From Little Americas to Lily Pads
On the autobahn just outside Ramstein-Miesenbach, a small town in southwestern Germany, the exit sign simply says: AIR BASE. Once off the exit ramp, you find yourself on an isolated, arrow-straight stretch of “private state road” surrounded by the thick woods of the local Palatinate forest. The road widens, expanding until one can easily imagine airplanes landing on it in an emergency. The huge breadth of the secluded highway makes it feel surreal. A steady stream of cars moves in both directions; about a mile down the road lies the busy western entrance to the Air Force’s “super base” in Europe, Ramstein Air Base.1 It is the largest base in the middle of the largest concentration of U.S. citizens living overseas—some fifty thousand Americans spread over an area the size of Rhode Island.
The hundreds of U.S. bases spread around Germany and the rest of the world can be broadly divided into three groups. Most troops and family members overseas are stationed at giant city-sized garrisons often referred to as “Little Americas”—places like Ramstein, Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, and Camp Humphreys in South Korea. Smaller than those are medium-sized bases like the Soto Cano Air Base in Honduras, which retain amenities such as fitness facilities but rarely host family members, eliminating the need for schools and child care. And the smallest of all are the bases officially known as “cooperative security locations,” more commonly referred to as “lily pads,” after the flora that enable a frog to jump across a pond. Often secretive in nature, lily pads tend to have few if any U.S. troops, sometimes relying instead on private contractors. They frequently house drones, surveillance aircraft, or pre-positioned weaponry for the use of troops deploying from elsewhere. Generally, they are located in parts of the world that have previously seen relatively little U.S. military presence, giving U.S. forces access to new parts of the globe.
The battle zones in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and elsewhere make the headlines. But behind the scenes, it is this far-flung base nation that has enabled the United States to wage war year after year in distant lands.
BURGER KINGS AND LEDERHOSEN
The Kaiserslautern Military Community, which includes Ramstein Air Base as well as Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, Rhine Ordnance Barracks, and numerous other bases, hosts roughly 45,000 U.S. troops, civilian employees, and family members, plus 5,000 retirees and their families and some 6,700 German civilians working for the U.S. military.2 The city of Kaiserslautern itself, which military folks call K-Town, has a population of about a hundred thousand—only around twice the size of the U.S. presence.
Just steps from Ramstein’s airfield are the shiny new passenger and cargo terminals of the Air Force’s largest overseas cargo port. These terminals have been major logistical hubs for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq: around 80 percent of the troops, weaponry, and supplies used in those wars have gone through Germany, the bulk of them through Ramstein.3 Standing directly across from the passenger terminal that has ferried troops to and from the war zones is what some call the “Mall of America of the East.” When it opened in 2009, the 844,000-square-foot Kaiserslautern Military Community Center was the largest single facility built by the military overseas, at a cost of more than $200 million.4 The mall’s “anchor tenant” is the world’s largest base exchange (the combined Air Force / Army shopping facility formerly called the Post Exchange or “PX”). The 165,000-square-foot store is so large it’s hard to see from end to end.5
A public affairs officer who gave me a tour of the Community Center explained that it is designed to add to the “quality of life” of military personnel and their families. This is particularly important, he said, when spouses and parents are deployed. It’s a “retainment benefit” to keep people happy and in the military. And all of it, he said, is “on, quote-unquote, foreign soil.”
Foreign soil or not, places like Ramstein tend to resemble insulated, self-contained small American towns that allow their inhabitants to hardly ever leave the base. These Little Americas have become both a symbol of American life and an exaggerated version of it. In many ways they resemble gated communities, with sprawling grounds, shopping malls, fast food, golf, and a car-based lifestyle. (Service members get their cars shipped overseas free of charge, and gasoline is heavily subsidized.) These “simulacrums of suburbia,” as the architecture professor and former Air Force officer Mark Gillem calls them, subtly and not so subtly shape life around them, presenting the host nation with their particular vision of American culture and transforming local economies to reflect the consumption habits of U.S. troops.
Even in Afghanistan and, previously, in Iraq, the biggest bases have been Little Americas, absent family members but complete with tens of thousands of troops, fast-food outlets, sports facilities, swimming pools, and shopping.
“It’s a little bit of Americana,” an officer at Ramstein told me about the giant mall. It lets you buy things you just can’t get off base. And while you’re there, it also offers other things you might want—all for less than on the German market. There’s even a vendor selling lederhosen in the middle of the mall and a “Ramsteiner” souvenir shop. “People go in there to buy German souvenirs,” the officer said. “It’s almost comical to me.”
