Around Washington, DC naval circles, Stu Barber was known as being “exceptionally far-sighted.”1 Two decades before President Carter announced his foreign policy doctrine—the consequences of which the world is feeling to this day—that the United States would intervene militarily in the Persian Gulf against threats to its interests, Stu proposed his own version. He called it the “South Atlantic and Indian Ocean Monroe Doctrine and Force.” Developed during the 1960 presidential election campaign, Stu intended the idea “to be fed, somehow, to both Presidential candidates.”2
During World War II, Stu served in naval intelligence on Ford Island, Hawai‘i. Rising to the rank of lieutenant commander, he spent most of his time tracking and analyzing statistics from land-based air combat operations in the Pacific—combat flights launched primarily from island bases. After the war, Stu worked for the war housing authority before returning to the Navy as a civilian analyst.
Working at the Pentagon, he helped found a somewhat obscure new office, the Long-Range Objectives Group, in 1955. Called “Op-93” by the Navy bureaucracy, the Group was charged with planning the Navy’s long-term technological, weapons, and strategic needs. The Group’s first annual report declared it “mandatory” to have a “courageous approach” to its mission.3 According to its highest-ranking staff members, “the brains of the outfit” belonged to Stu.4
Stu began work on his Strategic Island Concept idea around 1958. The premise of the plan was his recognition that in the age of decolonization, local peoples and the governments of newly independent nations were increasingly endangering the viability of many of the Navy’s overseas bases. One of his first memoranda warned that in the event of hostilities in the Indian Ocean region, “access via Suez, and undisputed access via Singapore or through the Indies may be denied, as may air communications other than via Australia or Central Africa. Access to anchorages and airfields may be denied or limited north of the equator, as the product of anti-colonialist feelings or Soviet pressures.”5
Stu realized that finding base locations somehow lacking “local problems” was the best long-term solution to maintaining the Navy’s positions overseas. The best place to find such locations, Stu saw, was on strategically located, lightly populated, isolated islands still controlled by friendly Western powers. In the words of former Navy official Vytautas Bandjunis, who later helped plan the base, Stu and soon others in the Navy realized that “remote colonial islands with small [colonial] populations would be the easiest to acquire, and would entail the least political headaches.”6
Stu realized, however, that opportunities for acquiring such islands were rapidly disappearing as territories around the world were gaining their independence. If the United States was going to secure islands as potential base locations, it would have to move quickly to purchase them outright or win guarantees from the remaining colonial powers not to grant independence and to provide the United States with long-term basing access.
From the Roman Empire to the British and French empires in the Indian Ocean and around the globe, bases have long been essential tools for securing empires and political, economic, and military control over vast lands. Prior to World War II, the United States had few bases outside its territory, although as we shall see, a series of U.S. Army forts played a critical role in enabling the westward conquest by the original thirteen states. By the end of World War II, the nation had more than 30,000 installations at more than 2,000 base sites globally.7
Today the United States has what is likely the largest collection of military bases in world history, totaling more than 5,300 globally and an estimated 1,000 bases outside its own territory of the 50 states and Washington, DC.8 Slowly, awareness has been growing about this massive deployment of U.S. forces on the sovereign territory of other nations. Many have started referring to the United States as an “Empire of Bases.”
People in the United States have long had trouble seeing their nation as an empire of any kind, given its powerful and important founding ideologies of democracy and freedom.9 Many thought that if the country was ever an empire, it was only briefly and perhaps absent-mindedly so around the 1898 Spanish-American War and the acquisition of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam. (Interestingly, many of the founders had little trouble reconciling imperial and democratic visions of the nation: George Washington referred to the United States as the “rising American Empire.”)
Following the rapid invasion and conquest of Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003, however, political scientists, historians, pundits, and others began acknowledging widely that the United States is indeed an empire.10 The notion is no longer dismissed as an accusation or conspiracy theory; debate now revolves around what kind of empire the United States has become and the legitimacy of imperialism.
