When you live in the United States, with the roar of the free market, the roar of this huge military power, the roar of being at the heart of empire, it’s hard to hear the whispering of the rest of the world.
The Department of Defense states that, as part of carrying out its mission to defend America, “certain activities—such as weapons testing, practice bombing and field maneuvers—may have had effects on tribal environmental health and safety as well as tribal economic, social and cultural welfare.” That would be an understatement.
Blowing things up (not cleaning up after itself) is the military’s strong suit. Only a tiny fraction of the federal defense budget is spent on resolving the Pentagon’s local and global environmental impacts.
According to a 2004 Associated Press story, “removing unexploded munitions and hazardous waste found so far on 15 million acres of shut-down U.S. military ranges could take more than 300 years, according to congressional auditors.” This cost, originally estimated at $35 billion, was soon climbing rapidly. In one report, the military identified 17,482 potentially contaminated sites at 1,855 installations. Rather than clean up the toxins, the Department of Defense simply limited its liability for much of the contamination.
The military is one of the largest landholders in the United States, with some 30 million acres of land under its control. Much of this land base was annexed or otherwise stolen from Native peoples. The two states with the most federal landholdings are Nevada with 84.5 percent of the state and Alaska with 69.1 percent of the state being held by the federal government. These represent takings under the 1863 Ruby Valley Treaty with the Shoshone and the Alaskan Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971.
In 1916, the U.S. Army owned approximately 1.5 million acres. Land ownership grew by 33 percent in the course of the World War I mobilization. As of 1940, the Army owned approximately two million acres. The scale of World War II mobilization was unprecedented: the Army (including the Army Air Forces) acquired eight million additional acres, thereby quintupling the Pentagon’s land ownership. Military agencies were given nearly unlimited spending authority to acquire land from private owners and had the option of foreclosing on lands it deemed necessary for national security.
Most of the new acreage cost the Army practically nothing. More than six million acres—more than three-quarters of the land it acquired—came from the public domain.
What is clear is that “public domain” is often really Native land. The Army took some 10,000 acres from the Cheyenne and Arapaho people for Fort Reno in 1881 and, until 1993, had use of Zuni and Navajo lands near Fort Wingate.
In fact, much of what is today U.S. military land was, at some time, taken from Native peoples, sometimes at gunpoint, sometimes in the wake of massacres or forced marches, sometimes through starvation, and sometimes through pen and paper—broken treaties, acts of Congress or state legislatures, or by presidential authority by the “Great White Father” himself.
Until 1940, the Army’s Chemical Warfare Service did all its testing at the Edgewood Arsenal in New Jersey and the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. Eventually these facilities became overcrowded, too close to growing population centers, and too small for large-scale testing of toxic agents. The Army’s answer: move their chemical warfare testing to the heart of Goshute Territory.
About 70 miles southwest of Salt Lake City, Utah, a small community of Goshutes lives on an 18,600-acre reservation. For the past forty years, the federal government has created, tested, and dumped toxic military wastes all around them. Less than ten miles southwest of the reservation is the Dugway Proving Grounds, where the government conducts tests of chemical and biological weapons.
In 1968, chemical agents escaped from Dugway and killed more than 6,000 sheep and other animals while the Army was conducting open-air nerve gas tests that included delivery by artillery shells and fighter jet. More than 1,600 of those animals were buried on the reservation, leaving a toxic legacy in the ground.
At least 1,174 other tests of chemical agents at Dugway spread nearly a half-million pounds of nerve agent to the winds. There were 328 open-air germ warfare tests, 74 radiological “dirty bomb” tests, and the equivalent of eight intentional meltdowns of small nuclear reactors.
The Desert Chemical Depot, located 15 miles east of the reservation, stores more than 40 percent of the nation’s chemical weapons stockpile and is responsible for the incineration of many chemical munitions and nerve agents.
The Skull Valley Goshutes were never consulted about the placement of any of these facilities, nor have they ever been compensated for the immense threats to their environment and health that these sites pose. Their story is a microcosm of the impact of the military on Native people.
New Mexico’s infamous Los Alamos National Laboratory has had more than its share of fires and toxic leaks. The laboratory was built on more than forty-three square miles of land taken from the Santa Clara and San Ildefonso Pueblos.
The multitude of nuclear weapons research facilities has left a series of nuclear dumps, including some 17.5 million square feet of hazardous and nuclear waste at 24 officially designated storage areas. These sites include plutonium and tritium plants used to build parts of nuclear warheads. Thus far, the United States has expended $7 trillion on nuclear warheads, a good sum of this allocated to Los Alamos. Of the laboratory’s $2.1 billion FY 2014 budget, some 73 percent was slated for nuclear weapons work. No long-term plan for waste disposal or reduction exists.
Alaska’s Natives have felt some of the most widespread and deepest impacts of the modern military. Alaska has over 200 Native villages and communities and almost as many military sites. The military holds over 1.7 million acres of Alaska, much of this within the traditional territories of Indigenous communities. Then there is the military occupation of airspace over Native territories where low-flying planes and sonic booms can have a disruptive impact on caribou herds.
Seven hundred active and abandoned military sites account for at least 1,900 toxic hotspots. Five out of Alaska’s seven Superfund sites are a result of military contamination. The 700 formerly used defense sites in Alaska tell a history of the Cold War and every war since. The levels of radioactive and persistent organic pollutants remaining in the environment continue to put at risk people who are dependent upon the land for their survival.
Alaskan Native lands were occupied for military reasons but, in many cases, were annexed for their oil and natural resources under the Alaskan Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971. The military remains dominant on the land, joined by multinational oil, mining, and logging companies.
In 1951, the Atomic Energy Commission created its Nevada Test Site (NTS) within Western Shoshone Territory as a “proving ground” for nuclear weapons. Between 1951 and 1992, the United States and Great Britain exploded 1,054 nuclear devices both above and below ground at the NTS. Radiation from these experiments was fully measured for only 111 of the tests, about 10 percent of the total.
In 1997, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) released a study of radiation exposure from aboveground nuclear tests that revealed some 160 million people suffered significant radiation exposure from the tests—on average 200 times more than the amount indicated by the government. The NCI estimated that as many as 75,000 cases of thyroid cancer may have been caused by atmospheric testing.
The military controls a large percentage of Hawaii, including some 25 percent of Oahu, valuable “submerged lands” (i.e., estuaries and bays) and, until relatively recently, the island of Kaho’olawe. The military reigns over more than 200,000 acres of Hawaii, with over 100 military installations and at least 150,000 personnel.
Live ammunition occasionally washes up on local beaches. Malu Aina, a military watchdog group from Hawaii, reports: “Live military ordnance in large quantities has been found off Hapuna Beach and in Hilo Bay. Additional ordnance, including grenades, artillery shells, rockets, mortars, armor-piercing ordnance, bazooka rounds, napalm bombs, and hedgehog missiles have been found at Hilo airport, in Waimea town, Waikoloa Village … and on residential and school grounds. At least nine people have been killed or injured by exploding ordnance.”
Since the end of World War II, Hawaii has been the center of the U.S. military’s Pacific Command. PACOM serves as an outpost for Pacific expansionism, along with Guam, the Marshall Islands, Samoa, and the Philippines. It is the center of U.S. military activities over more than half the Earth—from the west coast of United States to Africa’s east coast, from the Arctic to Antarctica, covering 70 percent of the world’s oceans.
The island of Kaho’olawe was the only national historic site to be used as a bombing range. After years of litigation and negotiations, Congress placed a moratorium on the bombing, but after $400 million in cleanup money, much remains to be completed. The military determined that there are more than 236 former military sites in Hawaii at 46 separate installations, all of which were contaminated.
There is no way to avoid an observation: it is as a result of our nation’s history of colonialism, the Doctrine of Manifest Destiny, and the expansion of military interests to support American imperialism that Indian Country communities are located adjacent to more than our fair share of these toxic military sites. That is because many of today’s military bases are the legacy of old U.S. Calvary forts, places where the Army built strongholds to support their invasions of Indian Country, places that were used to subjugate and imprison Native people.