Understanding how the Little Americas became so complete that one can shop for German souvenirs on base requires going back to the arrival of U.S. troops in Germany at the end of World War II. At the time, Germany was in chaos. Most of the country’s cities and towns had been battered by the war. Some were in near total ruin. “Much of Germany was just a mass of broken stones, and people found shelter among this rubble as best they could,” a classic history of the war explains. “Millions upon millions of people were faced with the basic necessity of finding food, shelter, and work.”6
Amid such destitution and destruction, tensions grew between occupiers and occupied. After years of bloody fighting, the first year of postwar occupation in particular was characterized by an aggressive Allied campaign to seize homes, automobiles, bicycles, wine, and other property from the locals. GIs called this “liberating” and spoke euphemistically of rape as “liberating a blonde.”7 Even when outright force was not involved, the nature of sexual relationships between GIs and German women—romance, prostitution, or assault—was often hazy at best.8 Survival prostitution was widespread, with impoverished women sometimes congregating outside PXs and soldiers’ camps. Venereal disease rates reflected as much. In April 1945, less than 6 percent of GIs had VD. Fifteen months later, the rate was over 30 percent.9
Rampant prostitution and venereal disease, GI theft and violence, a thriving black market, and racial hostility among Germans who objected to relationships between black GIs and German women became an increasing concern for the military. News of the Army’s “disarray” in Germany began filtering back to the United States. Life, Collier’s Weekly, and other popular news outlets published articles with titles like “Failure in Germany” and “Heels Among the Heroes.” John Dos Passos wrote in Life, “Never has American prestige in Europe been lower. People never tire of telling you the ignorance and rowdyism of American troops.”10
American officials decided that something had to be done. To reassert control and ease the tensions of the occupation, the Army employed a combination of harsh discipline and “wholesome” educational and recreational activities. As the economist John Willoughby writes in a book about the U.S. presence in Germany, the lifestyle that emerged was something “between boot camp and summer camp.” Its norms have continued to this day.11
FAMILIES TO THE RESCUE
At the heart of the new lifestyle was the Army’s decision in 1945 to allow families to join soldiers in Germany. Today it seems natural for spouses and children to join members of the military at bases worldwide. At the time, this was a radical decision. Traditionally, men in the U.S. military—as in most other militaries—deployed overseas alone. The idea that families might live with them somewhere abroad, let alone on the front lines of the Cold War amid the growing nuclear standoff between East and West, represented a profound change.
Until the end of the nineteenth century, after all, the U.S. military had made no formal provisions whatsoever for the lives or well-being of soldiers’ partners and children. Military leaders generally referred to them as “camp followers.” The only women allowed to live on post were a few officers’ wives; the wives of ordinary soldiers had to live outside the walls. Only in the 1890s did the Army begin to create basic schools on posts for children and to provide food rations and other benefits to the families of enlisted men—benefits that barely foreshadowed the amenities to come. Indeed, until 1913 the Army actively discouraged its soldiers from marrying. A popular line has long said if the Army had wanted you to have a wife, it would have issued you one.12
Beyond improving relations with the occupied Germans, the 1945 decision to allow families to rejoin soldiers overseas was a response to growing demands in the United States to reunite families by bringing troops home. It was also a way to deal with the multiple problems associated with “fraternization.” GIs’ sexual relationships with locals not only created tension with German men, who were intent on maintaining patriarchal control over “their” women, but also left many women in the United States angry about continued deployments. “Thank you for telling us what fun it is to ‘fraternize,’” one woman wrote to Life magazine in August 1945. “Too bad there aren’t enough Nazi prisoners of war here in America for all of us wives with husbands in Germany to try it.”13
U.S. leaders hoped that allowing family members to live with the GIs overseas would help address these problems, improve morale during continuing deployments abroad, and keep skilled soldiers from requesting redeployment to the United States. By October 1946, there were around four thousand wives and children in Germany. By the end of 1950, there were nearly thirty thousand.14
In the following decade, the numbers grew further. Beginning in 1951, following the outbreak of the Korean War, President Truman sent massive army reinforcements to Asia and Western Europe to contain “communist aggression.” It was an early manifestation of the newly enshrined forward strategy. By the end of 1951, there were 176,000 U.S. troops in Germany, and there was almost no decline with the end of the Korean War. By 1955, Germany hosted more than 260,000 U.S. troops. Hundreds of thousands of wives and children followed. They would remain stationed for almost four decades across West Germany’s south, where military planners thought a Soviet invasion was most likely.15
At first, the arrival of soldiers’ family members in Germany actually inflamed tensions with locals because the presence of the newcomers meant the requisitioning of more German land. Attempts to ease the effects of the occupation on Germans—and to exert more control over soldiers—led the military to segregate GIs and their families on bases further removed from German society. As the military realized that the bases badly lacked medical facilities, schools, shopping, and other facilities for families, a massive building campaign followed in Germany and, soon, around the world. The aim was to create replicas of American towns so GIs and their families would feel at home overseas. Housing, shopping centers, recreational services, and hospitals sprang up on bases worldwide. The military established a Family Services Program and created an entire overseas school system.
