The Trillion Dollar War Machine, page 12
Still, opponents of the US military presence in Guam have their work cut out for them, for one thing because Guam is firmly under US political control. Although its inhabitants have US citizenship, they cannot vote for president, and their representative to Congress does not have voting rights. Lisa Natividad, an assistant professor of social work at the University of Guam, has pointed out the inherent contradiction involved in the US political and military domination of Guam: “America justifies its military might as the spread of democracy whereas here in Guam, which is currently still U.S. soil, democracy doesn’t exist.”14 Military analyst Van Jackson underscores this point: “Exclusionary control of Guam is logically incompatible with the claim that the U.S. government is defending a ‘rules-based order’—the very claim it uses to justify rivalry with China. But it is essential to U.S. strategic machinations in Asia.”15
The growing resistance to the bases, according to Lutz, is partly being fueled by strong opposition to the assumption that “the island belongs to the U.S. military and they can do anything they want with it.” As for the island’s status, Lutz echoes the position of many of Guam’s residents when she notes that in essence “Guam is a U.S. colony—I don’t allow anyone to call it a territory.”16
Amid the conflicting views of Guamanian residents on the impact of the military’s presence there, Jackson notes that US dominance of Guam makes the long-standing practice of basing forces in Asia “more politically sustainable by easing the burden on sovereign allies.” He goes on to say that this strategic view was central to Richard Nixon’s “Guam Doctrine,” which sought to reduce the US military presence on the Asian mainland in favor of deployments on the “Pacific periphery in places that were seen as more controllable and less politically unpredictable.”17
As noted above, US control of Guam has come at the expense of the sovereignty of the island. There have been promises to hold a plebiscite of Guam residents to determine its status—statehood, independence, or free association—but the vote has been repeatedly delayed by the US government. In the 1980s, Congress revealed its true attitude toward Guam when it opposed commonwealth status for the island because this would have kept “the U.S. Government and the U.S. military from taking any action in Guam without mutual consent of the people.”18 In other words, military prerogatives first, people’s desires second.
The effect of the military presence on Guam and its residents is a crucial question. But another key question is whether the growing US dependence on Guam for its war plans in the Pacific makes strategic sense. Will it make war more or less likely? Lutz is clear on this point: The US presence in Guam is a “poke in the side” of Beijing and “exactly what is going to drag your kids into war with China.… They’re making us and the world less safe.”19
Yet Guam is just one of a number of Pacific islands that are central to US military planning and positioning for a war in the region, including the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, the Republic of Palau, the Federated States of Micronesia, Saipan, and the Republic of Marshall Islands. These islands have all paid a steep price for their role in the American global military strategy. As journalist Sara A. Topoll explains, “The United States has ruled, nuked, resettled, been attacked from and fought wars on the smaller islands scattered across the Pacific over a span of more than 100 years.”20
For example, the Marshall Islands, which were taken over by the United States in 1944, was the site of sixty-seven nuclear-weapons tests between 1946 and 1958, and it is still fighting for compensation to help deal with the severe health effects of the testing. The islands are also home to Kwajalein Atoll, which houses the Ronald Reagan Missile Defense Test Site.21 In the usual test, interceptor missiles are fired toward Kwajalein with the goal of hitting targets over the ocean in the western Pacific, monitored by advanced electronics and surveillance systems on Kwajalein. In June 2024 the Air Force fired two unarmed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles toward Kwajalein, a move that was criticized at a time of high tensions with China and Russia.22
Elsewhere in the Pacific island chain, the United States has announced a $5 billion plan to bulk up its air base on the island of Tinian, part of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands.23 An April 2024 Air Force press release described the work on Tinian as follows: “The Airmen there are restoring over 20 million square feet of degraded World War II pavement so that ultimately the rejuvenated runway can serve as a power projection platform.” The upgrade at Tinian is part of the Air Force’s Agile Combat Employment (ACE) strategy, which “shifts operations from centralized physical infrastructures to a network of smaller, dispersed locations that can complicate adversary planning and provide more options for joint force commanders.”24 The Tinian airfield was the launching pad for the aircraft that carried out the US nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II.25
The US focus on building up its military presence throughout East Asia, from the Pacific islands to the Philippines to Australia, is rooted in a military-first approach to the challenges posed by China. But as military analyst Dan Grazier has noted, China’s current military strategy is focused on developing weapons capable of fending off an attack, not projecting force overseas.26
As for Taiwan, the primary potential flash point for a US-China conflict, a military buildup is more likely to provoke Chinese countermoves or a costly arms race than it is to prevent a conflict. Diplomacy—starting with a common understanding of the rules of the road with respect to US and Chinese relations with Taiwan—offers the best hope of heading off a war between the United States and China.
