Chalmers Johnson - The Sorrows of Empire - Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic

As a result of this accident, the army decided to turn over all maintenance of the stockpiled vehicles and ammunition to private contractors. The company that received the contract to operate Camp Doha in 1991 was DynCorp of Reston, Virginia. By the year 2000, it was number twenty among the top two hundred military contractors. (Halliburton was number twenty-one.) 24In 1994, the contract for maintaining the prepositioned equipment at Camp Doha passed from DynCorp to the ITT Corporation. The contractor just prior to the second American attack on Iraq was Combat Support Associates of Orange, California, a joint venture of three military suppliers located in California, Colorado, and Texas. The ten-year cost-plus-award fee for all maintenance and operating services on the tanks and other tracked vehicles at Camp Doha comes to an estimated cumulative total of $546,751,502, an amount the Kuwaiti government has pledged to reimburse the U.S. goverment. In late 2002, Combat Support Associates had 546 American civilians and 747 third-country nationals working for it at the base. 25Camp Doha became the jumping-off point for the American assault forces in the second Iraq war.

Like Camp Doha, the other American military bases in the Persian Gulf region all depend on private contractors for their defenses, amenities, and operations. The significance of this development for military effectiveness as well as for the principle of accountable civilian government in the United States is a subject only rarely mentioned either in Congress or in the press. The use of private contractors is assumed to be more cost-effective, but even that is open to question when contracts go only to a few well-connected companies and the bidding is not particularly competitive.

In the long run, one wonders whether these private companies will be able to recruit employees successfully to work in countries where American bases are deeply resented. On January 21, 2003, at 9:15 in the morning, a gunman fired twenty-four bullets from a Kalashnikov at two American civilians sitting in a Toyota sport utility vehicle at a traffic signal three miles from Camp Doha. He killed Michael R. Pouliot, the executive vice president and cofounder of Tapestry Solutions Corporation, a small San Diego software development company that produces computerized modeling and simulation exercises for the military. Pouliot’s companion, David Caraway, was wounded six times but survived in critical condition. He is a senior software engineer for the company.

A few months later, on May 12, 2003, just after the end of fighting in the second Iraq war, terrorists blew up three foreign housing compounds in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, killing thirty-four, including eight Americans. One of the main targets was an apartment building for some seventy Vinnell Corporation employees—military mercenaries hired to train the Saudi National Guard. Fortunately for Vinnell, fifty members of its staff were away on a “training exercise” at the time of the bombing. It was widely speculated that the attack was a response to the American conquest of Iraq. Vinnell has about 800 employees in Riyadh, of whom 300 are Americans.

A large number of military contractors work in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia on various chores, including helping the army operate and maintain its equipment and training and equipping local militaries. After the Camp Doha killing, a spokesman for the army, Major Steve Stover, merely commented that “the world is a dangerous place, especially for Americans abroad.” 26

6

THE EMPIRE OF BASES

The presence of American forces overseas is one of the most profound symbols of the U.S. commitments to allies and friends. Through our willingness to use force in our own defense and in defense of others, the United States demonstrates its resolve to maintain a balance of power that favors freedom. To contend with uncertainty and to meet the many security challenges we face, the United States will require bases and stations within and beyond Western Europe and Northeast Asia, as well as temporary access arrangements for the long-distance deployment of U.S. forces.

“THE NATIONAL SECURITY STRATEGY OF THE UNITED STATES,”

September 17,2002

During the Cold War, standard military doctrine held that overseas bases had four missions. They were to project conventional military power into areas of concern to the United States; prepare, if necessary, for a nuclear war; serve as “tripwires” guaranteeing an American response to an attack (particularly in divided “hot spots” like Germany and South Korea); and function as symbols of American power. 1Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has been engaged in a continuous search for new justifications for its ever-expanding base structure—from “humanitarian intervention” to “disarming Iraq.”

I believe that today five post-Cold War missions have replaced the four older ones: maintaining absolute military preponderance over the rest of the world, a task that includes imperial policing to ensure that no part of the empire slips the leash; eavesdropping on the communications of citizens, allies, and enemies alike, often apparently just to demonstrate that no realm of privacy is impervious to the technological capabilities of our government; attempting to control as many sources of petroleum as possible, both to service America’s insatiable demand for fossil fuels and to use that control as a bargaining chip with even more oil-dependent regions; providing work and income for the military-industrial complex (as, for example, in the exorbitant profits Halliburton has extracted for building and operating Camps Bondsteel and Monteith); and ensuring that members of the military and their families live comfortably and are well entertained while serving abroad.

No one of these goals or even all of them together, however, can entirely explain our expanding empire of bases. There is something else at work, which I believe is the post-Cold War discovery of our immense power, rationalized by the self-glorifying conclusion that because we have it we deserve to have it. The only truly common elements in the totality of America’s foreign bases are imperialism and militarism—an impulse on the part of our elites to dominate other peoples largely because we have the power to do so, followed by the strategic reasoning that, in order to defend these newly acquired outposts and control the regions they are in, we must expand the areas under our control with still more bases. To maintain its empire, the Pentagon must constantly invent new reasons for keeping in our hands as many bases as possible long after the wars and crises that led to their creation have evaporated. As the Senate Foreign Relations Committee observed as long ago as 1970, “Once an American overseas base is established it takes on a life of its own. Original missions may become outdated but new missions are developed, not only with the intention of keeping the facility going, but often to actually enlarge it. Within the government departments most directly concerned—State and Defense—we found little initiative to reduce or eliminate any of these overseas facilities.” 2The Pentagon tries to prevent local populations from reclaiming or otherwise exerting their rights over these long-established bases (as in the cases of the Puerto Rican movement to get the navy off Vieques Island, which it used largely for target practice, and of the Okinawan movement to get the marines and air force to go home—or at least go elsewhere). It also works hard to think of ways to reestablish the right to bases from which the United States has withdrawn or been expelled (in places like the Philippines, Taiwan, Greece, and Spain).

Given that many of our bases around the world are secret, that some are camouflaged by flags of convenience, and that many consist of multiple distinct installations, how can anyone assess accurately the scope and value of our military empire? It is not easy. If the Secretary of Defense were to ask his closest aides with the highest security clearances how many bases abroad he had under his control, they would have to reply, using an old naval officers’ cop-out, “I don’t know, sir, but I’ll find out.”