The Hanford Nuclear Reservation—the largest nuclear waste dump in the Western Hemisphere—is located entirely within the treaty boundary of the Yakama Nation. As Hanford Watch activist Lynne Porter reports: “Hanford covers 560 square miles of high brush lands in eastern Washington, along 51 miles of the Columbia River. From 1943 to 1988, Hanford produced plutonium for nuclear weapons, using a line of nuclear reactors along the river. About 53 million gallons of high-level radioactive and chemical waste are stored in 177 underground tanks (the size of three-story buildings) buried in Hanford’s central area, about 12 miles from the river. Over the years, 70 of the tanks have leaked about 1 million gallons of waste into the soil.”
For 12,000 years, the Umatilla, Wasco, Cayuse, and Walla Walla have lived in the Columbia Plateau on lands and waters that sustained their people. In 1850, however, Congress passed the Oregon Donation Land Act, exclusively for the benefit of white “settlers” and “pioneers,” and thereby created the largest land giveaway in the history of the nation—at the sole expense of Native people, who paid with their lives by the thousands. Relentlessly harassed and murdered by both U.S. Army troops and bloodthirsty white vigilantes, surviving remnants were forced to sign treaties under egregious terms in 1855 and 1856.
In 1940, the Army selected a 16,000-acre parcel from within this territory to become the Umatilla Ordnance Depot. Beginning in 1941, some 7,000 workers were hired and $35 million was spent to create a complex of military storehouses, housing, and ammunition. The munitions that were stored there were used in the Korean conflict, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Operation Desert Shield, and Operation Desert Storm. In 1962, chemical nerve agents VX and GM and the mustard blister agent HD were sent there. The Umatilla Chemical Agent Disposal Facility covers more than 19,000 acres of Confederated Tribes of Umatilla land.
It is said that if the Great Sioux Nation were in control of its 1851 treaty area, it would be the third-greatest nuclear weapons power on the face of the Earth. This is due to the vast number of Air Force, NORAD, and other bases in the Lakota territories now called Nebraska, North and South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Of particular concern to the Lakota Nation, however, is the gunnery range on the Pine Ridge reservation, which is part of a more recent land seizure. As Sam Featherman explains in the book The Treadmill of Destruction: “The U.S. government seized 342,000 acres of the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota for a bombing range to train World War II pilots. The land seizure forced fifteen Oglala Sioux families to sell their farms and ranches for $.03 an acre.” The gunnery range (aka the Badlands Bombing Range) continues to be a source of concern for the Oglala Sioux Tribe, as both live and spent ordnance are found throughout the area.
The Badger Army Ammunitions plant near Baraboo, Wisconsin, was established by the military in 1942 as a Class II military propellant manufacturing installation. The plant produced propellants for small arms, rockets, and a host of larger weapons. Ammunition production ceased in 1975, but the plant occupied 7,400 acres of land, some contaminated with a host of toxic chemicals including chloroform, carbon tetrachloride, trichloroethene, and dinitrotoluene. Over the past two decades, the Ho-Chunk Nation has been seeking return of the lands associated with the former Badger facility. With this land, the Ho-Chunk plan to create an organic bison operation to feed the tribal population.
We talk of sending soldiers off to fight on battlefields. The word “battlefield” appears in news stories about our wars. And the term conveys to many of us a location in which soldiers fight other soldiers. We don’t think of certain things being found in a battlefield. We don’t imagine whole families, or picnics, or wedding parties, for example, as being found on a battlefield—or grocery stores or churches. We don’t picture schools or playgrounds or grandparents in the middle of an active battlefield. We visualize something similar to Gettysburg or World War I France: a field with a battle on it. Maybe it’s in the jungle or the mountains or the desert of some distant land we’re “defending,” but it’s some sort of a field with a battle on it. What else could a battlefield be?
At first glance, our battlefields do not appear to be where we live and work and play as civilians, as long as “we” is understood to mean Americans. Wars don’t happen in the United States. But for the people living in the countries where our wars have been fought since, and including World War II, the “battlefield” has quite clearly included and continues to include their hometowns and neighborhoods.
While the Battles of Bull Run or Manassas were fought in a field near Manassas, Virginia, the Battles of Fallujah were fought in the city of Fallujah, Iraq. When Vietnam was a battlefield, all of it was a battlefield, or what the U.S. Army now calls “the battlespace.” When our drones shoot missiles into Pakistan, the suspected terror plotters we’re murdering are not positioned in a designated field; they’re in houses, along with all of the other people we “accidentally” kill as part of the bargain. (And at least some of those people’s friends will indeed begin plotting terrorism, which is great news for the manufacturers of drones.)
Pilots speak of being on the battlefield when they have been great distances above anything resembling a field or even an apartment building. Sailors speak of being on the battlefield when they haven’t set foot on dry land. But the new battlefield also encompasses anywhere U.S. forces might conceivably be employed, which is where your house comes in. If the president declares you an “enemy combatant,” you will not only live on the battlefield—you will be the enemy, whether you want to be or not.
When U.S. forces kidnap people on the street in Milano or in an airport in New York and send them off to be tortured in secret prisons, or when our military pays a reward to someone in Afghanistan for handing over their rivals and falsely accusing them of terrorism, and we ship the victims off to be imprisoned indefinitely in Guantanamo or right there in Bagram, all of those activities are said to take place on a battlefield. Anywhere someone might be accused of terrorism and kidnapped or murdered is the battlefield. No discussion of releasing innocent people from Guantanamo would be complete without expression of the fear that they might “return to the battlefield,” meaning that they might engage in anti-U.S. violence, whether they had ever done so before or not.
When an Italian court convicts CIA agents in absentia for kidnapping a man in Italy in order to torture him, the court is staking the claim that Italian streets are not located in a U.S. battlefield. When the United States fails to hand over the convicts, it is restoring the battlefield to where it now exists: in each and every corner of the galaxy. Traditionally, killing people has been deemed legal in war but illegal outside of it. Apart from the fact that our wars are themselves illegal, should it be permissible to expand them to include an isolated assassination in Yemen? What about a massive bombing campaign with unmanned drones in Pakistan? Why should the smaller expansion of an isolated murder be less acceptable than the larger expansion that kills more people?
And if the battlefield is everywhere, it is in the United States as well. The Obama administration in 2010 announced its right to assassinate Americans, presuming to already possess by common understanding the right to assassinate non-Americans. But it claimed the power to kill Americans only outside the United States. Yet, active military troops are stationed within the United States and assigned to fight here if so ordered. If the “war on terror” makes it wartime, and if the “war on terror” lasts for generations, as some of its proponents desire, then there really are no limits.
Wars have always had a tendency to eliminate hard-won rights. In the United States, this tradition includes President John Adams’s Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, Abraham Lincoln’s suspensions of habeas corpus, Woodrow Wilson’s Espionage Act and Sedition Act, Franklin Roosevelt’s rounding up of Japanese Americans, the madness of McCarthyism, and the many developments of the Bush-Obama era that really took off with the first passage of the PATRIOT Act.
On July 25, 2008, the House Judiciary Committee agreed to hold a hearing on the impeachment of George W. Bush. The hearing was just a stunt. But the testimony was deadly serious and included a statement from former Justice Department official Bruce Fein from which this is excerpted:
After 9/11, the executive branch declared—with the endorsement or acquiescence of Congress and the American people—a state of permanent warfare with international terrorism [and that] … the entire world, including all of the United States, is an active battle-field where military force and military law may be employed at the discretion of the executive branch.
For instance, the executive branch claims authority to employ the military for aerial bombardment of cities in the United States if it believes that Al Qaeda sleeper cells are nesting there and are hidden among civilians….
The executive branch has directed United States forces to kill or kidnap persons it suspects have allegiance to Al Qaeda in foreign lands, for instance Italy, Macedonia, or Yemen, but it has plucked only one United States resident, Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, from his home for indefinite detention as a suspected enemy combatant. But if the executive branch’s constitutional justification for its modest actions is not rebuked through impeachment or otherwise, a precedent of executive power will have been established that will lie around like a loaded weapon ready for use by any incumbent who claims an urgent need.