“Commanders realized they needed to pay attention to quality of life issues in order to retain expensively trained personnel,” explains Anni Baker, a historian who has lived on bases abroad as a family member and civilian employee. Otherwise, troops “would desert the military for better opportunities in the civilian world.”16 Because of the changes initiated in the early 1950s in Germany and elsewhere, family members once dismissed as “camp followers” are now described by the military as “force multipliers” who contribute to “overall readiness.”17
The millions of dollars in base construction and spending that accompanied the buildup of Little Americas also helped improve relations with locals. Before the arrival of U.S. troops in Rheinland-Pfalz, for example, the rural state was Germany’s “traditional poorhouse.” After more than a hundred thousand GIs and family members arrived between 1950 and 1951, rapid construction created thousands of new jobs. Unemployment, which had been over 10 percent in the region and over 22 percent in the town of Baumholder, vanished amid a gold rush atmosphere. With a strong U.S. dollar, Americans splashed money around the local economy. By 1955, they were spending almost $5 million a year (the equivalent of $44 million today) in Baumholder alone, a town of around twenty-five hundred that came to host an average of thirty thousand U.S. troops and family members. People in Rheinland-Pfalz now remember the decade as the “Fabulous Fifties” and the “Golden Years.”18
To many, the presence of wives and children living on the front lines of the Cold War in Germany, Japan, South Korea, and elsewhere was also a powerful sign of the U.S. commitment to defending its allies.*19 Generally, people overlooked any problems such as airplane noise and damage caused by frequent exercises traversing city streets and farmers’ fields. (In Baumholder, a permanent office in the city center paid compensation for training-related damage.)20 Five years into the Korea buildup, a government survey indicated that a majority of Germans felt troop conduct and German-American rapport had improved.21
The family decision and the housing, schools, bowling alleys, and Burger Kings that followed it can seem superficial. They are anything but that, however, and their implications for the military and for the country as a whole have been profound. The Little Americas helped enable the permanent peacetime deployment of troops overseas, appeasing GIs, their families, and other Americans upset about the long-term presence of U.S. troops abroad. The city-sized bases that began growing in Germany, Italy, Japan, Britain, and beyond in the late 1940s and early 1950s also helped improve relations, legitimizing and normalizing what might have otherwise been seen as permanent occupation. They helped ensure a relatively friendly and stable local environment, thus allowing for the smooth operation of a military unencumbered by major protest or conflict with locals.22
“The success of the domesticating reforms,” says the economist John Willoughby, “permitted President Truman to double the troop presence during the Korean War crisis with few complaints from the German state” or from U.S. citizens back home.23 In short, the construction of Little Americas in Western Europe and Japan, the Philippines and South Korea, was critical to making the base nation a permanent feature of Cold War life. When the Cold War ended, however, the Little Americas, and the permanent war footing they represent, would not disappear.
GLOBAL REALIGNMENT
With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the U.S. presence overseas endured despite significant reductions. In the first half of the 1990s, the U.S. government gave up around 60 percent of its foreign bases and brought almost three hundred thousand troops back to the United States. The largest number of returnees came from the Army in Germany.24 Between 1991 and 1995 the U.S. military returned around a hundred thousand acres of land to the German government—about twice the size of Washington, D.C.25 Still, despite the disappearance of the Eastern Bloc, hundreds of U.S. bases and sixty thousand U.S. troops remained in Germany alone. Globally, in 2001—more than a decade after the end of the Cold War—around one thousand bases and hundreds of thousands of troops remained overseas.