Such a military confrontation would be an unprecedented disaster for all concerned, even if it didn’t escalate to the level of a nuclear confrontation. US military expansion in Asia and the Pacific should be debated in the context of a more balanced policy toward China, not taken for granted as the best way to defend America or the people of the Pacific.
DIEGO GARCIA
Right in the middle of the Indian Ocean sits the tiny island nation of Diego Garcia. And as in the case of US bases in Guam, the military base in Diego Garcia is a linchpin of US capabilities to project force—in this case, into the Middle East and South Asia. The Military Installations website describes Diego Garcia’s basic mission as follows: “U.S. support facility Diego Garcia’s mission is to provide critical support to U.S. and allied forces forward deployed to the Indian Ocean, while supporting multi-theater forces in CENTCOM, AFRICOM, EUCOM and PACOM [the US commands for the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and the Pacific].… Navy support facility Diego Garcia occupies a critical part on ‘the tip of the spear’ for U.S. military forces.”27
Diego Garcia is home to the most fundamental weapons of intervention, including modern aircraft carriers, which are in essence floating military bases that can bring large amounts of air power to bear on conflicts anywhere in the world. In addition, long-range bombers based on the island can reach the Middle East and South Asia without refueling.28
The US presence on Diego Garcia was established in the early 1970s in a deal with the United Kingdom, which had previously controlled the territory. In order to establish US military control, thousands of local residents—the Chagossians—were uprooted from their homes and sent into exile in Mauritius and the Seychelles, often without much more than the clothes on their back. The displaced Chagossians and their children remain among the most impoverished people in their places of exile, and there is an ongoing movement pressing for compensation for their forced displacement, coupled with a right to return to their homeland.29
Aurelie Lisette Talate was one of the last Chagossians to go: “I came to Mauritius with six children and my mother. We got our house… but the house didn’t have a door, didn’t have running water, didn’t have electricity. And then my children and I began to suffer. All my children started getting sick.” Within two months of their going into exile, two of Talate’s children were dead, and one was buried in an unmarked grave because Talate lacked funds for a proper burial.30
The rationale for the US Navy to set up shop in Diego Garcia goes back to the vision of an obscure Navy planner, Stuart Barber, who in the late 1950s developed the “strategic island concept.” The gist of the proposal was that because anticolonial movements were succeeding in winning independence in countries around the world, the status of US bases might be threatened by the new governments that were coming to power. The concept’s strategy was to establish bases in sparsely populated places that were still under the political control of the United States or its close allies. The thought was that a US military presence in these areas would be more secure, given the limited ability of the residents of the islands to push back because of their low level of political rights. The establishment of the base at Diego Garcia was a particularly harsh application of the concept.31
When he learned of the harsh conditions the exiled Chagossians lived in, two decades after he retired from the Navy, Barber came to regret his role in their displacement. Anthropologist David Vine, who wrote a book on the establishment of the Diego Garcia base and the expulsion of the Chagossians, Island of Shame, summarized Barber’s efforts to make up for his role in the process as follows: Barber “wrote impassioned letters to officials, the media, and Human Rights Watch asking them to help ‘redress the inexcusably inhuman wrongs inflicted by the British at our insistence.’ Barber’s appeals went unanswered.”32