President Obama maintained and expanded upon the powers established by George W. Bush. War was now officially everywhere and eternal, thereby allowing presidents even greater powers, which they could use in the waging of even more wars, from which yet more powers could derive, and so forth to Armageddon, unless something breaks the cycle.
The battlefield may be all around us, but the wars are still concentrated in particular places. Even in those particular locations—such as Iraq and Afghanistan—the wars lack the two basic features of a traditional battle-field—the field itself and a recognizable enemy. In a foreign occupation, the enemy looks just like the supposed beneficiaries of the “humanitarian” war. The only people recognizable for who they are in the war are the foreign occupiers.
Wars are not waged against armies. Nor are they waged against demonized dictators. They are waged against people. Remember the U.S. soldier who shot a woman who had apparently been bringing a bag of food to the U.S. troops? She would have looked just the same if she had been bringing a bomb. How was the soldier supposed to tell the difference? What was he supposed to do?
The answer, of course, is that he was supposed to not be there. The occupation battlefield is full of enemies who look exactly like, but sometimes are not, women bringing groceries. It is a lie to call such a place a “battlefield.” One way to make this clear is to note that a majority of those killed in wars are civilians. A better term is probably “non-participants.” Some civilians participate in wars. And those who resist a foreign occupation violently are not necessarily military. Nor is there any clear moral or legal justification for killing those fighting a truly defensive war any more than there is for killing the non-participants.
The “good war,” World War II, is still the deadliest of all time, with military deaths estimated at 20 to 25 million (including 5 million deaths of prisoners in captivity), and civilian deaths estimated at 40 to 52 million (including 13 to 20 million from war-related disease and famine). The United States suffered a relatively small portion of these deaths—an estimated 417,000 military and 1,700 civilian—small in relation to the suffering of some of the other countries.
The War on Korea saw the deaths of an estimated 500,000 North Korean troops; 400,000 Chinese troops; 245,000 to 415,000 South Korean troops; 37,000 U.S. troops; and an estimated 2 million Korean civilians.
The War on Vietnam may have killed 4 million civilians or more, plus 1.1 million North Vietnamese troops, 40,000 South Vietnamese troops, and 58,000 U.S. forces.
In the decades following the destruction of Vietnam, the United States killed a lot of people in a lot of wars, but relatively few U.S. soldiers died. The Gulf War saw 382 U.S. deaths. The 1965–66 invasion of the Dominican Republic didn’t cost a single U.S. life. Grenada in 1983 cost nineteen. Panama in 1989 saw forty Americans die. Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo saw a total of thirty-two U.S. war deaths. Wars had become exercises that killed very few Americans in comparison to the large numbers of non-U.S. non-participants dying.
The wars on Iraq and Afghanistan similarly saw the other sides do almost all of the dying. Americans hear through their media that over 4,000 U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq, but rarely do they encounter any report on the deaths of Iraqis. Fortunately, some serious studies have been done of Iraqi deaths caused by the invasion and occupation that began in March 2003.
A study by The Lancet, based on surveys of Iraqi households through the end of June 2006, concluded that there had been 654,965 excess violent and nonviolent deaths. This included deaths resulting from increased lawlessness, degraded infrastructure, and poor healthcare. Most of the deaths (601,027) were estimated to be due to violence. The causes of violent deaths were gunshot (56 percent), car bomb (13 percent), other explosion/ordnance (14 percent), air strike (13 percent), accident (2 percent), and unknown (2 percent). Extrapolating from the Lancet report, Just Foreign Policy, a Washington-based organization, calculated that Iraqi deaths through 2011 totaled 1,366,350.
For all of these wars, one can add a much larger casualty figure for the wounded than those I’ve cited for the dead. It is also safe to assume in each case a much larger number for those traumatized, orphaned, made homeless, or exiled. The Iraqi refugee crisis involves millions. Beyond that, these statistics do not capture the degraded quality of life in war zones—reduced life expectancy, increased birth defects, the rapid spread of cancers, and the horror of unexploded bombs.
If the numbers above are correct, World War II killed 67 percent civilians; the War on Korea, 61 percent civilians; the War on Vietnam, 77 percent civilians; the War on Iraq, 99.7 percent Iraqis (whether or not civilians); and the Drone War on Pakistan, 98 percent civilians.
On March 16, 2003, a young American woman named Rachel Corrie stood in front of a Palestinian home in the Gaza strip, hoping to protect it from demolition by the Israeli military, which claimed to be destroying guerrilla hideouts. She faced a Caterpillar D9-R bulldozer, and it crushed her to death. Defending against her family’s civil suit in court in September 2010, an Israeli military training unit leader explained: “During war there are no civilians.”
In 2007, the U.S. military admitted to having killed 429 civilians at Iraqi checkpoints. In an occupied country, the occupier’s vehicles must keep moving or those inside might be killed. The vehicles belonging to the occupied, however, must stop to prevent their being killed. War on Iraq veteran Matt Howard remembers:
An American life is always worth more than an Iraqi life. Right now, if you’re in a convoy in Iraq, you do not stop that convoy. If a little kid runs in front of your truck, you are under orders to run him over instead of stopping your convoy. This is the policy that’s set in how to deal with people in Iraq.
As Gen. Stanley McChrystal, then the senior American and NATO commander in Afghanistan, said in March 2010: “We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat.”
One of the most significant legacies of World War II has been the bombing of civilians. This new approach to war brought the front lines much closer to home while allowing those doing the killing to be located too far away to see their victims.
For the residents of German cities, survival “beneath the bombs” was a defining characteristic of the war. The war in the skies erased the distinction between home and front, adding “air terror psychosis” and “bunker panic” to the German vocabulary.
A U.S. pilot in the War on Korea had a different perspective:
The first couple of times I went in on a napalm strike, I had kind of an empty feeling. I thought afterward, Well, maybe I shouldn’t have done it. Maybe those people I set afire were innocent civilians. But you get conditioned, especially after you’ve hit what looks like a civilian and the A-frame on his back lights up like a Roman candle—a sure enough sign that he’s been carrying ammunition. Normally speaking, I have no qualms about my job. Besides, we don’t generally use napalm on people we can see. We use it on hill positions or buildings. And one thing about napalm is that when you’ve hit a village and have seen it go up in flames, you know that you’ve accomplished something.
Proponents of aerial bombing have argued from the start that it could bring a faster peace. This has always proved false, including in Germany, England, and Japan. The idea that the nuclear destruction of two Japanese cities would change the Japanese government’s position was implausible from the start, given that the United States had already destroyed several dozen Japanese cities with firebombs and napalm.
Asia-Pacific Journal editor Mark Selden explains the importance of this horror to the decades of U.S. war-making that would follow:
Every president from Roosevelt to George W. Bush has endorsed in practice an approach to warfare that targets entire populations for annihilation, one that eliminates all distinction between combatant and noncombatant with deadly consequences. The awesome power of the atomic bomb has obscured the fact that this strategy came of age in the firebombing of Tokyo and became the centerpiece of U.S. war-making from that time forward.
The damage of our wars outlasts the memories of elderly survivors. We leave landscapes pock-marked with bomb craters, oil fields ablaze, seas poisoned, groundwater ruined. We leave behind—on the land and in the bodies of our own veterans—Agent Orange, depleted uranium, and all the other substances designed to kill people quickly but carrying the side effect of killing people slowly. Since the United States’ secret bombing of Laos ended in 1975, some 20,000 people have been killed by leftover unexploded ordnance. Even the War on Drugs begins to look like the War on Terror when the spraying of fields with herbicides renders entire regions of Colombia uninhabitable.