As former deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy Andrew Hoehn told me, with the end of the Cold War, the military reduced its overseas presence but failed to make any significant change in the nature of its forces abroad. There was “a lot of hedging at that moment,” he said. “We shrank in place. But we really didn’t reposition.”
This did not please George W. Bush administration secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld. The day after Bush’s first presidential inauguration, Rumsfeld convened a small staff meeting. One of the staffers, Raymond DuBois, recounted how Rumsfeld told his staff, “We can no longer afford a post–Cold War [basing] apparatus.”
Out of the meeting emerged a plan to transform “a global system of overseas military bases [developed] primarily to contain aggression by the Soviet Union.” In late 2003, amid an intensifying insurgency in Iraq and warfare in Afghanistan, President 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.26
The administration said it would eliminate more than a third of the nation’s Cold War–era bases in Europe, South Korea, and Japan. In Europe alone, the Pentagon identified around three hundred base sites for closure, most of them in Germany. The Pentagon would shift troops to be closer to current and predicted conflict zones, moving them from Europe and the Middle East to Asia, Africa, and South America. The administration planned to return as many as seventy thousand more troops stationed abroad—about 20 percent of the overseas total—as well as a hundred thousand family members to the United States. The remaining U.S. forces overseas, who would still number in the hundreds of thousands, were to be concentrated in a smaller collection of sprawling (and often enlarged) main bases like Ramstein, Osan Air Base in South Korea, and Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni in Japan.
A move to consolidate troops at a smaller collection of very large bases had actually been under way for several years, thanks in part to a string of attacks beginning in 1996 that hit the Khobar Towers complex in Saudi Arabia, embassies in East Africa, and the USS Cole. In response, the military began closing small bases, bases in congested urban areas vulnerable to truck bombs, and other hard-to-protect facilities. The remaining Little Americas began growing larger, with taller walls, broader boundaries, and tighter security. Inside the gates, the military expanded shopping, food, and recreational offerings to provide troops and family members with most everything they might require.
“They are making these bases even more self-contained in an attempt to minimize the need for soldiers to go off-base” where security risks might arise, explains Mark Gillem in his book America Town. More than just idealized suburbia, these bases are now “necessarily like gated communities, with guards and walls designed to keep out the troublemakers.”27
“TEMPORARY BUT INDEFINITE”
Under the Bush administration’s plan, rather than building new Little Americas in former Cold War zones, the military would instead generally focus on developing smaller and more flexible bases elsewhere. Midsize “forward operating sites”—scattered from Singapore and Australia to Bulgaria and Djibouti—became increasingly important. These bases generally have been relatively compact, often rotating deployments of U.S. troops, fewer amenities, and usually no family members. Crucially, the “operating site” nomenclature and the smaller size of the bases often let U.S. officials insist that there is “no U.S. base” in the area. Instead, officials refer to the base as just a “site,” or, alternatively, as a “forward operating location” that’s a guest of the host country.
The Soto Cano Air Base in Honduras, which predates the global posture realignment, exemplifies the small-to-midsize base the Pentagon increasingly favors. Ever since construction at Soto Cano began in 1982, U.S. officials have maintained that there is “no U.S. base in Honduras.” They have said and still maintain that the more-than-three-decades-old base is “temporary,” or, as some say, “temporary but indefinite.”28 Officials insist that U.S. forces there are “guests” on the site of the Honduran Air Force Academy, even though there are now more than thirteen hundred U.S. troops and civilians in Soto Cano, dwarfing the three-hundred-person academy. As numerous analysts have pointed out, calling the base “temporary” provides a rhetorical mechanism to circumvent the Honduras constitution’s prohibition against the permanent stationing of foreign troops on Honduran soil.29
If there was any doubt about who really controls the base, a 2008 incident was revealing. At the time, Honduran president Manuel Zelaya proposed using Soto Cano’s runway as part of a new international airport for joint civilian and military use. An embassy staffer in the Honduran capital told me that the U.S. response was, No problem. But U.S. officials added, “Oh, by the way, all the power, all the water, all the sewage, all the lighting, all the air traffic control stuff, the radar, is all controlled by the U.S., and our laws prohibit U.S. military funds supporting private enterprises. So, if you want to open up an international airport”—by building replacement facilities from scratch, that is—“by all means, go for it.” The Honduran project went nowhere.
When I walked through the gate at Soto Cano in the summer of 2011, a handful of Puerto Rican National Guard soldiers rested at ease inside the guardhouse. A public affairs officer put a one-page letter (in English) approving my visit in front of the single Honduran guard. The slightest glance later, I was in.