Some scholars and commentators like Niall Ferguson and Michael Ignatieff have embraced and even promoted the idea of the United States as a benign “liberal empire” or as a kind of humanitarian “empire lite.”11 Ferguson believes “many parts of the world would benefit from a period of American rule.” People, he suggests, would benefit under an empire “that enhances its own security and prosperity precisely by providing the rest of the world with generally beneficial public goods: not only economic freedom but also the institutions necessary for markets to flourish.”12
Ignatieff says the question “is not whether America is too powerful but whether it is powerful enough.” Arguing in 2003 in support of invading Iraq, he asked, “Does it have what it takes to be grandmaster of what Colin Powell has called the chessboard of the world’s most inflammable region? . . . The case for empire is that it has become, in a place like Iraq, the last hope for democracy and stability alike.”13
Skeptical of such claims, others have long been critical of the U.S. Empire. They doubt that increasing U.S. power will do anything more than just that—increase the power and wealth of the United States and its economic elites. Focusing especially on the economic dynamics of U.S. Empire, revisionist historians and others have generally held that following the conquests of 1898, the United States primarily became an empire of economics, as exemplified by Open Door trade policies initiated in China after the Boxer Rebellion.14 These scholars argue that the nation largely avoided the colonialism of the European powers based on territorial expansion and direct rule over subject peoples in favor of a more discreet, nonterritorial kind of economic imperialism. Economic control and exploitation, scholars say, have largely emanated from policies of the Open Door and later the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. “The best-preferred strategy,” says geographer Neil Smith, “was to organize resource and commodity extraction through the market rather than through military or political occupation.”15 The market and the use of state power to open up capitalist opportunities became the basis for exploitation and continued imperialism, with geopolitical and military tools of only secondary importance.16
Figure 2.1 The Global U.S. Military Base Network.
Other scholars have pointed to the significance of military bases. Among them, Chalmers Johnson argues that unlike older European empires that relied on a series of colonies and direct rule over other peoples to exert their power, the United States has for the most part avoided colonial rule. Since World War II the United States has instead used its bases to exert control, influence, and economic domination over weaker nations. Bases, he and others say, have become a primary means by which the United States keeps other nations within a global political-economic order most favorable to the United States, thus maintaining its global political and economic supremacy.17 Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and Air Force Undersecretary James Blaker describes the role of bases most bluntly when he says the United States came to use bases to “structure the character of other nations” and shape the future of the world.18 Harnessing all its power, the nation has, like previous empires, exerted significant and substantive control over the affairs of other nations and peoples by combining a collection of bases in other people’s lands with other forms of economic, political, and military power.
The economic power can be seen as the influence exercised over other nations through organizations like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization. The political power can been seen in the system of Cold War alliances and client regimes nurtured since World War II and in the use and manipulation of the United Nations, NATO, and other multinational organizations for political and economic ends. The military power can be seen in frequent military interventions and wars abroad including more than 200 overseas military operations between the end of World War II and the invasion of Iraq, the maintenance of the world’s most lethal nuclear and nonnuclear armed forces (with funding equaling that of all the other nations in the world combined), the deployment of military advisers and arms transfers to other nations, public displays of military force, and numerous CIA-orchestrated coups and other covert and paramilitary activities to intervene in the domestic affairs of other nations.
Exploring how the United States came to possess its 1,000 overseas bases is critical to understanding the history of Diego Garcia and requires us to turn to the earliest days of the nation and its westward expansion. As we shall see, from the first days of independence to the development of a base on Diego Garcia, bases have played an increasingly important role in the expansion of the United States and its development as an empire.19
When the thirteen North American colonies began moving toward independence from Britain in the middle of the eighteenth century, the colonies’ leaders looked to the European empires as models for what the colonies might become. An “expansionist consensus” helped unify the revolutionaries around the “notion of preemptive right to the continent” and the vision of a united continental empire stretching across North America.20 (The idea that the land might rightfully belong to native groups was hardly considered.)