One of the first effects of military buildup is a relaxation of environmental standards. Prior to World War I, the United States had begun enacting legislation aimed at protecting the environment and conserving natural resources. Under the administration of Theodore Roosevelt (1901–9), 140 million acres were added to the National Park System. Legislation protecting land and water was passed. Big game and bird preserves were established. As we prepared for World War I, much of the legislation was overturned or ignored when claims of patriotism overrode environmental controls. National parks were opened to grazing, logging, hunting, and agricultural development that had been restricted in the early 1900s.
The role of preparing for war changed dramatically in the post–World War II years. The onset of the Cold War brought daily military rehearsals for the big war that everyone hoped would never come but decided to prepare for anyway. The military became a fixed part of American life—an entire industry was built up around military preparations for war. By the end of the Cold War, the Pentagon controlled 1,246 military bases (both in the United States and on foreign soil), 17 nuclear warhead production sites (operated by the Department of Energy), and 12 chemical weapons production and storage facilities.
While the military has begun taking precautions to contain and reduce toxic substances, the damage has already accumulated over more than fifty-five years. Denver’s Rocky Mountain Arsenal has been dubbed “the most toxic square mile on Earth.” All of the toxic byproducts from the production of mustard gas, napalm, incendiary weapons, and other types of munitions were dumped on the land for decades. Toxin ponds are lethal to wildlife, and yet poisons leaked into the groundwater for years before officials admitted there was even a problem at the arsenal.
Estimates are that more than 20,000 present and former government sites are contaminated with toxic substances. According to the nonprofit Center for Defense Information, the cleanup bill could reach or exceed $150 billion. No matter what the actual cost of the cleanup, the detriment to the environment will most likely never be fully assessed or reversed.
Throughout the Cold War, industrial wastes were routinely dumped into the local creeks at the Cherry Point Marine Corps Air Station in North Carolina. Today, these creeks contain high levels of mercury and lead. Local fish show signs of contamination and reproductive problems.
At Maryland’s Aberdeen Proving Ground (formerly known as the Edgewood Arsenal), military and civilian personnel dumped arsenic, cyanide, napalm, white phosphorus, and other chemicals at a site that sits in close proximity to state-designated Critical Habitat Areas, a National Wildlife Refuge, and Chesapeake Bay.
Tinker Air Force Base, just outside Oklahoma City, was built in a major drainage basin atop central Oklahoma’s only underground aquifer. Tinker AFB, a repair depot for aircraft weapons and engines, was contaminated with solvents such as trichloroethylene and heavy metals like hexavalent chromium. According to a 1991 report to Congress, the contamination covered 220 acres and included 6 landfills containing 1,705,000 cubic yards of industrial and sanitary waste.
In San Francisco, groundwater at the Hunters Point Naval Station Annex—a Navy shipyard originally built in 1869—tested positive for benzene, PCBs, toluene, and phenols. Studies also discovered higher-than-normal levels of heavy metals in offshore sediments.
Perhaps the worst case of unexploded ordnance was found at the Army’s Jefferson Proving Ground in Indiana. A munitions test area since 1941, the military test-fired an estimated 23 million rounds of ammunition at the site. As many as 1.5 million of those test rounds remain unexploded, littering the facility’s 55,000 acres with munitions—some reportedly buried 25 feet underground. Because unexploded munitions are not considered toxic substances, the cleanup of these munitions is not covered under the federal Resource Conservation and Recovery Act that pays for recovery costs at other contaminated sites.
American military bases worldwide are further sites of contamination. As far back as 1990, the army identified 358 contaminated sites at its European bases—the result of fuel leaks, solvent spills, hazardous substances dumped in landfills, and the ammunition expended at various firing ranges.
The United States is not the world’s only military polluter. Levels of pollution generated in the former Soviet Union’s military-industrial complex far surpassed that created by the United States. Without even the limited controls found in United States, the Soviets freely poured contaminants into the biosphere for five decades.
Preparations for warfare involve increased levels of war exercises. One of the major differences before and after World War II was in the amount of space required for an army (or navy or air force) to train. In World War II, only 4,000 acres were necessary for full-scale tank and infantry maneuvers. Today, army officials claim they need 80,000 acres to carry out similar exercises.
During World War II, troops under Gen. George S. Patton held tank maneuvers in the Southern California desert. Today, those tracks still remain visible. In most areas, only about 35 percent of the vegetation has recovered.
Armored tanks continue to be a major cause of environmental damage. Tanks destroy vegetation, wildlife habitat, and wildlife. U.S. exercises held in Germany—including the massive “Reforger” exercises—caused hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage to the German countryside.
Reforger assembled large numbers of U.S. troops—many shipped in from National Guard bases in the States—to conduct field training in the German countryside. At its peak in 1988, Reforger involved 97,000 NATO soldiers (including 75,000 Americans) and 7,000 tracked vehicles. Thousands of troops engaged in maneuvers for approximately two weeks, tearing up fields and roads. In the damp German countryside, the combination of wheeled vehicles and tanks turned fields into giant mud traps. These maneuvers were not restricted to military bases—they extended into meadows and fields, over planted crops, and into nearby forests.
Local opposition to these damaging maneuvers became so intense that the Reforger exercise scheduled for 1989 was cancelled. The last Reforger exercise was conducted in May 1993. Unfortunately, in 2015, the growing tension between the United States/NATO and Russia prompted the Pentagon to dispatch U.S. Army tanks and Air Force planes to participate in a new era of military exercises in Europe under the banner of Operation Atlantic Resolve.
In this age of ecological breakdown, pockets of wondrous biodiversity still survive in the vast Pacific Ocean. The Gulf of Alaska teems with a multitude of whale species; Southeast Asia’s “Coral Triangle” boasts 500 species of coral; the Great Barrier Reef of Australia, the Galapagos Islands, and the seven-mile-deep Mariana Trench are still fairly intact. But these marvels may soon be wiped out by unchallenged trends in global militarism.
Widespread military exercises, defense-industry profiteering, and base-building (mostly by the United States) are wreaking irreversible destruction on coral reefs and other ecosystems, even without active war.
It is true that, for decades, deleterious war games have taken place on military range complexes spanning from Asia’s east coast to the west coast of the Americas, and points in between. However, the scale and capacity for destruction has never been so immense as it is now. It’s as if military activities have been suddenly “supersized.” The U.S. Navy estimates that between 2016 and 2020, naval exercises in the Gulf of Alaska will kill over 180,000 marine mammals. In Hawaiian waters, it is estimated that 9.6 million marine mammals will be injured or killed over the same period.
But most galling is the new, fraudulent manner in which the United States has come to gain control of a whopping nine million square nautical miles of the Pacific Ocean—an area double the size of all fifty states. (This chicanery goes entirely unmentioned by reporters or politicians, so the public remains oblivious.)
The United States started claiming huge swaths of the Pacific about a decade ago, in anticipation of the threat of a rising China competing for finite resources and regional hegemony. The sweeping dominion of the United States took the form of “range complexes,” slated for military practice, and “marine monuments,” supposedly intended for environmental protection.
The first marine monument was designated in 2006, just before George W. Bush left office. He designated the Northwest Hawaiian Islands as the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument. Environmentalists cheered this supposedly conservationist move. Ten years later, they cheered again, when Obama doubled the size to over a half-million square miles. What they didn’t realize was that, in one fell swoop—without public participation or scrutiny—Bush and Obama were paving the way for militarizing vast tracts of the Pacific.
When commercial enterprise is banned, it turns out that a marine monument can easily morph into a military “range complex.” This was the case with Papahanaumokuakea Marine Monument, which overlaps with the Northwest Hawaiian Islands Range Complex. Commercial and indigenous fishing are off-limits, but torpedoes, sonar, and all manner of detonations can blast with impunity. For example, the Environmental Protection Agency’s “allowable” limit on cyanide is one part per billion parts of water. Nonetheless, the cyanide discharge from a single torpedo is in the range of 140 to 150 parts per billion.
The Pentagon insists that these war simulations are required to ensure military preparedness. But for the whales, turtles, dolphins, coral, sea sponges, snails, anemones, reef fish, sea urchins, and thousands of other diverse and rare species, living in a range complex is no “simulation.” For them, it’s real war, all the time. “Marine monument” status doesn’t protect them.
