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

Many bases in Germany are actually made up of numerous separate minibases or “sites,” a fragmentation that multiplies the effects of our military presence on surrounding civilian communities. The Department of Defense likes to count only major bases in its reports, thereby understating their numbers, whereas people who live near them think that counting “sites” is what matters. Keith B. Cunningham and Andreas Klemmer, researchers with the Bonn International Center for Conversion, have studied the economic effects of base closings in Germany and the longer-term implications of continuing to maintain American bases in Central Europe that have no military functions. According to them, at the time of German unification, the United States had forty-seven major military bases in Germany (thirty-seven “military communities” and ten air bases). 10But a shift in the terms of calculation, they write, reveals that “the United States maintained 285,000 troops in Germany at almost 800 discrete sites. By 1995, those numbers had fallen to approximately 94,000 troops at about 260 sites.” 11

What the army calls a military community exists only in Germany. In the United States, major military bases are normally large, self-contained reservations more or less separated from civilian urban areas and often constituting the equivalent of small or medium-sized towns or cities in their own right. For example, Fort Hood, Texas, sixty miles northeast of Austin, occupies 217,337 contiguous acres and has a population of about 130,000 people. By contrast, “each [German] Military Community consists of one or more barracks, or Kasernen, near the city center which acts as the administrative and social center of the community. The soldiers and their families may live in nearby U.S.-operated ‘family housing complexes’ or find their own housing within neighboring German communities. Most Military Communities also operate training ranges and airfields outside the city center. Additionally, the community likely supports a number of other, isolated sites such as radio stations, depots, warehouses, and hospitals. All of this causes the average community to operate more than seventeen different sites in at least two different German cities.... Shortly after the end of the Cold War, the Military Communities were reorganized under the command umbrella of Area Support Groups (ASGs) to facilitate consolidation. Thirteen ASGs were established in Germany in 1991, containing a total of thirty-four Military Communities.” 12

It is doubtful that any American city or town, with the possible exception of Honolulu, would put up with what the Germans, the Koreans, the Okinawans, and many others have experienced for more than half a century. The American film and television producer Michael Goldfarb caught the atmosphere of Cold War Germany in a description of a 1970 drive through Frankfurt: “At a red light an American Army jeep pulls up with a bunch of G.I.’s. We keep driving around the city trying to find the Department of Motor Vehicles or the German equivalent and at every red light there are jeeps with American soldiers. It seems like there are more jeeps than police cars, more American soldiers on the streets than German policemen. The war was over a quarter of a century ago. Surely the ratio of American G.I.’s to German cops should have skewed in favor of the Germans. We are long past the point of occupation and pacification. The phrase ‘Roman Legionnaires’ goes through my brain as another jeep passes us.” 13

As late as September 1991, the 103rd ASG, containing the military communities of Frankfurt—its headquarters—plus Darmstadt and Wiesbaden, with 25,598 military personnel, occupied 4,783 acres spread around seventy different sites. The Twenty-sixth ASG had its administrative center in the old university city of Heidelberg, which was also the headquarters of the U.S. Army Europe, the Seventh Army, and the V Corps. The Heidelberg ASG included the cities of Heilbronn, Karlsruhe, Mannheim, and Worms, with a total of 36,014 military personnel, occupying 18,312 acres at seventy-eight separate sites. The current public affairs officer of the Twenty-sixth ASG notes that the “community” encompasses over twelve separate installations in and around the city of Heidelberg and adds laconically that the military “shopping center complex [is] within walking distance of Campbell and Patton Barracks.” 14

The main offices of these military communities are usually in the middle of town because in 1945 the army simply moved its offices into the old German military barracks, often architecturally imposing edifices dating from the nineteenth century. The various family housing units of the military communities have been given colorful American names like Pattonville in the Stuttgart military community and Mark Twain Village Family Housing at Heidelberg. One of the most desirable military communities is Garmisch, located in the Bavarian Alps near Hitler’s old retreat, Berchtesgaden. It is home to many hotels, bachelors’ quarters, a shopping center, a golf course, and a skeet-shooting range, all named after famous American generals. It is, in fact, the Armed Forces Recreational Center for Europe—that is, an official ski resort for the military. Just so the brass can pretend to be working while visiting Garmisch, it also includes the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies, a think tank. The military has not found a need to downsize the 543rd ASG, which includes Garmisch. 15

Garmisch is but the tip of the recreational iceberg when it comes to base life in Germany. In December 2002, the army committed $375,000 for improvements to the Rheinblick Golf Course in Wiesbaden, $9 million for a bowling and entertainment center in Baumholder, $16 million for a physical fitness center in Bamberg, and $290,000 for a “kids’ zone” restaurant and entertainment center at the Pulaski Barracks—and these projects were just for the 104th Area Support Group in Hanau. All the other ASGs had similar expansion plans. It is possible, however, that none of these projects will be built thanks to the Bush administration’s pique over Germany’s refusal to fall in line behind its war on Iraq.

Contrary to the general rule that, once opened, an overseas base is never closed, after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact in 1990 it was no longer possible even for the army to pretend that a huge military force was needed in Central Europe. The Pentagon therefore cut forces in Germany by about two-thirds, transferring them to new bases then being established in the Balkans and the Persian Gulf. The most astonishing aspect of the German downsizing, however, is the number of bases the United States decided to retain —some 325, according to the September 2001 Base Status Report, occupied by 70,998 soldiers and airmen, 16,488 civilian Department of Defense employees, and 97,571 dependents. Since there is no credible use for these forces in Europe, they simply live there waiting for “out-of-area operations.” In the forty-one years from 1948 to 1989, we deployed army troops stationed in Germany outside their area of operations just eighteen times. During the four years after Operation Desert Storm, however, the Pentagon sent German-based soldiers on forty-nine out-of-area missions. 16

Germany has become a European version of Okinawa, a staging area for imperial activities in the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and Central Asia. As in Okinawa, the areas around our bases are constantly exposed to environmental pollution, the noise of warplanes, a high incidence of sexual crimes, and disputes about who has legal jurisdiction over the large number of Americans living in the host society. The first serious signs that Germany was getting tired of its semicolonial status came in the general elections of September 2002, when Gerhard Schröder was reelected chancellor on an explicit plank of dissociating Germany from American plans for a war against Iraq. The increasing tension between the two countries over our global aspirations may result in large-scale transfers of military personnel from Germany to the ex-Communist East European countries and to newly created Iraqi and Central Asian bases. Many in the Bush administration, including NATO commander General James L. Jones, have called for a radical reduction of American bases of Germany.