Planet Pentagon

Le Monde diplomatique
August 2007

OWNERSHIP OF THE EARTH, THE SEAS AND THE SKIES


The Pentagon is everywhere - literally. The US military now owns (and occupies) huge swathes of territory across the entire world.

by Nick Turse

Recently, The Wall Street Journal reported on a proposal,
championed by defence secretary Robert Gates, to reduce the
number of United States troops in Iraq in exchange for
bipartisan Congressional support for the longterm (read, more
or less permanent) garrisoning of that country. The troops
are to be tucked away on "large bases far from Iraq's major
cities." This plan sounded suspiciously similar to one
revealed by Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt in The New York
Times on 19 April 2003, just as US troops were preparing to
enter Baghdad.

Headlined "Pentagon Expects Long-Term Access to Four Key
Bases in Iraq", it laid out a US plan for "a long-term
military relationship with the emerging government of Iraq,
one that would grant the Pentagon access to... perhaps four
bases in Iraq that could be used in the future: one at the
international airport just outside Baghdad; another at
Tallil, near Nasiriya in the south; the third at an isolated
airstrip called H-1 in the western desert, along the old oil
pipeline that runs to Jordan; and the last at the Bashur air
field in the Kurdish north."

Shortly thereafter Donald Rumsfeld, then defence secretary,
denied any such plans: "I have never, that I can recall,
heard the subject of a permanent base in Iraq discussed in
any meeting..." - and, while the bases were being built, the
story largely disappeared from the mainstream media.

But even with the multi-square mile, multi-billion dollar,
state-of-the-art Balad Air Base and Camp Victory thrown in,
the bases in Gates' new plan will be but a drop in the bucket
for an organisation that may well be the world's largest
landlord. For many years the US military has been gobbling up
large swathes of the planet and huge amounts of just about
everything on (or in) it.

In 2003 Forbes magazine revealed that media mogul Ted Turner
was America's top land baron - with a total of 1.8m acres
across the US. The nation's 10 largest landowners, Forbes
reported, "own 10.6m acres, or one out of every 217 acres in
the country." Impressive as this total was, the Pentagon puts
Turner and the entire pack of mega-landlords to shame with
over 29m acres in US landholdings. Abroad, the Pentagon's
footprint is also that of a giant. For example, the defence
department controls 20% of the Japanese island of Okinawa
and, according to Stars and Stripes, "owns about 25% of
Guam". Mere land ownership, however, is just the tip of the
iceberg.

Global footprint

In his 2004 book The Sorrows of Empire, Chalmers Johnson
opened the world's eyes to the size of the Pentagon's global
footprint, noting that the Department of Defence (DoD) was
deploying nearly 255,000 military personnel at 725 bases in
38 countries. Since then, the total number of overseas bases
has increased to at least 766 and, according to a report by
the Congressional Research Service, may actually be as high
as 850.

The DoD's "real property portfolio", according to 2006
figures, consists of a total of 3,731 sites. Over 20% of
these sites are located on more than 711,000 acres outside
the US and its territories. Yet even these numbers turn out
to be a drastic undercount. For example, while a 2005
Pentagon report listed US military sites from Antigua and
Hong Kong to Kenya and Peru, some countries with significant
numbers of US bases go entirely unmentioned - Afghanistan and
Iraq, for example.

In Iraq alone, in mid-2005, US forces were deployed at some
106 bases, from the massive Camp Victory, headquarters of the
US high command, to small 500-troop outposts in the
hinterlands. None of them made the Pentagon's list. Nor was
there any mention of bases in Jordan on that list - or in the
2001-2005 reports either. Yet that nation, as military
analyst William Arkin has pointed out, allowed the
garrisoning of 5,000 US troops at various bases around the
country during the buildup to the war in Iraq. In addition,
some 76 nations have given the US military access to airports
and airfields - in addition to who knows where else that the
Pentagon forgot to acknowledge or considers inappropriate for
inclusion in its list.

Even without Jordan, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the more than
20 other nations that, Arkin noted in early 2004, were
"secretly or quietly providing bases and facilities", the
available statistics offer a window into a bloated
organisation bent on setting up franchises across the globe.
According to 2005 documents, the Pentagon acknowledges 39
nations with at least one US base, stations personnel in over
140 countries, and boasts a physical plant of at least
571,900 facilities, though some Pentagon figures show 587,000
"buildings and structures". Of these, 466,599 are located in
the US or its territories. In fact, the Department of Defence
owns or leases more than 75% of all federal buildings in the
US.

