Bases, Empire, and Global Response

Winter 2007

Featured Story

by Catherine Lutz

Much about our current world is unparalleled in human history: holes in the ozone layer, the commercial patenting of life forms, degrading poverty on a massive scale, and, more hopefully, the rise of concepts of global citizenship and universal human rights. Less visible, but just as unprecedented, is the global omnipresence of militarism: specifically, the unparalleled lethality of the U.S. military, and the imperial ambition with which it is being deployed.

Officially, a quarter of a million U.S. troops are massed in 737 major bases in 130 countries in facilities worth $115 billion. The U.S. military owns (or rents) over 28 million acres of land and $600 billion dollars worth of real estate, and these bases bristle with an inventory of weapons whose worth is measured in the trillions and whose killing power could wipe out all life on earth several times over. Deployed from battle zones in Afghanistan and Iraq to the quiet corners of Curacao, Korea, and England, its domain consists of sprawling Army bases, small listening posts, missile and artillery testing ranges, and berthed aircraft carriers. While the bases are literally weapons depots and staging areas for warmaking and ship repair facilities and golf courses and basketball courts, they are also political claims, spoils of war, arms sales showrooms, toxic industrial sites, laboratories for cultural (mis)communication, and collections of customers for local bars, shops, and prostitution.

The environmental, political, and economic impact of these bases is enormous, and, despite Pentagon claims that the bases simply provide security, most of the world’s people feel anything but reassured by this global reach. Some communities pay the highest price: their farm land taken for bases, their children neurologically damaged by military jet fuel in their water supply, their neighbors imprisoned, tortured, and disappeared by the autocratic regimes that survive on U.S. military and political support given as a form of tacit rent for the bases. Global opposition to U.S. basing has been widespread and growing rapidly, however, in vigorous campaigns to hold the U.S. accountable for that damage and to reorient their countries’ security policies in other, more humane, and truly secure directions.

Military bases are “installations routinely used by military forces.” They represent a confluence of labor (soldiers, paramilitary workers, and civilians), land, and capital in the form of static facilities, supplies, and equipment. Bases are just the most visible part of the larger picture of U.S. military presence overseas. This picture of military access includes U.S. military training of foreign forces, often in conjunction with the provision of U.S. weaponry, joint exercises meant to enhance U.S. soldiers’ exposure to a variety of operating environments from jungle to desert to urban terrain and interoperability across national militaries, and legal arrangements made to gain overflight rights and other forms of ad hoc use of others’ territory as well as to preposition military equipment there.

U.S. forces train 100,000 soldiers annually in 180 countries, and the scale of training is sharply increasing. It is done with the presumption that local militaries will then help pursue U.S. interests in local conflicts, saving the U.S. military itself money, casualties, and bad publicity when deaths or human rights abuses occur. Moreover, exercising and training with other, less advanced, militaries is important, say strategists: “given that these low-tech militaries may well be U.S. partners or adversaries in future contingencies, becoming familiar with their capabilities and operating style and learning to operate with them are important” (Roger Cliff & Jeremy Shapiro, “The Shift to Asia: Implications for U.S. Land Power”: The U.S. Army and the New National Security Strategy, Shapiro & Lynn E. Davis, eds., 2003). The blowback effects are especially well known since September 11th. Less well known is how these training programs have major effects in strengthening the power of military forces in relation to other sectors of society within countries, sometimes with fragile democracies, and they explicitly may include training in assassination and torture techniques.

The U.S. military presence also involves jungle, urban, desert, maritime, and polar training exercises across wide swaths of landscape. These exercises have sometimes been provocative to other nations, and in some cases become the pretext for substantial and permanent positioning of troops; in recent years, the U.S. has run approximately 20 exercises on Philippine soil annually, for example. This has meant a near continuous presence of U.S. troops in a country whose people ejected U.S. bases in 1992 and continue to vigorously object to their reinsertion, and whose constitution forbids the basing of foreign troops.

Finally, U.S. military and civilian personnel work every day, sometimes with a heavy hand, to shape local legal codes to facilitate U.S. access. They have lobbied in a variety of ways, for example, to change the Philippine and Japanese constitutions to allow, respectively, foreign troop basing and a more-than-defensive military. “Military diplomacy” with local civil and military elites is conducted also to shape opinion and sentiment in what are called, as if a party were being held, host countries.

Much of the U.S.’s unparalleled weaponry, nuclear and otherwise, is stored at places like Camp Darby in Italy, Kadena Air Force Base in Okinawa, and the Naval Magazine on Guam, as well as in nuclear submarines and on the Navy’s other floating bases. The deadliness of its armaments – nuclear, chemical, biological, and “conventional” – matches that of every other empire and every other contemporary military combined. The weapons, personnel, and fossil fuels involved in this U.S. military presence cost billions of dollars, mostly paid by U.S. taxpayers, but an increasing number of billions come from the citizens of the countries involved. Elaborate bilateral negotiations exchange weapons, cash, and trade privileges for overflight and land use rights. Less explicitly, but no less importantly, rice import levels or immigration rights to the U.S. or overlooking human rights abuses have been currencies of exchange.

Bases are the literal and symbolic anchors, and the most visible centerpieces, of the U.S. military presence overseas. To understand where those bases are and how they are being used is essential for understanding the United States’ relationship with the rest of the world. Military bases show us both the coercive underpinnings and the political/economic complexion of the U.S.’s global position.

