anywhere on Earth, and thus, something approaching total military control over the planet.

Beyond their military utility, the lily pads and other forms of power projection are also political and economic tools used to build and maintain alliances and provide privileged US access to overseas markets, resources, and investment opportunities. Washington is planning to use lily-pad bases and other military projects to bind countries in Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America as closely as possible to the US military - and so to continued US political-economic hegemony.

In short, American officials are hoping military might will entrench their influence and keep as many countries as possible within an American orbit at a time when some are asserting their independence ever more forcefully or gravitating toward China and other rising powers.

Those dangerous lily pads
While relying on smaller bases may sound smarter and more cost effective than maintaining huge bases that have often caused anger in places like Okinawa and South Korea, lily pads threaten US and global security in several ways:

First, the "lily pad" language can be misleading, since by design or otherwise, such installations are capable of quickly growing into bloated behemoths.

Second, despite the rhetoric about spreading democracy that still lingers in Washington, building more lily pads actually guarantees collaboration with an increasing number of despotic, corrupt, and murderous regimes.

Third, there is a well-documented pattern of damage that military facilities of various sizes inflict on local communities. Although lily pads seem to promise insulation from local opposition, over time even small bases have often led to anger and protest movements.

Finally, a proliferation of lily pads means the creeping militarization of large swaths of the globe. Like real lily pads - which are actually aquatic weeds - bases have a way of growing and reproducing uncontrollably. Indeed, bases tend to beget bases, creating "base races" with other nations, heightening military tensions, and discouraging diplomatic solutions to conflicts. After all, how would the United States respond if China, Russia, or Iran were to build even a single lily-pad base of its own in Mexico or the Caribbean?

For China and Russia in particular, ever more US bases near their borders threaten to set off new cold wars. Most troublingly, the creation of new bases to protect against an alleged future Chinese military threat may prove to be a self-fulfilling prophecy: such bases in Asia are likely to create the threat they are supposedly designed to protect against, making a catastrophic war with China more, not less, likely.

Encouragingly, however, overseas bases have recently begun to generate critical scrutiny across the political spectrum, from Republican Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison and former Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul to Democratic Senator Jon Tester and New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. With everyone looking for ways to trim the deficit, closing overseas bases offers easy savings. Indeed, increasingly influential types are recognizing that the country simply can't afford more than 1,000 bases abroad.

Great Britain, like empires before it, had to close most of its remaining foreign bases in the midst of an economic crisis in the 1960s and 1970s. The United States is undoubtedly headed in that direction sooner or later. The only question is whether the country will give up its bases and downsize its global mission by choice, or if it will follow Britain's path as a fading power forced to give up its bases from a position of weakness.

Of course, the consequences of not choosing another path extend beyond economics. If the proliferation of lily pads, special operations forces, and drone wars continues, the United States is likely to be drawn into new conflicts and new wars, generating unknown forms of blowback, and untold death and destruction. In that case, we'd better prepare for a lot more incoming flights - from the Horn of Africa to Honduras - carrying not just amputees but caskets.

David Vine is assistant professor of anthropology at American University, in Washington, DC. He is the author of Island of Shame: The Secret History of the US Military Base on Diego Garcia (Princeton University Press, 2009). He has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and Mother Jones, among other places. He is currently completing a book about the more than 1,000 US military bases located outside the United States.

[lakedaemonian]

Re: The Pentagon's New Generation of Secret Military Bases

I used to be one of those gung-ho Republicans who thought all wars were moral and the US was always on the side of 'right'. No longer. I have figured out the mess we continue to make in the world as we try to be the puppet masters of all, and I expect over time, and more especially with the oncoming 'peak cheap oil', that the blowback could become much more severe.

But it no longer sems to be enough for us to mess with the freedoms of other governments to do as they please, we now mess with our own personal rights and freedoms via such laws as 'The Patriot Act' and the NDAA and a host of other dubious legislation. the security state we seek to impart on the world is slowly being imparted upon us as well.

The trend may be to more and smaller bases, but it is also to drone spying and warfare which necessitates less personnel but wider geographic dispersion of bases to carry it out. My personal view is that we will see the same practices we have been imparting upon others 'come home' to us as the costs of drone 'warfare' are cheap, and the technology makes delivering payloads much much easier. It doesn't take much for a dedicated terrorist or government to send a bunch of drones our way as we have been doing to them.

I agree on the loss of perceived and real freedom, but in some ways I wonder if the whole "drone craze" is a bit much.

Here's a question.......what is the difference between a police helicopter equipped with stabilized hi-res FLIR/thermal cameras and other sensors and a "drone"...besides one is piloted the other isn't?

Has anyone been complaining much about the genuine need for police helicopters?

As far as an enemy terrorist group or nation using drones against us.....I think a few efforts have been tried with large model airplanes.....their likelihood of success? Not sure.....it could have been anything from a couple of RC aircraft enthusiasts at the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people....or a genuine attempt at doing something naughty.

I do have legitimate concerns about the loss of civil liberties, freedom, and privacy.......but I do also think there are legitimate law enforcement needs for aerial support as we've seen with quite expensive helos.