A similar scenario took place when the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument was expanded to include the Marshall Islands, infamous for its atomic-testing legacy. The new status has not stopped missiles and hypersonic aircraft from scattering shrapnel into the Marshalls’ Kwajalein lagoon. Apparently, the real function of the “marine monument” designation is to introduce, without controversy, U.S. jurisdiction over the open seas.
Yet another example is supremely wild Pagan isle, within the Mariana Trench Marine National Monument in the Western Pacific. Pagan is a kind of “Noah’s Ark,” a miraculous habitat where populations of rare birds, snails, insects, plants, and animals thrive. Yet, the Pentagon now is proposing “full spectrum” military exercises on Pagan. That would mean year-round amphibious attacks, bombing, torpedoes, underwater mines, and other detonations from the air, from the sea, and from the ground, bombing the eighteen-square-mile island out of recognition. Nearby Tinian Island is also slated for live-fire training.
So much for “marine monument” protection. The designation is a fraud. In fact, three of the four U.S. “marine monuments” overlap with “range complexes”; the one that doesn’t is the Rose Atoll Marine Monument. Even so, that monument, located in the Southern Hemisphere east of American Samoa, still serves a geostrategic function: to physically block China’s access to its newly established South American interests.
Base-building is another ecocidal activity on the rise. There are already more than 400 official U.S. bases throughout the Asia-Pacific region. Meanwhile, client states, such as Japan and South Korea, have been enlisted to build their own installations that would effectively encircle China with missiles. New bases have been built on Jeju Island, in Korea, and in Japan’s Ryuku chain—on Okinawa, Miyakojima, Amami Oshima, Ishigaki, and Yonaguni, only seventy miles from Taiwan. These bases turn peaceful islands into strategic targets.
Islanders determined to protect their homes have not remained silent. On Okinawa, ferocious opposition has significantly delayed the two-decade-old plan to build a U.S. base at lovely Oura Bay. Sadly, the Japanese government successfully installed dozens of twenty-ton concrete blocks atop coral reefs there. However, Okinawa’s anti-base governor Takeshi Onaga has joined the activists on the ground, filed lawsuits, and made three visits to Washington to personally explain Okinawa’s intractable stance.
And on Jeju Island, in South Korea, a Navy base (designed to port Lockheed Martin Aegis-missile destroyers) has been built at Gangjeong village, adjacent to a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. The base construction has destroyed a unique rocky wetlands and also a rare coral ecosystem that was home to Korea’s last remaining dolphin pod.
Against the stars-and-stripes backdrop of expanding range complexes, marine monuments, and base-building, other nations are also contributing to the demise of a healthy Pacific. This resource-rich sea—framed by China, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, and Vietnam—has become the region’s most disputed territory. At one point, the Philippines became so distressed by China’s incursion into the area’s Spratly Islands that it agreed to allow U.S. troops and ships to return to its former bases, from which they were passionately evicted in the 1990s.
In June 2015, over 11,000 American and Filipino troops (double the number of soldiers from previous years) participated in joint naval war games on beautiful Palawan Island. But that was under President Benigno Aquino. Newly elected president Rodrigo Duterte has called off any new U.S. military exercises in his nation and has engaged in diplomatic talks with China to defuse the volatile scenario.
For its part, China has built seven artificial islands, three of which are militarized, smack dab in the middle of the Spratlys. The islands, with a total area of 2,000 acres, are built from dredged and crushed coral spread over what were once some of the world’s most vibrant reefs—now certainly dead.
Such fever-pitch tensions are actually viewed by the Pentagon as a window of opportunity. In 2015 and 2016, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter completed several barnstorming tours of Asia to solidify alliances with nations seeking U.S. muscle. This resulted in an unprecedented onslaught of joint naval exercises that included the following partnerships: U.S.-Australia-Japan-New Zealand; U.S.-Philippines; U.S.-South Korea; U.S.-Japan; and U.S.-India-Japan. While in India, Carter signed a ten-year agreement that, among other things, recruits India’s top corporations to cheaply build jet engines, aircraft carriers, and other high-end armaments.
Carter’s visit also inspired new war-games partnerships between U.S.-ally nations, including a partnership between India and Singapore. (The United States and India conduct at least fifty joint naval exercises per year.) In 2016, for the first time in history, China and Russia conducted joint military training in the Sea of Japan and the South China Sea. If this ecocidal saber-rattling continues, it would effectively wipe out 10 percent of the world’s global fish supply, which, according to the UN Global International Waters Assessment, is the volume of catch produced in this region.
In 2015 and 2016, the Pacific region experienced scores of naval and land exercises involving thousands of troops and hundreds of armed vessels. In addition to forces from the United States, these joint exercises drew soldiers and sailors from Australia, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, and the Philippines. The Pacific region also has served as a staging area for troops from Bangladesh, Brunei, Cambodia, France, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Timor-Leste, and Vietnam. Here are a few of the larger exercises:
2015
July: “Talisman Sabre” took place over 10 days on Australia’s beautiful north coast with 640 officers from New Zealand and Japan—backed by 33,000 soldiers, 21 ships, Osprey and Cobra helicopters, jet fighters, three submarines, amphibious assault ships, and more than 200 aircraft. One goal of Talisman Sabre: to stage a naval blockade of sea lanes that could prevent oil from reaching China.
August: Russia and China staged massive drill “in response” to U.S. exercises. Joint Sea 2015 II involved sixteen warships, two subs, aircraft, and helicopters in the Sea of Japan.
September: U.S. “Valiant Shield.” A twelve-day multi-force exercise with nine warships, 180 aircraft, and 18,000 personnel off Guam and the Marianas.
2016
February: United States, Australia, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, and the Philippines staged a multinational air power exercise on Guam. This largest “Cope North” exercise in history involved 3,000 personnel and 100 aircraft from the United States, Japan, and Australia.
March–May: United States and South Korea. Operation “Foal Eagle” involved 50 ships, submarines, aircraft, and 315,000 troops, double the number from 2015.
April: Some 5,000 U.S. soldiers joined more than 3,000 troops from Australia and the Philippines for Operation Balikatan, with air-land-and-sea strikes targeting the Philippine islands of Luzon, Panay, and Palawan.
July–November: United States, Bangladesh, Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Timor-Leste, and Vietnam staged land-and-sea combat exercises in the waters off Singapore.
August: United States and South Korea held annual Ulchi Freedom Guardian war games with live missile firings in the Sea of Japan. Approximately 50,000 South Korean and 30,000 U.S. troops engaged in command-and-control exercises that North Korea condemned as a “provocation.”
September: China and Russia. A total of 18 ships and supply vessels, 21 aircraft, and more than 250 personnel convened for one week in the South China Sea for Joint Sea 2016 exercises to practice what China’s Xinhua news service described as “air defense” and “island seizing” operations.
October: More than 1,900 U.S. and Philippine troops conducted amphibious landing exercises and live-fire training in Luzon between the Sulu Sea and the South China Sea. Other joint naval exercises involved: China and Thailand, India and Mauritius, Philippines and Cambodia, and the United States, Japan, and India.
And then there is RIMPAC (Rim of the Pacific), the granddaddy of joint naval exercises. Part World Cup, part trade show, RIMPAC is the chance for 25,000 troops from 22 nations, 55 vessels, and more than 200 aircraft to gather every four years in Hawaii. For two weeks, they drop bombs, shoot missiles, set explosions, and sink aircraft carriers at the Papahanaumokuakea Marine Monument. And sell a missile or two.
Lockheed Martin has shown its capitalist foresight by moving into the undersea-mining-technology sector. The idea is to profit by selling missiles and destroyers to nations fighting for mineral-rich territories, and then sell the mining technology to whichever nation prevails. Lockheed Martin wins, both coming and going, while the creatures of the ocean perish either way.