According to 2006 figures, the army controls the lion's share
of DoD land (52%), with the air force coming in second (33%),
and the marine corps (8%) and navy (7 %) bringing up the
rear. The army is also tops in total number of sites (1,742)
and total number of installations (1,659). But when it comes
to "large installations", those whose value tops $1,584bn,
the army is trumped by the air force (with 43 mega-bases
compared to the army's 39). The navy and marines possess only
29 and 10, respectively. But what the navy lacks in big bases
of its own, it more than makes up for in borrowed foreign
naval bases and ports - some 251 across the globe.

Diversification

Land and large installations, however, are not all that the
DoD owns. Until fairly recently, the US navy operated its own
865-acre dairy farm in Maryland, complete with a herd of
Holsteins.

While it doesn't have a dairy, the army still operates
stables - such as the John C McKinney Memorial Stables where
many of the 44 horses from its ceremonial Caisson Platoon
live. In fact, the Pentagon owns hundreds of thousands of
animals - from rats to dogs to monkeys. In addition to an
unknown number of animals used for unexplained "other
purposes", in 2001 alone, the DoD utilised 330,149 creatures
for various types of experimentation.

Then there's the equipment the DoD owns, loads of it. For
instance, it is the unlikely owner of "over 2,050 railcars,
know[n] as the Defence Freight Rail Interchange Fleet." The
DoD also reportedly ships 100,000 sea containers each year
and spends $800m annually on domestic cargo, primarily truck
and rail shipments. And when it comes to trucks, the army,
alone, has a fleet of 12,700 Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical
Trucks (huge, eight-wheeled vehicles used to supply
ammunition, petroleum, oils and lubricants to units in the
field) and 120,000 Humvees. All told, according to a 2006
Pentagon report, the DoD had "280 ships, 14,000 aircraft, 900
strategic missiles and 330,000 ground combat and tactical
vehicles."

The Defence Logistics Agency (DLA), the DoD's largest combat
support agency (with operations in 48 of the 50 states and 28
foreign countries) boasts: "If America's forces eat it, wear
it, maintain equipment with it, or burn it as fuel... DLA
probably provides it." In all, the DLA "manages" 5.2m items
and maintains an inventory, in its Defence Distribution
Depots (which stretch from Italy and Japan to Korea and
Kuwait), valued at $94.1bn.

The DLA runs the Defence National Stockpile Centre (DNSC)
which stores 42 "strategic and critical materials" - from
zinc, lead, cobalt, chromium, and mercury (more than 9.7
million pounds of it in 2005) to precious metals such as
platinum, palladium, and even industrial diamonds - at 20
locations across the US. With a stockpile valued at over
$1.5bn and $5.7bn in sales of excess commodities since 1993,
the DNSC claims that there is "no private sector company in
the world that sells this wide range of commodities and
materials".

All told, the Department of Defence owns up to having "over
$1trn in assets [and] $1.6trn in liabilities". This is, no
doubt, a gross underestimate given the DoD's historic
penchant for flawed book-keeping and the fact that, according
to a study by its own inspector general, it cannot even
account for at least $1trn dollars in money spent - or
perhaps, according to Donald Rumsfeld, as much as $2.3trn.

Cooking the books is fitting enough for an American
organisation, in the age of Enron, that thinks of itself not
just as a government agency but, in its own words, as
"America's oldest company, largest company, busiest company
and most successful company." In fact, on its website the DoD
makes the point that it easily bests Wal-Mart, Exxon-Mobil
and General Motors in terms of budget and staff.

The whole world in its hands

In addition to assembling a dizzying array of assets, from
tungsten to tubas (in 2005 alone, it spent more than $6m on
sheet music, musical instruments, and accessories), the
Pentagon owns a great deal of housing: 300,000 units
worldwide. By its own admission, it is also a slum landlord -
with an inventory of "180,000 inadequate family housing
units". According to the Office of the Deputy Undersecretary
of Defence (Installations & Environment): "Approximately 33
percent of all [military] families live on-base, in housing
that is often dilapidated, too small, lacking in modern
facilities - almost 49 percent (or 83,000 units) are
substandard."

Meanwhile, the DoD's own home, the Pentagon, bests the Sultan
of Brunei's Istana Nurul Iman palace, the largest private
residence in the world - 3,705,793 to 2,152,782 square feet
of occupiable space. The DoD likes to boast that the Pentagon
is "virtually a city in itself" - with 30 miles of access
highways and 200 acres of lawn space. It includes a five-acre
centre courtyard, 17.5 miles of corridors, 16 parking lots
(with an estimated 8,770 parking spaces), a post office,
"credit union, travel agency, dental offices, ticket offices,
blood donor centre, housing referral office, and 30 other
retail shops and services," a chapel, a heliport, and
numerous libraries. Moreover, says the DoD, the Pentagon
consumed a huge portion of its natural environment: its
concrete reportedly contains "680,000 tons of sand and gravel
from the nearby Potomac River".