Fueled by such expansionist desires, surging feelings of nationalism, a growing population, fears about the other imperial powers in North America, and a government desperate to pay off its war debts by selling western lands (inconveniently occupied by Native Americans), waves of settlers and speculators moved westward after independence, pushing Indians progressively away from the east coast. According to Horsman, “land and more land” is what settlers and many state governments wanted. To the settlers, native peoples were mere obstacles “to drive out or annihilate”; their land claims were simply “invalid.”21
Assisting the process, the U.S. Army became what one scholar calls the “advance agent” and “pry bar” of Euro-American westward expansion. The Army was aided by a growing chain of forts marking the line of expansion.22 By the mid-nineteenth century, there were more than 60 major forts west of the Mississippi River, from Fort Leavenworth in Kansas to the Presidio in San Francisco. Forts helped enable and protect what became a mass migration west, assisting the Army in forcing indigenous groups off their lands, into treaties, and onto “reservations.”23
Over the course of the nineteenth century, most of the major native peoples in the east were forced into western reserves. Federal forts encircled the reserves to keep native peoples in and whites out, though the new reserves would soon face white encroachment. The Cherokee’s 1832 “Trail of Tears” forced march westward, during which one in four may have died, was just one example of the systematic population displacements.24 It’s estimated that the government expropriated approximately 100 million acres of land from native groups in the east alone.25 Across the continent, Indians faced starvation and the growing dissolution of their societies.26
By 1853, the United States had conquered most Native Americans, invaded and conquered large parts of Mexico, and seized or annexed Texas, the southwest, and Oregon. After the Civil War, interest in bases shifted primarily to the Pacific and increasingly, to island bases. The nation increased its commercial capabilities in the Pacific with the establishment of coaling stations—necessary for new steamship travel—in 1857, on Jarvis Island, Baker Island, and Howland’s Island, southwest of Hawai‘i.27
In 1867, the same year that the United States purchased Alaska from Russia, the government increased its possessions in the Pacific by acquiring Midway Island. Within a decade, the United States had signed an agreement to lease a naval station in Samoa; while the Senate failed to ratify it, the United States eventually gained possession of what became American Samoa in 1899, the same year it acquired Wake Island.
In this period, the most powerful proponent for increasing the nation’s collection of island bases and building up a powerful navy to protect a growing commercial empire was naval historian Rear Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan. Called the “prophet” of the Navy by World War II Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, Mahan has proved the most influential U.S. naval thinker for over a century. Based largely on an analysis of the wars between Britain and France from 1660 to the fall of Napoleon in 1812, Mahan argued that “sea power,” or the lack thereof, had determined the course of every major conflict as a result of each power’s relative ability to control the enemy’s commerce.28 Applying these historical lessons to the United States, Mahan (and soon others) argued for the maintenance of a navy equal to or greater than Britain’s, able to operate globally, and supported by new coaling stations and bases from China to Hawai‘i to the Caribbean.29
Spurred by Mahan, the Navy grew interested, beginning in the 1890s, in creating additional bases in the Pacific to support U.S. commerce in Asia. In 1894, the United States gained access to a base in Hawai‘i as part of a U.S.-supported overthrow of the local Hawai‘ian monarchy by white sugar planters and settlers. The islands maintained limited sovereignty until the United States formally annexed Hawai‘i in 1898; the annexation was realized in no small part because the growing empire needed a halfway base from which to deploy its power into Asia.30
The major movement of the United States into Asia came with the outbreak of the Spanish-American War and the largest seizure of territory by the United States since the completion of its continental expansion. In what was a rapid and ignominious defeat for a once mighty empire, the United States routed Spanish forces, claiming the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, and (as a “protectorate”) Cuba. The Philippines alone included more than 7,000 islands and a population of 7 million.31 Although scholars will continue to debate the motivations of President William McKinley and the nation for acquiring the distant Spanish possessions, it is beyond debate that the United States expanded its territory, and with it the basing of military forces outside North America, in dramatic fashion. The Navy ultimately gained an indefinite lease for a base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba (now the oldest U.S. base on foreign territory), control of a base in the Philippines’ Subic Bay, and bases that came with Hawai‘ian annexation. After warships again steamed eastward to stamp out the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, the Navy proposed to Congress the creation of additional bases in both the Far East and the Caribbean.