U.S. corporations were not the only ones planning to profit from Obama’s “pivot toward Asia.” With Japan relaxing its postwar ban on defense manufacturing, Mitsubishi anticipates healthy sales of its new amphibious tank that operates three times faster than its U.S. counterpart. Its main selling point is that coral-crunching traction over reefs is not compromised by its unprecedented speed.
Another environmentally chilling development is the inauguration of a RIMPAC-like event focusing on amphibious warfare. Sponsored by the U.S. Marine Corps, the event’s purpose is to develop procedures and technologies best suited to dominating the South China Sea. The list of participating countries is surprisingly diverse: Australia, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Chile, Canada, Colombia, France, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Maldives, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, Tonga, the United Kingdom, and Vietnam.
Our oceans, which are already suffering from overfishing and gyres of plastic waste, supply up to 80 percent of our atmospheric oxygen. Our reefs, the essential foundation for all marine life, are already dying due to warming waters and acidification. Yet war profiteers seem determined to bomb all life out of the Pacific. Such behavior is intolerable. Don’t they know there are no winners on a dead planet?
From Gallipoli to Normandy, some of history’s bloodiest battles have been fought on the world’s beaches. In the near future, however, some of our fiercest battles may be fought because of our beaches or, more correctly, because of the sand that shapes them. Like oil, gas, and all nonrenewables, sand (after water, the most consumed resource on Earth) is now on the front line of a growing global war over access to raw materials.
For most of us, sand conjures up images of relaxing days at the beach. But, sand’s impact on our lives spreads far beyond the shoreline. Melted and transformed into glass, it sits on every shelf. It’s also the source of silicon dioxide, a mineral found in cleaning products and detergents, in paper, dehydrated foods, hairspray, toothpaste, cosmetics, and an astounding variety of products we use on a daily basis.
The minerals extracted from sand form the foundations of our hyper-connected society, including microchips, without which our computers, credit cards, bank machines, cell phones, and many other devices would not exist. Sand is everywhere. It’s in our household plastics and it’s in our cars, trains, buses, and planes. It’s in the lightweight alloys of the jet engines, the fuselage, the paint, and even the tires.
And for the last 150 years, sand—mixed with cement—has helped sculpt the contours of our urban landscape. Two-thirds of the world’s buildings are made of reinforced concrete—a blend of cement, sand, and gravel. Because of its strength and low cost, concrete has become the world’s dominant building material. The quantities used are astronomical. To build an average house takes 200 tons of sand. For a school or a hospital, around 3,000 tons. Each mile of highway devours 48,000 tons. And to build a nuclear plant? The estimate is about 12 million tons.
Sand constitutes the largest volume of solid material extracted on the planet, with annual consumption totaling 15 billion tons. With beaches disappearing, most sand we now use is dredged from beneath the ocean.
While modern civilization has depleted the available sand, it has also interrupted the process of sand formation. Sand is formed from the actions of glaciers and water breaking apart rocks in the high mountains and is ultimately carried to the ocean with river sediments. But there now are at least 845,000 dams on the planet and it’s not only water they are holding back. One-quarter of the planet’s sand reserves lie trapped behind these dams. Any sand that makes it beyond the dams often encounters river dredging.
Dubai is an astonishing example of our voracious appetite for sand. Within a few decades, this fishing village has morphed into a Mecca of modern architecture—a sandbox for developers where no fantasy is too grandiose. But Dubai’s delusion of grandeur swallows up a lot of sand.
Flying high on a seemingly endless supply of oil money, Dubai embarked on an extravagant construction project called “World”—an artificial archipelago of 300 islands, designed as a map of the world. This self-proclaimed “eighth wonder” cost more than $14 billion and devoured more than 150 million tons of sand—all dredged from Dubai’s coastline.
Today Dubai’s World is a mirage. The worksite was abandoned at the onset of the 2008 financial crisis, and the deserted islands now parch in the sun. Overdevelopment has liquidated Dubai’s natural sand resources and, sans sand, the construction-addicted emirate has reached an impasse. (In order to finish building the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, Dubai had to import sand from Australia. The emirate continues to import sand, even while 90 percent of the Burj Khalifa’s apartments remain vacant.)
But how can this be when Dubai is surrounded by sand? Michael Welland, a geologist and author of the book Sand, explains: “Desert sand is the wrong kind of sand for building artificial islands. Why? Because desert sand … [is] typically very round and very smooth…. To build an island, you need sand that is more angular [because] … it’s rougher-edged sand that naturally sticks together.”
Thanks to its finite nature and overexploitation, the market for sand is booming with profits tripling in twenty years. But this doesn’t bode well for the health of the oceans. For when ships scour the sea bottom for sand, everything on the seafloor is dredged as well—including crustaceans, fish, plants, and coral.
Singapore’s land mass has increased 40 percent in the past 20 years with 130 square kilometers [50 square miles] converted from coastal water to land using dredged sand. The Singaporean government is the largest customer of illegal sand traders.
One of the most visible impacts of the sand trade is the disappearance of twenty-five islands off the coast of Indonesia. Meanwhile, dozens of barges filled to the brim can be seen unloading sand on a daily basis. Where does this sand come from? Thanks to local trafficking networks, dealers with false identities, working for fictional companies, continue to remove sand from beaches in Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam.
In India, the sand mafia—the country’s most powerful criminal organization—uses blackmail and violence to enforce loyalty. Its influence reaches far beyond the extraction sites. Under the eyes of corrupt authorities, sand pirates ply their trade in broad daylight at more than 8,000 dredging sites along the coasts and riverbanks of the subcontinent.
The illegal theft and sale of sand affects every continent. Tons upon tons of sand are removed every day from the beaches of Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. This pillaging goes on nonstop, year-round.
Much of this sand is sold directly on the construction sites of unscrupulous developers. But there is a risk. If not properly rinsed in fresh water before being added to cement, sand mixed with salt water becomes highly corrosive, which could eventually cause buildings to collapse.
In the Maldives, where reserves of sand derived from coral are dwindling fast, the islands are eroding at an alarming rate and the future of a whole population is under threat. The Maldives’ most vulnerable islands now stand deserted after their residents fled to larger, better-protected islands. The overpopulated capital is building new houses to meet the demand but, ironically, the resulting construction boom is fed by sand removed from nearby lagoons—the very sand that is supposed to protect the islands from steadily rising seas.
We’ve never built on such a scale but, at the same time, housing has never been less available. One-third of the urban population lives in slums, while sprawling “ghost cities” and empty apartments are built all over the world. Entire airports have been built, without seeing a single passenger. In China, 65 million flats are empty, yet the construction industry is flourishing.
Like the automobile industry’s addiction to oil, the construction industry is addicted to sand. But the leading consumer of sand is the state—a massive builder of infrastructure like highways, bridges, ports, etc. (The next time you look at a network of highways, pause to remind yourself that “roads are made from the world’s beaches.”)
Around the world, the planet’s beaches are shrinking at an accelerating rate, largely due to sand dredging. By 2025, three-quarters of the world’s inhabitants will live near the ocean, and those thin ribbons of sand that surround the continents are feeling the pressure. Unregulated dredging has transformed once-healthy beaches into lunar landscapes. Between 75 and 90 percent of our beaches are shrinking—and the trend is accelerating. If nothing is done, by 2100, the world’s beaches could be history.
Grain after grain, beaches slowly erode, mute victims of decades of human interference. Overexploitation of sand—combined with dams and bad management of shorelines—is creating an explosive mix for the planet’s beaches.
Whale-watching tourists sailing along Kaua‘i’s famed Na Pali Coast have no idea they are sharing the scenic waters with defense contractors Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and General Atomics, among others.
But just as Kaua‘i is a major center for biotech companies, so is it a critical, albeit under-reported, testing and training hub for the U.S. military, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), NASA, the Missile Defense Agency (MDA), and Sandia National Laboratories, which all conduct programs at the Pacific Missile Range Facility (PMRF).
Unlike O’ahu, Kaua‘i’s military presence goes largely unseen. Yet PMRF, which has nearly seventy-five-year-old roots as an Army landing site, occupies a 7.5 by .75-mile-wide swath of coast at Barking Sands on the edge of the Mana Plain. This once marshy wetland, long ago drained to grow sugar cane, is today home to GMO crop fields that form a buffer around PMRF.