In value, the Pentagon's other properties are almost as
impressive. The combined worth of the world's two most
expensive homes - the $138m, 103-room Updown Court in
Windlesham, Surrey in the United Kingdom, and Saudi Prince
Bandar bin Sultan's $135m Aspen ski lodge in the US - don't
even come close to the price tag on Ascension Auxiliary
Airfield, located on a small island off the coast of St
Helena (the place of Napoleon Bonaparte's final exile and
death). It has an estimated replacement value of over $337m.
Other high-priced facilities include Camp Ederle in Italy at
$544m; Incirlik Air Base in Turkey at almost $1.2bn; and
Thule Air Base in Greenland at $2.8bn; while the US Naval Air
Station in Keflavik, Iceland, is appraised at $3.4bn and the
various military facilities in Guam are valued at more than
$11bn.

To begin to grasp the Pentagon's global immensity, it helps
to look, again, at its land holdings - all 120,191 square
kilometres which are almost exactly the size of North Korea
(120,538 square kilometres) and larger than nations such as
Guatemala, South Korea, Portugal, Jordan, Kuwait, Israel,
Denmark etc. The 7,518 square kilometres of 20 micro-states
combined (1) pales in comparison to the 9,307 square
kilometres of just one military base, White Sands Missile
Range.

Downsizing?

While it has been setting up hundreds of bases across the
globe to support ongoing wars, the Pentagon has also been
restructuring its forces in an effort to reduce troop levels
at old cold war mega-bases and close down less strategically
useful sites. Does this mean less Pentagon control in the
world?

Don't bet on it. In fact, the US military is exploring
long-term options to dominate the planet as never before.
Previously, the DoD has maintained only a moving presence on
the high seas. The Pentagon is now considering - and planning
for - future "sea-basing". No longer just a ship, a fleet or
"prepositioned material" stationed on the world's oceans,
sea-bases will be "a hybrid system-of-systems consisting of
concepts of operations, ships, forces, offensive and
defensive weapons, aircraft, communications and logistics."
The notion of such bases is increasingly popular within the
military due to the fact that they "will help to assure
access to areas where US military forces may be denied access
to support [land] facilities". After all, as a report by the
Defence Science Board pointed out: "[S]eabases are sovereign
[and] not subject to alliance vagaries." Imagine a future
where the people of countries at odds with US policies
suddenly find America's "massive seaborne platforms" floating
just outside their territorial waters.

With a real-estate portfolio that includes the earth and the
sea, the sky would, quite literally, be the limit for the
DoD. According to Noah Shachtman, editor of Wired
's "Danger Room" blog, the "US Air Force Transformation
Flight Plan" of 2004 outlined what "analysts call the most
detailed picture since the end of the cold war of the
Pentagon's efforts to turn outer space into a battlefield...
the report makes US dominance of the heavens a top Pentagon
priority in the new century." As the US military's
outer-space policy statement puts it: "Freedom of action in
space is as important to the United States as air power and
sea power."

When you're effectively controlling a planet, the idea of
occupying Iraq, a country about the size of the state of
California, for the next decade or five, must seem like a
small thing. In practice, however, the global landlord on the
Potomac has found property values in Iraq steep indeed. As
all now know, it has been fought to a standstill there by
modest-sized bands of guerrillas lacking air power, sea
power, or hi-tech spy satellites in outer space. The Pentagon
may be landlord to massive swathes of the globe, but from
Vietnam to Laos, Beirut to Somalia, US forces have also found
themselves evicted by neighbourhood residents from properties
they were prepared to consider their own. The question
remains: will Iraq be added to the list of permanently
occupied territories and take on the look of long-garrisoned
South Korea as Robert Gates (2) and President George Bush
have urged? Or will it be added to a growing list of places
that have effectively resisted paying the rent on Planet
Pentagon?
________________________________________________________

Nick Turse is associate editor of Tomdispatch.com and author
of The Complex (the American Empire Project Series,
Metropolitan Books, New York, forthcoming)

(1) The Vatican, Monaco, Nauru, Tuvalu, San Marino,
Liechtenstein, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Maldives, Malta, Saint
Vincent and the Grenadines, Barbados, Antigua and Barbuda,
Seychelles, Andorra, Bahrain, Saint Lucia, Singapore, the
Federated States of Micronesia, Kiribati and Tonga.

(2) David E Sanger and David S Cloud, The New York Times,
26 May 2007.

Original text in English