16

OUT-OF-CONTROL WAR

On March 20, 2003, little more than a year after beginning the occupation of Afghanistan, U.S.-led forces invaded Iraq. Land, air, and naval forces attacked Iraq from bases in Kuwait, Diego Garcia, Jordan, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, elsewhere in the Middle East, and the United States. Bases in Germany, Italy, and other countries in Europe and as far off as Japan and Thailand were critical logistical hubs, shuttling troops and supplies in preparation for the invasion and throughout the subsequent occupation. Installations as distant as Australia played command and control roles in orchestrating the coordination of U.S. and allied military forces. The Turkish government quietly permitted U.S. forces to use some Turkish territory and airspace before and during the invasion (after having bowed to large protests and publicly refused to allow the use of U.S. bases in the country).1 Once in Iraq, U.S. and allied forces quickly began building bases on Iraqi soil and taking over Iraqi military installations.

Removing Saddam Hussein from power had been a long-term goal for many in the Bush/Cheney administration, following the failure to topple Hussein during the 1991 first Gulf War. Shortly before the 2000 presidential election, a prominent group of neoconservatives, organized as the Project for a New American Century, articulated this goal. They also declared their dream of ensuring complete U.S. geopolitical-economic domination for, as their name suggested, another century.2 Al-Qaeda’s attacks on the United States provided an opportunity to pursue these goals. Vice President Cheney led administration efforts to find evidence tying Hussein to al-Qaeda to provide justification for an invasion. When such evidence couldn’t be found, Cheney and other administration officials sold the war with threads of false intelligence, anti-Saddam Iraqi exile propaganda, and fearmongering about nonexistent chemical weapons and the “mushroom cloud” of an equally nonexistent Iraqi nuclear stockpile.

While the administration may not have been prepared for the aftermath of the initial invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, officials were prepared to oversee a new expansion of bases in the Middle East that made the buildups after the Carter Doctrine and the first Gulf War look small. At the same time, to the surprise of many, the Bush/Cheney administration also closed more bases, mostly in Europe, than had been closed since the early 1990s. Despite the closures, however, spending on bases abroad reached record highs. New construction actually appeared in some of the same places where bases were closing. Unraveling these contradictions helps reveal the economic and political foundations of the global network of bases and the war system itself.

At the height of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, there were more than 1,200 U.S. checkpoints, outposts, and major bases in the two countries.³ The extensive amenities, sheer size, and construction plans for many of the largest bases indicated that the military intended to occupy the countries for a decade or more to come.⁴ Balad Air Base near Baghdad was one of five “mega bases” in Iraq. It housed some thirty thousand troops and ten thousand contractors in facilities complete with fortified Pizza Hut, Burger King, and Subway outlets and two Walmart-sized shopping centers. “The base is one giant construction project, with new roads, sidewalks, and structures going up across this 16-square-mile fortress in the center of Iraq, all with an eye toward the next few decades,” National Public Radio (NPR) reported. “Seen from the sky at night, the base resembles Las Vegas: While the surrounding Iraqi villages get about 10 hours of electricity a day, the lights never go out at Balad Air Base.”5

Beyond Afghanistan and Iraq, scores more bases dotted the region. They were and mostly still are in nearly every country in the Greater Middle East, including every Persian Gulf nation except Iran. Globally, extraterritorial U.S. bases totaled two thousand or more—perhaps more bases than at any time since World War II.

The buildup started almost immediately after al-Qaeda’s September 2001 attacks. The Air Force sent around two thousand personnel to Diego Garcia, where it built a new thirty-acre housing facility, “Camp Justice.” Flying from the atoll, B-1 bombers, B-2 “stealth” bombers, and B-52 nuclear-capable bombers dropped more ordnance on Afghanistan than any other flying squadron in the Afghan war.⁶ In central Asia the Pentagon used several countries as logistical pipelines to supply troops in Afghanistan. The military built new bases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan and explored installations in Tajikistan and Kazakhstan. (In 2005 the military left Uzbekistan due to the Uzbek government’s egregious record of human rights abuses; in 2013 the Kyrgyz government, under pressure from the Russian government, evicted U.S. forces. Despite the departures, U.S. bases are today in around forty countries—about half the total—ruled by authoritarian or otherwise undemocratic governments.)⁷