For most tourists and even many Kaua‘i residents, PMRF remains terra incognita. Although PMRF is covered in the local Garden Island newspaper and the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, it’s rarely mentioned in national or international media—unless there’s a major launch, like the May 22, 2014, Aegis Ashore ballistic missile defense (BMD) test.
In May 2014, I had the chance to spend a few hours touring PMRF with its commanding officer, Captain Bruce Hay, as my guide. After a cafeteria-style lunch at PMRF’s Shenanigans cafe (during which Capt. Hay promised our tour would be “open kimono”), we were led to his car—a Chevy Malibu as blinding white as his uniform. We piled in and were taken on a short drive to a 135-foot-long rocket launch rail resembling a gray steel bridge jutting out over the sand.
The captain described how the launch was designed to fire the Space-Borne Payload Assist Rocket, also called Super Strypi—a collaborative project of Sandia National Laboratories, Aerojet Rocketdyne Corp., the University of Hawai‘i, and PMRF. The main function of its first mission will be to demonstrate how to inexpensively deliver a 300-kilogram (662-pound) payload into low-earth orbit. For the project’s partners, Super Strypi represents not only a technical achievement but also an educational opportunity as private and public sectors push to advance Hawai‘i’s position in the world of the aerospace and defense industries.
Launching a rocket—any kind of a rocket—at PMRF is, for Hay, “pretty neat.” Over the course of the two-and-a-half-hour tour, he repeatedly expressed his enthusiasm for involving children in launches (as observers), whenever possible. It’s all part of PMRF’s—and more broadly, the aerospace and military defense industry’s—enthusiasm for supporting STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) education.
Contrary to popular belief, PMRF is not limited to Kaua‘i’s Mana Plain. The range also includes “small installation” sites at Koke’e State Park, Makaha Ridge, Kamokala Ridge, Port Allen, Mauna Kapu on O’ahu, Pōhakuloa Training Area on Hawai‘i Island, and the privately owned island Ni’ihau, which is home to a “perch site” comprised of a helicopter pad, electronic warfare equipment, and surveillance radar.
Less than two dozen miles south of Ni’ihau stands Ka’ula, a steep offshore islet inhabited by bird colonies. Like Kaho’olawe island and Pagan island in the Northern Marianas, part of Ka’ula is being used for “inert air-to-surface weapons” testing. Unlike Kaho’olawe and Pagan, however, there is effectively no protest or even knowledge that this island is being used.
As we drove from one site to the next, Hay pointed out that Ka’ula’s ownership is in question. “Is it the Federal Government? Is it the Department of Defense? Is it the State of Hawai‘i? I don’t know. I’m not a lawyer—thank God,” he quipped.
One of PMRF’s greatest assets, Hay noted, is the fact that it has a whole lot of nothing. That “nothing” is, in fact, over 2.1 million square miles of “extended range”—roughly the size of the continental United States west of the Mississippi including Baja, Mexico. This is in addition to 1,100 square miles of “instrumented sea range” and 42,000 square miles of “controlled airspace.”
From Hay’s perspective, conducting testing and training west of Kaua‘i means the military is not impacting shipping lanes or civilian air traffic. Critics, however, are increasingly challenging environmental impacts, particularly the use of high-frequency sonar and its alleged impact on marine life from deepwater corals to large marine mammals.
Out in that vast watery “nothingness,” PMRF operates MATSS (Mobile-At-Sea-Sensor System)—a barge loaded with antennae, telemetry tracking dishes, and equipment used to support BMD testing.
PMRF touts itself as an important economic driver on Kaua‘i, proudly describing its role in employing local people. The base employs around 770 contractors, tenants, and other service providers, along with 140 civilian and 87 military personnel (officers/enlisted). Currently, about 150 people live on base in some 50 modest housing units.
Although PMRF has many of the amenities you’d find in a small town (gas station, car wash, barbershop, post office, an outdoor theater, Subway sandwich outlet, parks, and recreational sports facilities), it doesn’t feel like your average civilian town. Maybe it was the Regulus cruise missile mounted on display, but the place just feels like a military base, which, of course, it is.
Driving along PMRF’s almost carless roads, we slowed down to look at roadside tanks. Hay said the dummy tanks—called “composites”—are used for pilot training. The tanks aren’t fired at with live ammunition, but they can provide a realistic training object, particularly when equipped with heat generators that simulate a “live” target.
Next we stopped at an unremarkable beige building, which Hay identified as his primary working headquarters—the Range Operations Complex or “the Roc.” Hay led us to a Standard Missile Three (SM-3) displayed on a mount behind a plaque that reads “Ad Astra Per Aspera” (“To the stars through adversity”).
The SM-3 (manufactured by Raytheon, which describes it as “the world’s only ballistic missile killer deployable on land or at sea”) is designed to “engage non-air-breathing ballistic missile targets.” In other words, the SM-3 is intended to be fired at an incoming enemy missile and destroyed by sheer kinetic force. It’s the “kill vehicle,” Hay explained—gesturing to the rocket’s twenty-one-inch tip—that matters most. “It’s pretty neat to think we are hitting a bullet with a bullet,” Hay said, referring to the 21.5-foot-long white priapic missile behind him.
Hay described ballistic missile defense as “very successful, in the low nineties,” but a Los Angeles Times investigation found that the Boeing-manufactured $40 billion Ground-Based Midcourse Defense System, tested at PMRF-partnering facility Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, was “unreliable, even in scripted tests.” One physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory called the system’s test record “abysmal.”
PMRF has a long history of supporting missile defense testing. One of the most high-profile systems being tested today is Aegis Ashore. Essentially identical to the BMD system deployed on Aegis naval destroyers, Aegis Ashore is designed for use on land.
A product of Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, the U.S. Navy, and the Missile Defense Agency, Aegis Ashore was championed by the late senator Daniel Inouye and was slated for deployment in Romania in 2015 and Poland in 2018.
As Capt. Hay pulled up in front of a dull, white building topped with radar antenna equipment behind a high black fence topped with barbed wire, he said, “If you’re familiar with ships, [this] looks a lot like a Ticonderoga Class (guided missile) cruiser.” He explained that operating the Aegis on a ship requires 300 to 400 people. “Take a stab at how many sailors run this facility,” he said.
“Fifteen?” I guessed.
“Less, but not much. Twelve sailors and a few contractors,” he replied. According to Hay, the building alone (Aegis Ashore Missile Defense Test Complex) cost $60 million. Once fitted with radar and other equipment, the cost soared to $700 million. On a ship, Hay said, that would be around $2 billion—even before crew salaries and fuel.
The first Aegis Ashore test took place at PMRF just three days before my visit and made news for the mysterious vapor trails it left behind. But the real news no one seems to talk about is how Kaua‘i stands at the center of a BMD system that Washington insists is to protect Europe from Iran but whose deployment has been repeatedly and angrily criticized by Russia.
When I asked Capt. Hay who Aegis Ashore is intended to defend against, he declined to name names, instead saying: “Think of all the antagonists all throughout Europe and the Middle East.” And, Hay added, “the former Soviet Union wasn’t too crazy about it, for obvious reasons.” I did not ask how the United States would respond to a Russian BMD deployment in Mexico, Canada, or Cuba.
PMRF is “not just ballistic missile testing,” Hay pointed out in an interview with the Garden Island newspaper. “We’re doing big things for very important people all across the globe.”
“Big things” presumably include supporting Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) or drone testing and training for systems like the MQ-Reaper, MQ-1 Predator, and the high-altitude capable ALTUS II, as well as NASA research aircraft and other UAV systems like the Coyote and the Cutlass V. PMRF has also seen visits by fighter jets and the V-22 Osprey, a hybrid aircraft with a checkered safety record and the object of ongoing protests in Okinawa, where it is deployed.