Sgt. Timothy Edwards first showed me what he called, using air quotes, “the Honduran side.” The Honduran Air Force Academy probably makes up less than one fifth of the base. It consists of a small array of aging classroom buildings and two-story concrete dorms. Grass and weeds sprout wildly along the road.
On the other side of the base, the grass is carefully manicured, as on U.S. bases worldwide. The “U.S. side” is not, however, a Little America kind of base. There are no suburban-style housing developments. There are a few fast-food vendors, but no shopping malls. Most signs on base were made in the 1980s with hand-painted stencils, and wood cabins are the base’s dominant architectural feature, making it somewhat reminiscent of a large summer camp attached to an eight-thousand-foot runway. What troops call “hooches” (military slang dating back to the wars in Korea and Vietnam), with rusting corrugated iron roofs and shutters, are situated around communal toilets and bathrooms. Enlisted personnel sleep in the cabins; officers get more comfortable housing with indoor plumbing. More hooches are used as offices for the various tenant units on base. Still others house small restaurants and a few souvenir shops that may make Soto Cano the only U.S. military base in the world to sell Cuban cigars.
A military official who was in Honduras in the early 1980s told me that when he first came to the area, the Honduran Air Force was landing a few planes on dirt or on a little pavement. So, he said, “We came in and built it up.” U.S. troops constructed a proper runway and assembled some tents and other basic living facilities. Soon there was an airplane ramp as well as hangars and the hooches. Over time they built a large runway capable of accommodating F-16 fighter jets and C-5 cargo planes, a pool, a gym, sports fields and other recreational facilities, twenty-two miles of roads, and extensive water, sewer, and electrical systems.30
If anything, the hooches and the “summer camp” feel of the base have helped maintain the pretense that U.S. troops might pack up and leave at short notice. But by 1989, operations at Soto Cano were so significant that some Pentagon officials referred to Joint Task Force Bravo, which commands the base, as having responsibilities and power almost matching an entire regional command, like the Southern or European Commands.31 Two decades later, when I visited, millions of dollars in expansion and new construction was well under way; to some extent, officials have now dispensed with the charade of calling the base temporary.32 Since 2003, Congress has appropriated at least $45 million to build “permanent facilities” in Soto Cano for almost seven hundred troops.33 Between 2009 and 2011 alone, the base population has grown by almost 20 percent.34 Construction workers were replacing the hooches with yellow aluminum-sided buildings, where enlisted soldiers would get single rooms with central air, furniture, a refrigerator, and a microwave. Elsewhere, they were building the foundation for new officers’ housing.
Military planners generally design medium-sized bases like Soto Cano and others like it in Singapore, Djibouti, and Romania to be readily expandable. This allows short-term deployments of U.S. forces to visit for training purposes and operations of various kinds and also permits for more permanent construction of the kind that Soto Cano saw during the 1980s and is seeing today. All the while, officials at “forward operating sites” often repeat the mantra that their U.S.-funded, U.S.-operated facilities are not U.S. military bases at all. “This is their base,” Sergeant Edwards emphasized to me before the end of my visit to Soto Cano. “Sometimes we forget that. But we’re here to help them.”
As Sergeant Edwards’s admission suggests, the sincerity of such claims depends greatly on the power of a host country relative to the United States, with wealthy nations like Singapore toward one end of a spectrum and Honduras very much at the other. In many of the countries where one finds the smallest category of bases—the lily pads—the hosts often have similarly little power relative to their ostensible guests.
“NO FLAG, NO FORWARD PRESENCE, NO FAMILIES”
As with medium-sized forward operating sites (FOSs), U.S. officials strenuously avoid calling the third smaller group of installations “bases.” They instead call them cooperative security locations, or lily pads. Like “forward operating site,” the terms “cooperative security location” and “lily pad” seek to minimize perceptions about the size and significance of a base.
Beyond the terminology, lily pads generally occupy remote locations and are either secret or only tacitly acknowledged to avoid protests that might lead to restrictions on their use. They usually have limited numbers of troops, no families, and few amenities. Sometimes they rely mostly or entirely on private military contractors, whose actions the U.S. government can more easily disown if necessary. To further maintain a low profile and preempt accusations about building “new U.S. bases,” the Pentagon has often hidden its lily pads within existing host nation bases or on the margins of civilian airports.