Elsewhere the military expanded a critical base in Djibouti at the strategic chokepoint between the Suez Canal and the Indian Ocean. In East Africa the Pentagon created or gained access to small bases in Kenya, Ethiopia, and the Seychelles. Along the northwestern edge of the Middle East and the western side of the gas-rich Black Sea, new bases appeared in Bulgaria and Romania. The military and the CIA quietly established at least five drone bases in Pakistan; the U.S. war in Afghanistan really has been a war in Afghanistan and Pakistan ever since al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters fled across the border shortly after the war started.⁸

Kuwait has remained an equally important hub for thousands of U.S. troops and sprawling military infrastructure ever since the first U.S.-led Gulf War forced occupying Iraqi forces to leave Kuwait. The country served as the main staging area and logistical center for ground troops in the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq. Weaponry and supplies prepositioned in Diego Garcia’s lagoon were also among the first to arrive at staging areas near Iraq’s borders. Bombers from Diego Garcia launched some of the first attacks.

By the summer of 2003, with the occupation of Iraq underway, the Pentagon removed most of its forces from Saudi Arabia. The departure was a response to the 1996 bombing of Khobar Towers near Dhahran, as well as other al-Qaeda attacks in the region and mounting anger about non-Muslim troops in the Muslim Holy Land (one of Osama bin Laden’s justifications for attacking the United States). A small U.S. military contingent quietly remained to train Saudi personnel and keep bases “warm” as backups for future wars. The military later established a secret drone base in the kingdom.

The Central Command moved its air operations center for the Middle East from Saudi Arabia to Qatar. Al Udeid Air Base now hosts a fifteen-thousand-foot runway, large munitions stocks, and thousands of troops and contractors. The base has coordinated much of the newest war, against the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Qatar’s neighbor, competitor, and recent antagonist, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), is home to Al Dhafra Air Base, which hosts five thousand troops and appears to have launched more attack aircraft against the Islamic State than any other base. Bahrain is headquarters for the Navy’s Middle Eastern operations, whose primary mission is to ensure the free flow of oil and other resources though the Persian Gulf and surrounding sea lanes.9

Toward the end of the Bush/Cheney administration, officials began planning to withdraw large numbers of U.S. troops from Iraq while keeping fifty-eight “enduring bases” in the country, much as bases have remained in South Korea for decades after the end of active Korean War hostilities.10 To the surprise of many, the Iraqi parliament rejected the proposed deal. Following the 2011 withdrawal of most U.S. troops from Iraq, the Obama administration signed an agreement with Afghanistan permitting U.S. troops to stay in that country until 2024, with access to at least nine major installations. Since the start of the new war with ISIS in 2014, thousands of troops have returned to Iraq. As troop numbers have grown, so did the number of bases. U.S. forces now occupy around six bases. They withdrew from four installations in early 2020 following the U.S. assassination of Iranian Gen. Qassim Suleimani and the Iraqi parliament's passage of a nonbinding resolution to expel U.S. troops.

Map 24. U.S. Bases, Wars, and Expansion Abroad, 2001–2020. (Map appears on following pages.)

Significant bases, combat, and expansion outside U.S. states are shown. Some bases were occupied for only part of this period. The range in the approximate number of bases across the period is provided for countries that saw significant changes. At the height of U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, there were over two thousand bases abroad. By 2020 there were around eight hundred. Oceans not to scale. Key sources: Base Structure Report: Fiscal Year 2002 Baseline; A Summary of DoD’s Real Property Inventory Data (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Defense, 2002); Barbara Salazar Torreon and Sofia Plagakis, Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798–2018 (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2018);

Near the Iraqi border, F-16 fighter jets and hundreds of U.S. troops have been operating from at least one Jordanian base. The military has six base sites in Oman and thirteen in Turkey. The Turkish government has restricted their use but allowed some logistical operations and the launching of surveillance drones over Syria and Iraq.¹¹ The Navy has no such constraints in the Persian Gulf, given that it maintains at least one aircraft carrier—a massive floating base—on an effectively permanent basis in the Gulf. Other naval vessels in the Gulf and the Red Sea have launched cruise missiles into Iraq and, more recently, Syria. Nearby in the Mediterranean, there’s a de facto U.S. naval base in Haifa, Israel. For years there have been as many as six secret U.S. bases in Israel that can be used to preposition weaponry and equipment. Recently, the Pentagon acknowledged the existence of a base in Israel’s Negev Desert.¹²

