Here’s the best attempt I’ve seen at trying to figure out how many bases the U.S. military has around the world. It seems like the Pentagon does not even know how many it has in Afghanistan or Iraq and gives different numbers for the total around the world. And, there are covert bases in places like Pakistan and various Middle East countries, as well as covert prisons run by the U.S.
“The Pentagon’s 2010 Base Structure Report, on the other hand, lists 4,999 total sites in the U.S., its territories, and overseas.” That statement includes bases in the U.S.. It seems like about 1100 overseas is a good guess. An “empire of bases” and when you compare it to Great Britain at the peak of its empire — a total of 37 bases — we certainly have a big empire.
In a recent op-ed piece, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof made a trenchant point: “The United States maintains troops at more than 560 bases and other sites abroad, many of them a legacy of a world war that ended 65 years ago. Do we fear that if we pull our bases from Germany, Russia might invade?”
For years, the late Chalmers Johnson, the man who literally wrote the book on the U.S. military’s empire of bases, The Sorrows of Empire, made the same point and backed it with the most detailed research on the globe-spanning American archipelago of bases that has ever been assembled. Several years ago, after mining the Pentagon’s own publicly-available documents, Johnson wrote, “[T]he United States maintains 761 active military ‘sites’ in foreign countries. (That’s the Defense Department’s preferred term, rather than ‘bases,’ although bases are what they are.)”
Recently, the Pentagon updated its numbers on bases and other sites, and they have dropped. Whether they’ve fallen to the level advanced by Kristof, however, is a matter of interpretation. According to the Department of Defense’s 2010 Base Structure Report, the U.S. military now maintains 662 foreign sites in 38 countries around the world. Dig into that report more deeply, though, and Grand Canyon-sized gaps begin to emerge.
In 1955, 10 years after World War II ended, the Chicago Daily Tribune published a major investigation of bases, including a map dotted with little stars and triangles, most of them clustered in Europe and the Pacific. “The American flag flies over more than 300 overseas outposts,” wrote reporter Walter Trohan. “Camps and barracks and bases cover 12 American possessions or territories held in trust. The foreign bases are in 63 foreign nations or islands.”
Today, according to the Pentagon’s published figures, the American flag flies over 750 U.S. military sites in foreign nations and U.S. territories abroad. This figure does not include small foreign sites of less 10 acres or those that the U.S. military values at less than $10 million. In some cases, numerous bases of this type may be folded together and counted as a single military installation in a given country. A request for further clarification from the Department of Defense went unanswered.
What we do know is that, on the foreign outposts the U.S. military counts, it controls close to 52,000 buildings, and more than 38,000 pieces of heavy infrastructure like piers, wharves, and gigantic storage tanks, not to mention more than 9,100 “linear structures” like runways, rail lines, and pipelines. Add in more than 6,300 buildings, 3,500 pieces of infrastructure, and 928 linear structures in U.S. territories and you have an impressive total.
The empire of bases, while still at or close to its height, is destined to shrink. The military is going to have to scale back its foreign footholds and lessen its global footprint in the years ahead. Economic realities will necessitate that. The choices the Pentagon makes today will likely determine on what terms its garrisons come home tomorrow. At the moment, they can still choose whether coming home will look like an act of magnanimous good statesmanship or inglorious retreat.
Whatever the decision, the clock is ticking, and before any withdrawals begin, the U.S. military needs to know exactly where it’s withdrawing from (and Americans should have an accurate sense of just where its overseas armies are). An honest count of U.S. bases abroad — a true, full, and comprehensive list — would be a tiny first step in the necessary process of downsizing the global mission…
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