[BadJuju]

Re: The Pentagon's New Generation of Secret Military Bases

The problem, at least as I see it, is that having unmanned warfare could make war even more routine than it is. When you no longer have a personal stake in warfare, such as a manned operation, it removes a critical element that prevents warfare. I do not want anyone to die, but unmanned warfare just seems like it could enable more warfare because you no longer have anyone involved in it.

[don]

Re: The Pentagon's New Generation of Secret Military Bases

I feel you're both missing the fundamental element of drone warfare - state sovereignty is allowed to be violated if it's by a drone. For a hundred years aerial bombing was an act of war. No longer . . . if it's with a drone.

(The domestic flip side of the 'drone syndrome' is the no-holds-barred surveillance of cell phones. Way back when, a court approved wiretapping writ was needed. Cell phones, somehow someway - see drones, above - bypassed that 'civil right' . . . let's not even mention emails)

[doom&gloom]

Re: The Pentagon's New Generation of Secret Military Bases

I agree on the loss of perceived and real freedom, but in some ways I wonder if the whole "drone craze" is a bit much.

Here's a question.......what is the difference between a police helicopter equipped with stabilized hi-res FLIR/thermal cameras and other sensors and a "drone"...besides one is piloted the other isn't?

Has anyone been complaining much about the genuine need for police helicopters?

As far as an enemy terrorist group or nation using drones against us.....I think a few efforts have been tried with large model airplanes.....their likelihood of success? Not sure.....it could have been anything from a couple of RC aircraft enthusiasts at the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people....or a genuine attempt at doing something naughty.

I do have legitimate concerns about the loss of civil liberties, freedom, and privacy.......but I do also think there are legitimate law enforcement needs for aerial support as we've seen with quite expensive helos.

Drones v. choppers? Choppers are expensive, large, noisy and obtrusive. A small drone, with or without payload, can hover almost noislessly for some time observing (spying), or with a payload used to deliver a lethal strike against a person, persons, or infrastructure by an anonymous operator from a long way away. Imagine what a dozen drones with small explosives could do to a commercial airport, or a petrochem plant, or a sports stadium. T he technology is already there, the execution easily purchased off the shelf.

On privacy, where is 'the line'? If you have a private residence in a quiet neighborhood or maybe on 40 country acres with a 6' high fence, your expectation is that you have a private area, be it for sunbathing nude or illegal target practice with a handgun and silencer. When that 'privacy is invaded by an unobtrusive quadcopter used to spy on you from a few hundred feet, and you have no indication of it's presence, how secure should one feel?

The problem, at least as I see it, is that having unmanned warfare could make war even more routine than it is. When you no longer have a personal stake in warfare, such as a manned operation, it removes a critical element that prevents warfare. I do not want anyone to die, but unmanned warfare just seems like it could enable more warfare because you no longer have anyone involved in it.

If you think the military industrial complex had little remorse in the deaths of many millions since the early 1900's, just think of the 'fun' they can have waging war with swarms of drones, or squads of remotely piloted predators armed with hellfire missles. The salient selling point is no longer the cost of a huge expensive carrier and F-xx's and million dollar pilots, you now sell units that can range in price from a few thousand to a few million, never offer up US servicepeople in body bags on the nightly news, and allow ultimate empire expansion without the large bases and supporting infrastrucure of a 'conventional' war. What's not to like in CONgress when you can wage war, er, police actions, on the cheap? Never mind that you risk the blowback of 'terrorists' that are tired of watching their countries destroyed andfamilies killed by silent machines that patrol the skys like something out of SkyNet in the Terminator.

I feel you're both missing the fundamental element of drone warfare - state sovereignty is allowed to be violated if it's by a drone. For a hundred years aerial bombing was an act of war. No longer . . . if it's with a drone.

(The domestic flip side of the 'drone syndrome' is the no-holds-barred surveillance of cell phones. Way back when, a court approved wiretapping writ was needed. Cell phones, somehow someway - see drones, above - bypassed that 'civil right' . . . let's not even mention emails)

Who cares about state sovereignty when you can fly something that can remain off the radar, or fly below it, and if you 'lose' it you don't have to deal with another 'Pueblo Incident" or similar.

Don't even get me started on domestic issues like how police in some states now routinely take and download everything off your cellphone automatically upon a stop with NO warrant. Just another action of the leviathon of the state growing and encroaching until the populace is trained to act and respect 'authority' everywhere, legal and constitutional or not.

Look at the para-military nature of Us police forces nowadays. Everyone wants to show up as a swat member even for the most dubious of crime situations. I remember as a kid you knew the cops in your neighborhood, now it is all an 'us v. them' mentality out there it seems.

[c1ue]

Re: The Pentagon's New Generation of Secret Military Bases

Here's a question.......what is the difference between a police helicopter equipped with stabilized hi-res FLIR/thermal cameras and other sensors and a "drone"...besides one is piloted the other isn't?

Has anyone been complaining much about the genuine need for police helicopters?

I'm assuming you mean in the context of American domestic police purposes.

A drone with a Hellfire missile in Afghanistan - huge difference.

I also wonder at the relative costs: clearly the drone is cheaper from a purchasing basis, but what are the relative operational costs? Relative capabilities?