Following the conquests of 1898, the United States began to pursue a new kind of imperialism that generally avoided the bald-faced seizure of territory. Most scholars emphasize how this period was characterized by informal assertions of dominance exemplified by the Open Door policies in China.32 While the Open Door became an important template for the extension of U.S. power abroad, the era between 1898 and World War II also featured frequent (and largely underestimated) military interventions in Latin America and the accompanying basing of forces abroad.33
In this period, the United States intervened militarily in (and in some cases occupied) Mexico (1914, 1916–19), Guatemala (1920), El Salvador (1932), Honduras (1903, 1907, 1911, 1912, 1919, 1920, 1924, 1925), Nicaragua (1898, 1899, 1909–10, occupied 1912–33), Costa Rica (naval presence 1921), the Dominican Republic (1903, 1904, 1914, occupied 1915–24), Haiti (1914, occupied 1915–34), and Cuba (occupied 1898–1902, 1906–9, 1912, 1917–22).34 The military occupations in particular depended on the establishment of local military bases and garrisons to station U.S. troops. In Nicaragua, for example, between 1930 and 1932, the United States established at least eight military garrisons.35 In Panama, where the United States intervened 24 times between 1856 and 1990, the nation built fourteen bases as part of gaining access to the Panama Canal Zone in perpetuity, as well as extensive powers of land expropriation and interference outside the Zone.36 Like Cuba, Panama became an “American colony in all but name.”37
Elsewhere in the hemisphere, during World War I, the Wilson administration grew worried that Germany would overrun Denmark and create a base in the Danish Virgin Islands. In a move that foreshadowed both the unprecedented expansion in the number of U.S. overseas bases and Stu Barber’s Strategic Island Concept, the government purchased the soon renamed U.S. Virgin Islands from Denmark for $25 million.38
On September 3, 1940, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt informed Congress that as commander in chief, he was authorizing an agreement with the United Kingdom to provide nearly bankrupt wartime Britain with fifty World War I–era destroyers in exchange for U.S. control over a string of air and naval bases in Britain’s colonies. Under a program known as “lend-lease” or “destroyers-for-bases,” the United States acquired 99-year leases and near-sovereign powers on bases in the Bahamas, Jamaica, St. Lucia, St. Thomas, Antigua, Aruba-Curaçao, Trinidad, and British Guiana, and temporary access to bases in Bermuda and Newfoundland.39
Ostensibly the bases were for the defense of the western hemisphere against the Axis powers. Importantly, they were also used to preempt Germany and Italy from establishing their own bases in Latin America. Functionally, the military came to use the bases primarily to shuttle arms and aircraft to the battlefields of Europe and Africa, as well as for intelligence gathering, antisubmarine warfare, and hosting naval convoys. Ultimately, the bases created the foundation for a network of U.S. bases that would soon span the globe.
With the entrance of the United States into World War II after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the question for the U.S. military was not if it should expand its collection of bases but how to expand the number as quickly as possible.40 The government followed lend-lease with deals to station U.S. forces in Iceland, Greenland (Denmark), Ascension (U.K.), Haiti, Cuba, Suriname (Netherlands), the Azores (Portugal), Acapulco (Mexico), the Galapagos Islands (Ecuador), Palmyia (south of Hawai‘i), and Recife and Fortaleza (Brazil).41 Major regional base networks emerged in the southwest Pacific, the central Pacific, North Africa, and from India through Burma and into China.
In addition to war-making interests, the multiplication of bases likely had other motivations, including a “strong element of imperial rivalry.”42 Roosevelt first became interested in obtaining island bases in the Caribbean in 1939, prior to lend-lease. Within a year of entering the war, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were already making plans for a network of postwar bases around the globe. In 1943, a paper for the Joint Chiefs declared that “adequate bases, owned or controlled by the United States, are essential and their acquisition and development must be considered as amongst our primary war aims.” Domestic planners likewise saw the advantage of maintaining the base structure after the war for the nation’s burgeoning airline industry, which needed access to airfields to service growing intercontinental air travel.43
During the war, base construction was particularly rapid in the Pacific, where the military built strings of small island bases to battle Japan. After the shock of the attack on Pearl Harbor and the subsequent loss of bases in the Philippines, Guam, and Wake Island, the U.S. military remembered the strategic doctrine of Admiral Mahan: Island bases were a way to win the war and ultimately to control the peace—to ensure that there would never again be a Pearl Harbor (part of the Japanese attack came from an island base on tiny Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands, west of Hawai‘i). The military fought its way slowly through the ocean in a series of deadly and costly battles, retaking its lost islands and fighting from island chain to island chain toward mainland Japan. A construction “frenzy” followed the battles for each island group, building bases to launch assaults on other islands and Japan itself;44 many of the affected islands and the local peoples living on them faced “devastation.”45
