Bases, Bases, Everywhere … Except in the
Pentagon’s Report
Posted
By Nick Turse On January 10, 2019 @ 1:52 am In
articles 2015 |
The U.S. military is finally withdrawing (or not) from its base at
al-Tanf. You know, the place that the Syrian government long
claimed was a training ground for Islamic State (ISIS)
fighters; the land corridor just inside Syria, near both the Iraqi and
Jordanian borders, that Russia has
called a terrorist hotbed (while
floating the idea of jointly administering it
with the United States); the location of a camp where hundreds of U.S.
Marines joined Special Operations forces last year; an outpost that U.S.
officials claimed was the key
not only to defeating ISIS, but
also, according to General Joseph Votel, the commander of U.S. forces in the
Middle East, to countering “the malign activities that Iran and their various
proxies and surrogates would like to pursue.” You know, that al-Tanf.
Within hours of President Trump’s
announcement of a withdrawal of U.S. forces from Syria, equipment at that base
was already being inventoried for removal. And just like that, arguably the
most important American garrison in Syria was (maybe) being struck from
the Pentagon’s books — except, as it happens, al-Tanf was never actually on the
Pentagon’s books. Opened in 2015 and, until
recently, home to hundreds of U.S. troops, it was one of the many military
bases that exist somewhere between light and shadow, an acknowledged foreign
outpost that somehow never actually made it onto the Pentagon’s official
inventory of bases.
Officially, the Department of Defense
(DoD) maintains 4,775 “sites,” spread across all 50 states, eight U.S.
territories, and 45 foreign countries. A total of 514 of these outposts are
located overseas, according to the Pentagon’s worldwide property portfolio.
Just to start down a long list, these include bases on the Indian Ocean island
of Diego Garcia, in Djibouti on the Horn of Africa, as well as in Peru and
Portugal, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom. But the most recent
version of that portfolio, issued in early 2018 and known as the Base Structure
Report (BSR), doesn’t include any mention of al-Tanf. Or, for that matter, any
other base in Syria. Or Iraq. Or Afghanistan. Or Niger. Or Tunisia. Or
Cameroon. Or Somalia. Or any number of locales where such military outposts are
known to exist and even, unlike in Syria, to be expanding.
According to David Vine, author of Base Nation: How U.S. Military
Bases Abroad Harm America and the World, there could be hundreds
of similar off-the-books bases around the world. “The missing sites are a
reflection of the lack of transparency involved in the system of what I still estimate
to be around 800 U.S. bases outside the 50 states and Washington, D.C., that
have been encircling the globe since World War II,” says Vine, who is also a
founding member of the recently established Overseas
Base Realignment and Closure Coalition, a group of military analysts
from across the ideological spectrum who advocate shrinking the U.S. military’s
global “footprint.”
Such off-the-books bases are off the books
for a reason. The Pentagon doesn’t want to talk about them. “I spoke to the
press officer who is responsible for the Base Structure Report and she has
nothing to add and no one available to discuss further at this time,” Pentagon
spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel Michelle Baldanza told TomDispatch when
asked about the Defense Department’s many mystery bases.
“Undocumented
bases are immune to oversight by the public and often even Congress,” Vine
explains. “Bases are a physical manifestation of U.S. foreign and military
policy, so off-the-books bases mean the military and executive branch are
deciding such policy without public debate, frequently spending hundreds of
millions or billions of dollars and potentially getting the U.S. involved in
wars and conflicts about which most of the country knows nothing.”
Where Are They?
The Overseas Base Realignment and Closure
Coalition notes that the United States possesses up to 95% of the world’s
foreign military bases, while countries like France, Russia, and the United
Kingdom have perhaps 10-20 foreign outposts each. China has just one.
The Department of Defense even boasts that its “locations” include 164
countries. Put another way, it has a military presence of some sort in
approximately 84% of the nations on this planet — or at least
the DoD briefly claimed this. After TomDispatch inquired about
the number on a new webpage designed to tell the Pentagon’s “story” to the general
public, it was quickly changed. “We appreciate your diligence in getting to the
bottom of this,” said Lieutenant Colonel Baldanza. “Thanks to your
observations, we have updated defense.gov to say ‘more than 160.’”
The progressive changes made to the Defense Department’s “Our Story” webpage as a result of questions from TomDispatch.