Cartoon: Justin DeFreitas (www.defreitas.com)

The world responds

Social movements have proliferated around the world in response to the empire of U.S. bases. Some groups have focused on the base itself, its sheer presence as matter out of place in a world of national borders. Others focus on and object to the purpose served by the bases, which is to stand ready to wage, and sometimes actually wage, war. (The objections to war are variously ethical, socioeconomic, and realist-strategic.) Most movements also focus on the noxious effects of the bases’ daily operations, a high impact matter given that bases are often the tools of mass industrial warfare, which is a highly toxic, labor-intensive, and violent operation that employs an inordinate number of young males.

For years, then, the movements have logged and described past and current confiscation of land; the health effects from military jet noise and air and water pollution; soldiers’ crimes, especially rapes, other assaults, murders, and car crashes, and the impunity perpetrators have usually enjoyed; the inequality of the nation-to-nation relationship often undergirded by racism and other forms of disrespect; the culture of militarism that infiltrates local societies and its sequelae in higher rates of enlistment, death, and injury to local youth; the cost to local treasuries in payments to the U.S. for support of the bases; and the use of the bases for prisoner extradition and torture.

In Okinawa, most polls show that 70 to 80% of the island’s people want the bases to leave, or at least want the Marines to leave, both because they want back the land that the bases occupy and because they suffer under a constant risk of aviation crashes as well as higher rates of prostitution, drug trafficking, and sexual assault and other crimes by U.S. soldiers. For years, Okinawans have staged large protests, linking hands and encircling large bases in their entirety, and sitting-in for months at the site of proposed new military construction. One family built a large peace museum right up against the edge of the fence to Futenma Air Base there, with a stairway to the roof which allows busloads of schoolchildren and other visitors to view the sprawling base after looking at art depicting the horrors of war.

Very different degrees of unhappiness and resistance to the presence and practices of the U.S. military exist around the world. In part, this is the result of differences in the nature of the U.S. presence in each place. Marine bases create more criminal behavior than Air Force bases; Air Force bases produce more toxins per square inch than Army bases; and Navy bases produce more episodic and visible social impacts, as ships dock and spill what are sometimes thousands of men and women into a community, many looking for sex and alcohol. Small bases obviously create less impact than large ones, and urban bases sit on more valuable land than rural ones. More recently claimed or captured territory for bases also attracts more attention than long-occupied sites, which may disappear into a normalized background of consciousness. In some countries, the bases create discontent in the immediately-surrounding communities, but are little noticed elsewhere in the country where the costs are less visible. In many places, the bases’ perceived benefits in providing jobs for local workers or revenues to local companies or corporations mute dissent.

Objections to U.S. bases have been voiced since their inception. The attempt to take the Philippines from Spain in 1898 led to a drawn-out guerrilla war for independence that it required 126,000 American occupation troops to put down. After World War II, there were multiple calls for return of the bases or of the land on which the radically-expanded U.S. military presence stood. But protest of U.S. foreign military presence was stifled in the pre-1991 period by the cultural and political climate of the Cold War's anti-communism, and by the authoritarianism of many of the allied regimes hosting U.S. bases, as in South Korea and the Philippines. Nonetheless, anti-militarist movements in Japan drew attention to the bases. In the 1980s, the anti-nuclear movement, spurred particularly by the U.S./NATO move to introduce Cruise missiles into Europe, created awareness of the nuclear weapons stored across that continent and spurred similar interrogation and protests of the nuclear weapons on U.S. bases in Australia. The movement continues today to call for the removal of the 480 U.S. nuclear weapons still scattered across Europe. And the original inhabitants of Diego Garcia, evicted from their homes between 1967-1973 by the British on behalf of the U.S., have organized a concerted campaign for the right to return, bringing legal suit against the British government.

With the onset of the Bush administration’s declaration of a “war on terror” and of the right to preemptive war, the number of countries into which the U.S. has inserted troops has radically expanded, particularly in Africa, Central Asia, and Latin America. Yet 9/11 notwithstanding, sustained campaigns of direct action and political lobbying resulted in the removal of the U.S. Navy from Vieques, Puerto Rico in 2003. The success of this anti-base campaign, where others had failed, was due in part to the use of arguments about the deleterious environmental and health effects of military activities on the island. This argument also remains the centerpiece of resistance to military activities on and around domestic U.S. bases.

An unprecedented global mobilization of peace movements arose in the wake of the terror attacks and the counter-attacks on Afghanistan and of the threatened invasion of Iraq in 2003. These efforts built on the efflorescence of transnational movements to protest corporate globalization and of global civil society organizations and events, and on increased visibility. The host of social movements organized against U.S. bases or against some aspects of their operation has been networked in a variety of regional and cross-regional ways since at least the 1980s. The centrality of the anti-bases movement to this global organizing was evident in the Jakarta Peace Consensus forged by an international group of peace organizations in May 2003. It proposed that the elimination of overseas U.S. military bases be one of the top four goals of the global peace movement.

The U.S. has responded to anti-bases organizing with a renewed emphasis on “force protection,” in some cases enforcing curfews on soldiers and cutting back on events that bring local people onto base property. The Department of Defense has also engaged in the time-honored practice of renaming: clusters of soldiers, buildings and equipment have become “defense staging posts” or “forward operating locations” rather than military bases. While major reorganization of bases is underway for a host of reasons, the motives include an attempt to derail or prevent political momentum of the sort that ended U.S. use of Vieques and the Philippines.

Catherine Lutz is a professor of anthropology at Brown University and the Watson Institute for International Studies. This article is drawn from the introduction to her forthcoming edited book, Bases, Empire and Global Response.