The battle for the Marshall Islands, one of Japan’s “mandates” (i.e., internationally legitimated colonies) from World War I, illustrates the deadly fighting that went on in the Pacific and the nature of the basing complexes that followed. In a span of eight days in 1944, the United States assaulted and captured all six square miles of Kwajalein Island with a force of 40,000 troops. The United States suffered 372 dead and 2,000 wounded in the fighting. Japan suffered 8,000 dead. No U.S. historians or military officials seem to have bothered to count the Marshallese dead.46
Within two months, the U.S. Army had turned Kwajalein into its main base in Micronesia, hosting 22,000 troops. (Later the island would become a major missile-testing base.) Within three months of taking what is now the Marshallese capital, Majuro, the Army and Navy had built a 5,800-foot airstrip and a naval anchorage. On Enewetak Atoll, another base hosted more than 11,000 troops.47
By the end of the war, the United States had built or occupied thousands of bases in the Pacific. Globally, the U.S. military was building base facilities at an average rate of 112 a month. In a matter of five years, the U.S. military developed a global network of bases that, according to some, became the world’s largest collection ever held by a single power.48
With the end of the World War II, the United States, like previous empires, was reluctant to give up territories and bases acquired in wartime. Even if the military had little interest in using a base or a territory, military principles of “redundancy”—the more bases, the safer the nation—and “strategic denial”—preventing enemies from using a territory by denying them access—held that the United States should almost never cede its acquisitions.
Especially in the Pacific, because of the high human and financial costs of acquiring “its” bases, the military felt justified in retaining control of captured islands as the “spoils of war.”49 “Having defeated or subordinated its former imperial rivals in the Pacific,” several base experts explain, “the United States military was in no mood to hand back occupied real estate.”50 Congress agreed. It “shared the feeling that no one had the right to give away land which had been bought and paid for with American lives.” Louisiana Representative F. Edward Hébert explained the logic prevalent after the war: “We fought for them, we’ve got them, we should keep them. They are necessary to our safety. I see no other course.”51
The maintenance of such an extensive collection of military bases was driven by a widely held strategic belief that the security of the nation and the prevention of future wars depended on dominating the Pacific (and to a lesser extent the Atlantic) through a Mahanian combination of unparalleled naval forces and island bases. “Most importantly,” Hal Friedman writes, “this imperial solution to American anxieties about strategic security in the postwar Pacific exhibited itself in a bureaucratic consensus about turning the Pacific Basin into an ‘American lake.’”52
For General Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Japan, and other Navy leaders, securing the Pacific meant creating what they called an “offshore island perimeter.” The perimeter was to be a line of island bases stretching from north to south across the western Pacific like a giant wall protecting the United States, yet with thousands of miles of moat before reaching U.S. shores. “Our line of defense,” Mac-Arthur explained, “runs through the chain of islands fringing the coast of Asia. It starts from the Philippines and continues through the Ryukyu Archipelago, which includes its main bastion, Okinawa. Then it bends back through Japan and the Aleutian Island chain, to Alaska.”53
The island base plan found support from the architect of early Cold War strategic policy, George Kennan, who saw the island perimeter as equally beneficial for hosting air power to control East Asia without large ground forces. To carry out the plan, military leaders demanded complete sovereignty over Guam, the other islands in the Marianas and in Micronesia, and the retention of other captured Japanese islands. Some suggested full incorporation of Guam and other Pacific islands into the country as states or as part of a new Hawai‘ian state. In the process of breaking up the British and French empires and sensitive to being attacked as colonialists, State Department and other Truman administration officials opposed outright U.S. sovereignty.
Eventually the administration struck a compromise to turn most of Micronesia and some of the other Pacific islands into a “strategic trust territory.” Under the auspices of the United Nations, this Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (TTPI) would be administered by the United States until the islands could assume self-government. Among other UN-granted powers, the United States had the right to establish military facilities in the TTPI and effectively governed the islands as part of the nation. (Until 1951, the Navy maintained direct administrative control of the islands.) As one observer put it, the trusteeship was “de facto annexation, papered over with the thinnest of disguises.”54
The grandest plans for postwar bases were initially trumped by concerns about costs and (partial) demilitarization after the war. In the Pacific, the military abandoned its plans for an extensive offshore island perimeter (which would have resembled something like an offensive, oceanic Magi-not Line), instead relying on key bases in Japan, Guam, and Hawai‘i, and continued control over the TTPI.