What the Pentagon still doesn’t say is how
it defines a “location.” The number 164 does roughly track with the Department
of Defense’s current manpower statistics, which
show personnel deployments of varying sizes in 166 “overseas” locales —
including some nations with token numbers of U.S. military personnel and
others, like Iraq and Syria, where the size of the force was obviously far larger,
even if unlisted at the time of the assessment. (The Pentagon recently claimed
that there were 5,200 troops in Iraq and at least 2,000 troops in Syria
although that number should now markedly shrink.) The
Defense Department’s “overseas” tally, however, also lists troops in U.S.
territories like American Samoa, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Wake
Island. Dozens of soldiers, according to the Pentagon, are also deployed to the
country of “Akrotiri” (which is actually a village on the island of Santorini in Greece) and thousands more are
based in “unknown” locations.
In the latest report, the number of
those “unknown” troops exceeds 44,000.
Official Defense Department manpower statistics show U.S. forces deployed to the nation of “Akrotiri.”
Perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn
that the Pentagon is also somewhat fuzzy about just where its troops are
stationed. The new Defense Department website, for instance, offered a count of
“4,800+ defense sites” around the world.
After TomDispatch inquired about this total and how it related to
the official count of 4,775 sites listed in the BSR, the website was changed to
read “approximately 4,800 Defense Sites.”
“Thank you for pointing out the
discrepancy. As we transition to the new site, we are working on updating
information,” wrote Lieutenant Colonel Baldanza. “Please refer to the Base
Structure Report which has the latest numbers.”
In the most literal sense, the Base
Structure Report does indeed have the latest numbers — but their accuracy is
another matter. “The number of bases listed in the BSR has long born little
relation to the actual number of U.S. bases outside the United States,” says
Vine. “Many, many well-known and secretive bases have long been left off the
list.”
One prime example is the constellation of outposts that the U.S. has
built across Africa. The official BSR inventory lists only a handful of sites
there — on Ascension Island as well as in Djibouti, Egypt, and Kenya. In
reality, though, there are many more outposts in many more African countries.
A recent investigation by
the Intercept, based on documents obtained from U.S. Africa Command
(AFRICOM) via the Freedom of Information Act, revealed a network of 34 bases
heavily clustered in the north and west of that continent as well as in the
Horn of Africa. AFRICOM’s “strategic posture” consists of larger “enduring”
outposts, including two forward operating sites (FOSes), 12 cooperative
security locations (CSLs), and 20 more austere sites known as contingency
locations (CLs).
The Pentagon’s official inventory does
include the two FOSes: Ascension Island and the crown jewel of Washington’s
African bases, Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, which expanded from 88 acres
in the early 2000s to nearly 600 acres today. The Base Structure Report is,
however, missing a CSL in that same country, Chabelley Airfield, a
lower-profile outpost located about 10 kilometers away that has served as a
drone hub for operations in Africa and the Middle East.
The official Pentagon tally also mentions
a site that goes by the confusing moniker of “NSA Bahrain-Kenya.” AFRICOM had
previously described it as a collection of warehouses built in the 1980s at the
airport and seaport of Mombasa, Kenya, but it now appears on that command’s
2018 list as a CSL. Missing, however, is another Kenyan base, Camp Simba, mentioned in a
2013 internal Pentagon study of secret drone operations in Somalia and Yemen.
At least two manned surveillance aircraft were based there at the time. Simba,
a longtime Navy-run facility, is
currently operated by the Air Force’s 475th Expeditionary Air Base Squadron,
part of the 435th Air Expeditionary Wing.
Personnel from that same air wing can be
found at yet another outpost that doesn’t appear in the Base Structure Report,
this one on the opposite side of the continent. The BSR states that it doesn’t
list specific information on “non-U.S. locations” not at least 10 acres in size
or worth at least $10 million. However, the base in question — Air Base 201 in
Agadez, Niger — already has a $100 million construction
price tag, a sum soon to be eclipsed by the cost of operating the facility:
about $30 million a year. By 2024, when the present 10-year agreement for use
of the base ends, its construction and operating costs will have reached about
$280 million.
Also missing from the BSR are outposts in
nearby Cameroon, including a longtime base in Douala, a drone airfield in
the remote town of Garoua, and a facility
known as Salak. That site, according to a 2017 investigation by
theIntercept, the research firm Forensic Architecture, and Amnesty International,
has been used by U.S. personnel and private contractors for drone surveillance
and training missions and by allied Cameroonian forces for illegal imprisonment
and torture.