Some Bush/Cheney Pentagon officials actually took office wanting to close bases. Pentagon Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wanted to initiate a new round of Base Realignment and Closure. BRAC, as it’s known, is the process Congress created in 1990 to close domestic bases after the end of the “Cold War.” Since then Congress had closed hundreds through four separate multiyear BRAC processes. Congress had never considered base closures abroad as part of BRAC, and there was no BRAC-like process for bases overseas. Rumsfeld’s staff convinced him to make overseas base closures a priority.¹³ As senior Pentagon official Ray DuBois explained to me, Rumsfeld began a Global Defense Posture Review, by asking the regional combatant commands to answer one question: “In a post–Cold War environment, what do we really need and why?” Weeks later the combatant commanders responded. In effect, according to DuBois, each said, “We need everything that we already have.”14

Rumsfeld was not pleased. Rumsfeld and his staff issued more specific directions, firmly telling the commanders to revisit the issue. Rumsfeld and his staff soon made progress. In late 2003, amid intensifying insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush surprised many by declaring plans to “realign the global posture” of the U.S. military. The goal, Bush said, was to “ensure that we place the right capabilities in the most appropriate locations to best address” the world’s security threats.¹⁵ The administration said it would eliminate more than a third of the nation’s “Cold War”–era bases in Europe, South Korea, and Japan. The Pentagon would shift troops east and south, away from Europe, to be closer to current and predicted conflict zones, from the Middle East and the Black Sea to Asia, Africa, and South America. The administration said it would return as many as seventy thousand troops stationed abroad—about 20 percent of the overseas total—as well as one hundred thousand family members to the United States. The military would concentrate most of its remaining forces overseas (still numbering in the hundreds of thousands) at about two dozen very large bases, called “main operating bases” (or “MOBs,” in Pentagon speak). These included installations such as Ramstein Air Base in Germany and Kadena Air Base in Okinawa.

The Pentagon would focus on creating smaller, more flexible bases, called “forward operating sites.” They would also build even smaller installations, “cooperative security locations,” or, as some called them, “lily pad” bases. Andy Hoehn’s boss, the Pentagon Under Secretary for Policy, Douglas Feith, wrote in an op-ed, “The standard comment of those briefed on the realignment has been: The United States should have done this a long time ago.”¹⁶

The global transformation plans succeeded in closing more bases than at any time since the first four years after the end of the “Cold War.” Most of the closures were in Europe, where hundreds of bases closed and tens of thousands of troops returned to the United States, mostly from Germany and Britain.¹⁷ The Army consolidated most of its forces at eight “enduring communities” (each consisting of multiple base sites) in Germany; Vicenza, Italy; and a group of installations in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg.¹⁸ Meanwhile, the Army started building smaller bases in central and eastern Europe, to the increasing concern of Russian leaders.

At the same time the military was closing bases and returning them to host nations, the Pentagon began a construction boom in Asia and Europe. There were already construction projects all over Iraq and Afghanistan to house U.S. troops. Others appeared in central Asia and in every Persian Gulf nation, bar Iran. More surprising were major construction projects in Italy and Germany, where many of the base closures took place. There was also new construction in South Korea, Japan, Guam, Australia, and East Asia; in the Marshall Islands; across much of Africa; and in Latin America. Between 2001 and 2009 military construction funding expanded to highs not seen since World War II. “MilCon,” as it’s called, almost tripled in constant dollar terms from $13.6 billion in fiscal year 2002 to $33.6 billion in fiscal year 2009.19 The $33.6 billion is almost double the previous post–World War II high, reached during the military buildup in Vietnam in 1966.²⁰

One of the most illustrative, and galling, projects was in Vicenza, Italy. In 2006 the Army told Congress it needed more than $600 million for a new base that would consolidate an airborne brigade moving from Germany to Vicenza. In 2013, just weeks after moving into the base, the Army said it wouldn’t be putting the entire brigade in Vicenza after all. One-third of the brigade would stay in Germany. Roughly half of the planned number of soldiers and family members would relocate to Vicenza. A Senate Committee on Appropriations report expressed its “concern,” stating, “This decision is in direct contravention of the [consolidation’s] original purpose.”²¹

Andy Hoehn’s Global Defense Posture Review envisioned billions in construction and other spending to carry out the base transformation. Such spending doesn’t explain the scale of the construction spending spree that followed October 2001. The construction spree in part reflects overall war spending and skyrocketing military budgets that followed the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Bush/Cheney administration officials repeatedly lowballed the costs of the wars. Most members of Congress and the mainstream media supported the wars and the military budget increases that followed. Even members of Congress opposed to the wars were fearful of opposing Pentagon budget increases, because opponents might accuse them of “not supporting the troops.” They likewise feared the economic and voting-booth consequences of military budget cuts in their districts and states.