To the disappointment of military leaders, the nation returned about half its foreign bases with the close of the war.55 And yet, the United States still maintained what became a “permanent institution” of bases in peacetime.56 In Germany, Italy, Japan, and France, U.S. forces retained rights of occupation as a victor nation. The United States signed deals to maintain three of its most important bases in Greenland, Iceland, and the Azores. The nation retained facilities in most of the British territories occupied under lend-lease, continued occupying French bases in Morocco, and gained further access to British facilities in Ascension, Bahrain, Guadalcanal, and Tarawa. When Britain wanted to grant complete independence to India and Burma, the U.S. State Department asked its ally to maintain control of three airfields in the former and one in the latter. U.S. bases in Great Britain proper turned the British Isles into what one journalist called an “emergency parking lot for the Strategic Air Command.”57 And the U.S. military had access to an even wider array of British and French bases still held in their remaining colonies.
Among its own colonial possessions, the United States retained important bases in Guam, Puerto Rico, Wake Island, and Cuba. When the Philippines gained its independence in 1946, the United States pressured its former colony into granting a 99-year rent-free lease on 23 bases and military installations.58
Alongside U.S. postwar economic and political power, the base network constituted a major mechanism of U.S. imperial control. While the total acreage of territory acquired may have been relatively slight (especially compared to prior European empires), in the ability to rapidly deploy the U.S. military nearly anywhere on the globe, the basing system represented a dramatic expansion of U.S. power and a significant way in which the United States came to maintain dominance over other nations.
In the nineteenth century, Britain and other European powers tied their expansionist success to the direct control of foreign lands. World War II made this no longer an option for the United States. The European powers had already divided most of the world among themselves, and the ideological mood of the time was clearly against colonialism and territorial expansion.59 The allied powers had made World War II a war against the expansionist desires of Germany, Japan, and Italy, and the United States had framed the war as an anticolonial struggle, criticizing the colonial powers, and pledging to assist with the decolonization of colonial territories upon war’s end. After the war, the creation of the United Nations enshrined the decolonization process and the right of nations and peoples to self-determination and self-government.
“In the 1950s era of decolonization,” writes anthropologist Carole McGranahan, “empires did not go away, but went underground, surfacing in guises ranging from socialist empire in the Soviet Union to various forms of neo-imperialist aggressive democracy as in the case of the United States. Yet each of these polities,” she explains, “fiercely guarded themselves against any accusations of empire or imperialism.”60
Which meant the United States came to exert its power through increasingly subtle and discreet means: most importantly through economic markets, international agreements, and foreign bases. Without a collection of colonies, the United States used what is likely the greatest collection of bases ever as well as periodic displays of military might to keep wayward nations within the rules of an economic and political system favorable to the United States.61 Indeed, it was the nation’s unchallenged military superiority at the end of World War II that left it in a position to dictate much of the postwar international economic system upon which U.S. geoeconomic power is based.62
U.S. forces abroad came to be “used to influence and limit the political, diplomatic, and economic initiatives of host nations,” explains base expert Joseph Gerson.63 In the Philippines, for example, the United States used military and economic aid and defense promises to extract not only decades’ worth of base access but favorable terms of trade and political influence as well.64 “Global economic access without colonies” was the postwar strategy, explains geographer Neil Smith, “matched by a strategic vision of necessary bases around the globe both to protect global economic interests and to restrain any future military belligerence.”65
During the Korean War, shortly before Stu Barber began his work on Diego Garcia, the U.S. military increased its number of overseas bases by 40 percent, bringing the total to near the heights of World War II.66 By the end of the 1950s, around one million U.S. troops and their families lived on or near bases abroad. By 1960, the United States had entered into eight mutual defense pacts with 42 nations and executive security agreements with more than 30 others, most of which provided various kinds of basing access. After some post-Korea reductions, there would be another 20 percent increase in base sites during the war in Vietnam.67 One was Diego Garcia.