According to Vine, keeping America’s
African bases secret is advantageous to Washington. It protects allies on that
continent from possible domestic opposition to the presence of American troops,
he points out, while helping to ensure that there will be no domestic debate in
the U.S. over such spending and the military commitments involved. “It’s
important for U.S. citizens to know where their troops are based in Africa and
elsewhere around the world,” he told TomDispatch, “because that
troop presence costs the U.S. billions of dollars every year and because the
U.S. is involved, or potentially involved, in wars and conflicts that could
spiral out of control.”
Those Missing Bases
Africa is hardly
the only place where the Pentagon’s official list doesn’t match up well with
reality. For close to two decades, the Base Structure Report has ignored bases
of all sorts in America’s active war zones. At the height of the American
occupation of Iraq, for instance, the United States had 505 bases there,
ranging from small outposts to mega-sized facilities. None appeared on the
Pentagon’s official rolls.
In Afghanistan, the numbers were even
higher. As TomDispatch reported in 2012, the U.S.-led
International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) had about 550 bases in that country. If you had added
ISAF checkpoints — small baselets used to secure roads and villages — to the
count of mega-bases, forward operating bases, combat outposts, and patrol
bases, the number reached an astounding 750. And counting all foreign military
installations of every type — including logistical, administrative, and support
facilities — hiked ISAF Joint Command’s official count to 1,500 sites. America’s significant share of them
was, however, also mysteriously absent from the Defense Department’s official
tally.
There are now far fewer such facilities in
Afghanistan — and the numbers may drop further in the months ahead as troop levels decrease. But
the existence of Camp Morehead, Forward Operating Base Fenty, Tarin Kowt Airfield, Camp Dahlke West, and Bost Airfield, as well
as Camp Shorab, a small
installation occupying what was once the site of much larger twin bases known
as Camp Leatherneck and Camp Bastion, is indisputable. Yet none of them has
ever appeared in the Base Structure Report.
Similarly, while there are no longer
500-plus U.S. bases in Iraq, in recent years, as American troops returned to
that country, some garrisons have either been reconstituted or built from
scratch. These include the Besmaya Range Complex, Firebase Sakheem, Firebase Um Jorais, and Al
Asad Air Base, as well as Qayyarah Airfield West —
a base 40 miles south of Mosul that’s better known as “Q-West.” Again, you
won’t find any of them listed in the Pentagon’s official count.
These days, it’s
even difficult to obtain accurate manpower numbers for the military personnel
in America’s war zones, let alone the number of bases in each of them. As Vine
explains, “The military keeps the figures secret to some extent to hide the
base presence from its adversaries. Because it is probably not hard to spot
these bases in places like Syria and Iraq, however, the secrecy is mostly to
prevent domestic debate about the money, danger, and death involved, as well as
to avoid diplomatic tensions and international inquiries.”
If stifling domestic debate through
information control is the Pentagon’s aim, it’s been doing a fine job for years
of deflecting questions about its global posture, or what the late TomDispatch regular Chalmers Johnson called
America’s “empire of bases.”
In mid-October, TomDispatch asked
Heather Babb, another Pentagon spokesperson, for details about the outposts in
Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria that were absent from the Base Structure Report,
as well as about those missing African bases. Among the other questions put to
Babb: Could the Pentagon offer a simple count — if not a list — of all its
outposts? Did it have a true count of overseas facilities, even if it hadn’t
been released to the public — a list, that is, which actually did what the Base
Structure Report only purports to do? October and November passed without
answers.
In December, in
response to follow-up requests for information, Babb responded in a fashion
firmly in line with the Pentagon’s well-worn policy of keeping American
taxpayers in the dark about the bases they pay for — no matter the theoretical
difficulty of denying the existence of outposts that stretch from Agadez in
Niger to Mosul in Iraq. “I have nothing to add,” she explained, “to the
information and criteria that is included in the report.”
President Trump’s decision to withdraw
American troops from Syria means that the 2019 Base Structure Report will
likely be the most accurate in years. For the first time since 2015, the Pentagon’s
inventory of outposts will no longer be missing the al-Tanf garrison (or then
again, maybe it will). But that
still potentially leaves hundreds of off-the-books bases absent from the
official rolls. Consider it one outpost down and who knows how many to go.
This article originally appeared on TomDispatch.
Article printed from www.counterpunch.org: https://www.counterpunch.org
URL to article: https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/01/10/bases-bases-everywhere-except-in-the-pentagons-report/
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