Annual Pentagon budgets increased rapidly to around the same level (in constant dollar terms) reached at the height of the “Cold War.” Prior to the invasion of Afghanistan, in fiscal year 2001, the Pentagon budget was $316 billion. By 2007 the total, including war budgets, was $600 billion. It was $690 billion by 2010. A decade later the total neared $750 billion. For several years military spending nearly equaled the rest of the world’s military spending combined, despite the absence of another superpower and an al-Qaeda threat numbering only in the thousands of militants. (The United States still spends around three times what China spends and exceeds the combined military spending of the next seven countries, most of whom are U.S. allies.)22 The cost of nuclear weapons and additional military spending in the Departments of Homeland Security, State, and Veterans Affairs brought annual totals to around $1.25 trillion in 2019.²³ Total costs for the post–October 7, 2001, wars, including obligated future spending on interest and veterans care, will soon reach $6.4 trillion.²⁴

Some of the spending on bases, like the overall military budget, reflects the inflation of budgets, outright fraud, and profiteering in a wartime context, with even laxer levels of oversight for a military already known for negligent, incompetent, and dysfunctional bookkeeping.²⁵ In 2011 the Commission on Wartime Contracting, which Congress established to investigate waste and abuse, estimated there had been $31–$60 billion in contracting fraud in the wars. Most of the waste, fraud, and abuse involved contracts on bases in and around Afghanistan and Iraq.²⁶ Nearly a decade later the total is likely many billions higher, despite some improved efforts to prevent fraud.

My examination of government-spending data and contracts showed that from late 2001 (when the war in Afghanistan began) to 2013, the Pentagon dispersed around $385 billion in taxpayer-funded contracts to private companies for work outside the United States.²⁷ Most of this money has gone to overseas bases. Overall, base spending has been marked by spiraling expenditures, outright fraud, and the growing use of uncompetitive contracts and contracts lacking incentives to control costs. Companies with well-established histories of fraud and abuse repeatedly won noncompetitive sweetheart contracts. Financial irregularities have been so common that any attempt to document the total misappropriation of taxpayer funds at overseas bases would be a mammoth effort. Almost a third of the total—more than $115 billion in my 2001–13 calculation—was concentrated among the top ten corporate recipients alone. The largest single recipient was the major base-construction and maintenance contractor KBR, the former subsidiary of Dick Cheney’s old company Halliburton.28

Over time the Pentagon used war budgets as a financial trick to evade spending restrictions placed on its regular “base” budget. War budgets were a way to get additional funds from Congress for construction, operations and maintenance, and other spending.²⁹ To keep the funding flowing, base contractors have made millions in campaign contributions to Congress members. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, individuals and Political Action Committees (PACs) linked to military contractors gave more than $30 million in election donations in the 2018 election cycle alone and have donated more than $300 million between 1990 and 2020.³⁰ Contractors pay lobbyists and industry associations millions more to sway military budgeteers and policy makers. Kellogg Brown and Root and Halliburton spent nearly $5.5 million on lobbying between 2002 and 2012—a large sum, but one that’s incredibly modest given the payoff of tens of billions in Pentagon contracts over the same period. Fluor, another top-ten recipient of Pentagon contracts abroad, racked up nearly $9.5 million in lobbying fees from 2002 to 2012. Even German states hoping to stop U.S. base closures paid lobbyists on Capitol Hill. This foreign lobbying illustrates how politicians and business leaders in many countries, as well as foreign weapons manufacturers, food-service contractors, oil companies, and many, many others who supply the U.S. military, are deeply invested in maintaining the base status quo.³¹

While some of the out-of-control spending is the result of profiteering, corruption, and fraud, some is the result of the Pentagon and the military branches simply not caring about costs. Operating in a context with astounding amounts of money, where tens of millions of dollars can be a rounding error, leaders generally have had the license to make policy decisions with massive financial implications without regard to cost. If the same things happened in any other government agency, it usually would be a national scandal. In the Pentagon such misuse of funds tends to generate little notice or outrage.