With lily pads found in places as diverse as Colombia, Kenya, and Thailand, a principal aim of the new strategy is avoiding local populations, publicity, and potential opposition. “To project its power,” former Air Force officer Mark Gillem says, the United States wants “secluded and self-contained outposts strategically located” around the world.35 According to some of the strategy’s strongest proponents at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, the goal should be “to create a worldwide network of frontier forts,” with the U.S. military “the ‘global cavalry’ of the twenty-first century.”36
Unbeknownst to most, the Pentagon has been trying to acquire as many lily pads as it can, in as many countries as it can, as fast as it can. Although statistics are hard to assemble, given the often secretive nature of such bases, the Pentagon has probably built upwards of fifty lily pads and other small bases in the past fifteen years, while exploring the construction of dozens more. While the collection of giant Cold War–era bases has shrunk, the proliferation of new lily pads (and FOSs) in recent years has meant that our base nation has actually grown in geographic scope.
In early 2001, the Pentagon official Ray DuBois traveled to the Philippines to negotiate new access to the country for the U.S. military. Some wondered whether this would mark a return to the days of giant American bases in the Philippines: Clark Air Base and Subic Bay Naval Base used to be the largest overseas U.S. military bases in the world. DuBois responded with an emphatic no. There would be “no flag, no forward presence, no families,” he said. The phrase became his motto. It meant that host countries would maintain sovereignty over the lily pads; that there would be no large, permanent contingent of U.S. troops; and that there would be no family members or the extensive amenities that go with them.
Clark and Subic Bay closed in 1992 after the Filipino government refused to renew a lease on the bases and adopted a new constitution banning foreign bases. A few years later, after the 1999 reversion of the Panama Canal Zone, the U.S. military lost its Panamanian bases as well. Responding to these losses, Bill Clinton’s Pentagon started developing lily pads and other small and medium-sized bases in places such as Ecuador, Aruba, Curaçao, and El Salvador. As a Pentagon official explained in a 2009 presentation, the aim is to “lighten U.S. foreign footprints to reduce friction with host nations” and avoid offending “host nation and regional sensitivities.”37
The Pentagon has various techniques for disguising its presence at cooperative security locations. In Pakistan, for instance, the military leased a base technically owned by the United Arab Emirates so the Pakistani government could deny the presence of a “U.S. base” on its territory.38 In Thailand, a private contractor rents space on Utapao Naval Air Base, a facility of the Royal Thai Navy, and leases the space to U.S. forces. “Because of Delta Golf Global,” writes the journalist Robert D. Kaplan, “the U.S. military was here, but it was not here. After all, the Thais did no business with the U.S. Air Force. They dealt only with a private contractor.”39 Thanks to this arrangement, the Thai lily pad has become a major logistical hub for aircraft and naval vessels heading to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. By 2008, almost nine hundred flights were passing through Utapao annually.40 The military misleadingly calls Utapao a “disaster relief hub,” which describes only a small portion of its activities.41
In even more countries, “access agreements” have given U.S. forces regular use rights at airfields, ports, and bases. As part of the global realignment, the Air Force signed more than twenty “gas-and-go” agreements with countries in Africa alone during Donald Rumsfeld’s time as secretary of defense. These agreements allow planes to refuel and repair at locations across the continent. Between the end of the Cold War and the end of Rumsfeld’s tenure in 2007, the number of agreements permitting the presence of U.S. troops on foreign soil more than doubled, from forty-five to more than ninety.42
“Access, not bases” has become a mantra for some—although sometimes, as in the Philippines since 2001, “access” can become just another euphemism for a base. Through the work of DuBois and other U.S. negotiators in the Philippines, as many as six hundred American special forces troops began operating in the country’s south in early 2002, using perhaps as many as seven lily pads. Kaplan, one of the few journalists to visit the bases, noted that despite the Philippines’ constitutional ban on foreign bases, the new deployment “had succeeded as a political mechanism for getting an American base-of-sorts up and running.”43
The developments in the Philippines have been widely replicated with American lily pads flowering around the globe. The result appears to be a case of “back to the future,” with the creation of what military analyst Robert Work likens to a “global coaling-station network” last seen in the nineteenth century.44
This new generation of smaller bases is appealing to many who hope that lily pads and other relatively small bases can avoid the controversies and protests that have often accompanied the large bases worldwide. But this has often not been the case. As we will see, military facilities small and large alike all too often harm local communities in ways that locals do not easily forget.