Doing “big things for very important people” also means hosting Sandia National Laboratories’ Kaua‘i Test Facility (KTF). Sandia, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin, is one of the United States’ three primary nuclear weapons labs. KTF was established on Kaua‘i as a tenant inside the PMRF in 1962 to support Operation Dominic, which included a series of thirty-six high-altitude nuclear weapons tests over the Pacific.
In November 2011, KTF was the launch site of the Advanced Hypersonic Weapon (AHW), a missile that is intended to fulfill the goal of a “Prompt Global Strike,” a directive that would enable the United States to bomb anywhere on Earth in under sixty minutes. In the November 2011 test, the AHW was fired from Kaua‘i, arriving at the Reagan Test Site on Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, about 2,500 miles away, in 30 minutes.
Since its inception in 1962, KTF has supported 443 rocket launches from multiple sites (as of January 2017), making it—and its host PMRF—major players in a militarized Pacific.
When asked directly if nuclear weapons or components of nuclear weapons have ever been stored or passed through PMRF, a spokesman replied, “Per Department of Defense policy, all U.S. military installations can neither confirm nor deny the presence of nuclear weapons.”
In the summer of 2014, twenty-three nations converged on Hawai‘i for the RIMPAC (Rim of the Pacific) biennial maritime exercise. While the war games included countries as diverse as India, China, Singapore, Norway, Tonga, and Japan, the participants page of RIMPAC’s website shows the U.S. military was overwhelmingly represented.
RIMPAC provides a chance to show off the latest military technology, gadgetry, and test systems like drones (during RIMPAC 2012, an AeroVironment sub-launched “kamikaze” drone was tested) and practice live-fire sinkings of decommissioned ships in an exercise called SINKEX (Sinking Exercises).
Besides this, RIMPAC provides a realistic setting for urban combat training, amphibious landings, underwater sonar training, and a host of other military exercises.
Kaua‘i may be only 35 square miles larger than the city of Phoenix (with less than 5 percent of its population) but, thanks to PMRF, it plays an outsized role in America’s ability to wage wars; control the seas, skies, and space; and ensure that the U.S. military juggernaut can continue in its quest to maintain Full-Spectrum Dominance. Like the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site in the Marshall Islands and Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, PMRF is a key spoke in the military’s missile-testing arsenal.
As I drove away, a hard rain began to fall and I reflected: If PMRF is our base, then it is also our kuleana (responsibility) to understand what goes on inside and to make the connections between it and events around the world. Militarism and war do not take place in a vacuum. What happens here affects people around the world. It is incumbent on us to closely follow what our base is doing beyond the occasional headline rocket launch.
We need to understand that our base impacts lives in faraway places—from the dun-colored hills of Afghanistan and the war-torn cities of Syria and Iraq to the shallow blue lagoons of Micronesia’s coral atolls and the gritty urban landscapes across the United States where many veterans end up after war.
Vision for 2020, a report of the United States Space Command (USSC), declared that the United States sought to deploy weapons in orbit to “control space.” This 1996 report spoke of dominating “the space dimension of military operations to protect U.S. interests and investment.”
U.S. military leaders have been blunt through the years in describing plans for space warfare.
“It’s politically sensitive, but it’s going to happen,” said Gen. Joseph Ashy, USSC commander-in-chief. In a 1996 article in Aviation Week and Space Technology titled “Future Combat Missions in Space,” he stated: “Some people don’t want to hear this, and it sure isn’t in vogue, but absolutely—we’re going to fight in space. We’re going to fight from space and we’re going to fight into space. That’s why the United States has development programs in directed energy and hit-to-kill mechanisms.”
As then assistant secretary of the Air Force for Space Keith Hall declared: “With regard to space dominance, we have it, we like it, and we’re going to keep it.”
Phillips Laboratory, a major Air Force contractor, has proudly described its mission as “helping control space for the United States.”
There’s been keen interest by U.S. administrations—the Reagan administration with its “Star Wars” plan a leading example—in placing weapons in space. That has alternated with some administrations more or less opposed—the Obama administration, for instance. On the other hand, the George W. Bush administration (with Richard Cheney as secretary of defense) was gung ho for the weaponization of space.
Under the Trump administration, it is highly likely that there will be a move by the United States to deploy weapons in space. If this happens, it will be profoundly destabilizing, setting off an arms race in space and, likely, leading to war in space.
The deployment of weapons in space is intimately linked to the use of nuclear power in space. The Reagan “Star Wars” program was predicated on orbiting battle platforms with onboard nuclear reactors providing the energy for their weaponry.
As Gen. James Abramson, director of the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization, told a symposium on Space Nuclear Power and Propulsion in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1988, “Without reactors in orbit [there is] going to be a long, long light cord that goes down to the surface of the Earth.” He went on to note that “failure to develop nuclear power in space could cripple efforts to deploy anti-missile sensors and weapons in orbit.”
In his 1989 book, Military Space Forces: The Next 50 Years, military specialist John M. Collins described how orbiting nuclear reactors could power space-based lasers, neutral particle beams, and other weapons while ground-based reactors could provide energy to support military bases on the moon. Collins’ book, which was commissioned by the U.S. Congress, hailed the “unilateral control of space, which overarches Planet Earth, all occupants and its entire contents” and observed that “possessors of that vantage position could overpower every opponent.”
The U.S. position in regard to weaponizing space is a violation of the intent of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, the landmark agreement that sets space aside for peaceful purposes. Signed by ninety-one nations—including the United States, China, the United Kingdom, and the former Soviet Union—it decrees: “The exploration and use of outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interest of all countries” and states that no nation shall “place in orbit around the Earth any objects carrying nuclear weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass destruction.”
Moreover, there have been repeated attempts since 1985 to pass a UN resolution titled “Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space” (PAROS) to assure that space “shall be used for peaceful purposes.”
The United States has continually balked on this measure. For example, on November 1, 1999, 138 member nations of the United Nations voted for this resolution. The United States abstained. Canada, Russia, and China have been leaders in urging passage of the PAROS treaty.
With the arrival of the Trump administration, a renewed drive to weaponize space appeared in the offing. In a post-election report in November 2016 in Roll Call, Representative Trent Franks (R-AZ) predicted “a big payday is coming for programs aimed at developing weapons that can be deployed in space.” The article was headlined “Under Trump, GOP to Give Space Weapons Close Look.”
A November 22, 2016, article in Blasting News forecast that the new administration would be looking at “space-based weapons that could strike targets on Earth.” This could include so-called “Rods of God”—tungsten projectiles fired from space.
The administration’s $1.15 trillion “America First” budget—released on March 16, 2017—noted that Trump’s proposed $52 billion increase in Pentagon spending “exceeds the entire defense budget of most countries.” The key Defense Department programs listed in the budget document included: “American superiority … on land, at sea, in the air, and in space.”
Prior to the release of the budget outline, Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, founded in 1992, cited “some very disturbing initial recommendations that have been surfacing.” The reported Trump administration plans “indicate the mindset that a full-blown war in space is in the thinking of some now coming to power,” Gagnon warned. “The world does not need a new arms race in space—especially when we should be using our resources to deal with the real problems of climate change and growing poverty due to increasing economic divide.”
In an interview at the University of Arizona on February 2, 2017, Prof. Noam Chomsky was asked about the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ “Doomsday Clock,” whose minute hand had just been moved forward to a mere thirty seconds to midnight (“midnight” representing a global nuclear holocaust). Did he share the organization’s concerns about the risks of a Trump presidency?
“Trump has been very inconsistent on many things,” Chomsky noted. “His statements are all over the map, but his personality is frightening. He’s a complete megalomaniac. You never know how he’s going to react.” Chomsky reminded the audience that even a “first strike” is an act of suicide since it would trigger a “nuclear winter” that would destroy the world’s crops and trigger global famine.
In his 1984 book, Arming the Heavens: The Hidden Military Agenda for Space, Prof. Jack Manno concluded that weapons, no matter how advanced, would never bring peace: “Only by eliminating the sources of international tension through cooperation and common development can any kind of national security be achieved in the next century.”