Repeatedly one sees the Pentagon making decisions to spend hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars based on incomplete data, shoddy math, little or no attempt to consider cheaper alternatives, and cost analyses that appear to be either incompetent or intentionally manipulated. A long, regular stream of Government Accountability Office (GAO formerly General Accounting Office) reports provides abundant evidence of the problems. Unfortunately, each report appears in isolation, and they generally portray the problems as unrelated incidents. Rarely does anyone point out the larger pattern: the Pentagon, the armed services, and many of their component parts are spending tens of billions on overseas military construction with what frequently appears to be a willful disregard for costs and, often, the law. For its part, Congress has provided little or no oversight.32

These are symptoms of the profligacy in the military budget as a whole and the Military Industrial Congressional Complex about which President Dwight Eisenhower warned. In his famous farewell address of 1961, Eisenhower alerted U.S. citizens that the “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry” was wielding “economic, political, even spiritual” influence “in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government.” He warned of the “grave implications” of this new development and the need to “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence” and “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power.” Failing to do so, he said, would “endanger our liberties or democratic processes” and the “very structure of society.”³³

Overseas bases have become, in even more complicated ways than major weapons systems, Eisenhower’s worst nightmare about the Military Industrial Complex.³⁴ The establishment of overseas bases has created entire social worlds with corporations and thousands of people economically, socially, institutionally, and psychologically dependent on the continued operation of those worlds. Bases abroad are a perfect, if horrifying, microcosm of how the Military Industrial Congressional Complex can be like Frankenstein’s monster, taking on a life of its own thanks to the spending it commands. This has been true since the days of Eisenhower, but the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and twenty-one other countries since 2001 have taken the Complex to new levels of profligacy.

More worryingly, the Military Industrial Congressional Complex has broader and deeper influence than it had in 1961. The result is what investigative reporter Gareth Porter calls a “permanent-war complex.” Porter writes that out-of-control military spending on the post-2001 wars, coupled with the dramatic privatization of the military in recent decades, has made the Military Industrial Congressional Complex a “much more serious menace” than ever before.35 After the invasion of Afghanistan, thousands of new contracted employees began working in the Pentagon, the CIA, and other parts of the national military bureaucracy. Pentagon Secretary Robert M. Gates admitted in 2010 that he couldn’t determine how many contractors worked in his own Office of the Secretary. Contractors soon outnumbered soldiers in Afghanistan. By the end of the Obama presidency, there were nearly three contractors for every soldier.³⁶

For the highest-ranking military leaders, the “revolving door” to jobs with weapons manufacturers and other contractors is spinning faster than ever. In 1993, 45 percent of three- and four-star Army generals took such jobs as consultants or executives. By 2005 it was 80 percent. Two Washington Post reporters rightly asked whether these military contractors were now “obligated to shareholders rather than the public interest.”³⁷ Today the Military Industrial Congressional Complex might be more accurately called the Industrial Military Congressional Complex—such is the power of private, profit-seeking corporations in this government-corporate entity. With millions of dollars spent on lobbyists and campaign contributions to members of Congress and the ability to spread contract dollars to as many congressional districts as possible, contractors have secured billions in government contracts and repeatedly demonstrated their power to force the military to buy weaponry that the military doesn’t even want. “It just hits you like a ton of bricks when you think about it,” said one high-ranking officer with almost thirty years of experience in the military. “The Department of Defense is no longer a war-fighting organization, it’s a business enterprise.”³⁸

The wars that the Bush/Cheney administration launched in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and far beyond spawned out-of-control military budgets completely out of proportion to the threats facing the United States. The out-of-control military budgets, in turn, enabled a base buildup, first in the Greater Middle East, and then in regions far from the war zones. As we’ll see, the new buildups included proliferating bases in Africa, among other regions that had previously seen little U.S. military presence. In Africa especially, there’s a risk that building bases will again sow blowback, making future conflicts more likely and further entrenching a self-perpetuating system of permanent war.