A February 2023 report by Human Rights Watch stated flatly that “the forced displacement of the Chagossians and ongoing abuses amount to crimes against humanity committed by a colonial power against an Indigenous people.”33 In a 2008 visit to Washington, Chagossian leader Oliver Bancoult noted the hypocrisy inherent in the policies of the United States and the United Kingdom toward his people: “All that we are asking for is to be treated as human beings. Unfortunately the great protectors of human rights, the United States and Britain, have not yet been able to see that to be uprooted from one’s homeland and one’s way of life is a denial of a people’s fundamental rights.”34
Ironically, given the treatment of the Chagossians in the establishment of the base at Diego Garcia, the Navy’s official website for the facility calls it the “footprint of freedom.”35 An October 2024 agreement by the United Kingdom to give sovereignty over the island to Mauritius may open the door to resettlement by some of the Chagossians displaced when the Diego Garcia base was built, but this would be only a partial victory at best. After all, the base itself will remain in place, for the US military is intent on keeping Diego Garcia indefinitely because of its role as a platform for intervention. The base at Diego Garcia could be closed only in the context of a more restrained foreign policy that is not intent on supporting the ability to intervene militarily in the Middle East, South Asia, or Africa on short notice.
RAMSTEIN: GATEWAY TO AFRICA AND THE MIDDLE EAST
“The most important U.S. air force base you’ve never heard of,” according to author Norman Solomon, is Ramstein, Germany. Serving as a backstop and transit point for US wars in the Middle East—from the 2003 intervention in Iraq to the smaller wars that have followed in its wake—Ramstein is home to the Air Force’s joint command for activities in Europe and Africa. As such, Ramstein is a “grand central station for airborne war.”36
Not only does Ramstein host combat aircraft with missions in Europe and Africa, but it has also been used as a hub for the transmission of video images used to guide drone strikes in Afghanistan, a transport base for sending Special Forces to Africa, and a transit point for munitions sent into war zones in Syria and Iraq. The base also houses the consolidated Allied Air Command, which is “responsible for all Air and Space matters within NATO.”37 The official Air Force website for the base notes that it directs air operations in a theater “spanning three continents, covering more than 15 million square miles, containing 104 independent states, possessing more than one-fifth of the world’s population and more than a quarter of the world’s gross domestic product.” As Major Tony Wickham told Solomon, “We touch a good chunk of the world right from Ramstein. We think of it as a power-projection platform.”38
In Germany itself, Ramstein hosts fifty-seven thousand troops, as well as their family members. As such, the area around Ramstein is called “Little America.” But the base is not universally welcomed. Two out of three Germans oppose the US drone wars that are coordinated from Ramstein, and there is a small but active campaign to close the facility altogether. “Without Ramstein,” notes local activist Pascal Luig, “no [US] war in the Middle East would be possible.”39
THE BROADER MIDDLE EAST BASE NETWORK
The bases at Diego Garcia and Ramstein are integrated with the US bases in the Middle East proper, from the headquarters of the US Seventh Fleet in Bahrain to major air bases in Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE. As of late 2023, the United States had more than 45,000 troops and contractors in the Middle East, including 13,500 in Kuwait, 9,000 in Bahrain, 8,000 in Qatar, and 3,500 in the UAE.40
These personnel are the foundation for US intervention in the region. But they are also targets: Since the start of the Israeli war on Gaza in October 2023, US forces in Iraq and Syria have been attacked.
The United States did not always have such an extensive military presence in the Middle East. The genesis of the current US base network goes back to the administration of Jimmy Carter, who pledged to defend US interests in the Middle East “by force, if necessary” in the wake of the 1978 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the 1979 Iranian Revolution.41 Initially, this “Carter Doctrine” involved the creation of a rapid deployment force (RDF) designed to get forces to the Middle East quickly, using equipment already positioned on the soil of US allies in the region. The RDF was the predecessor to the current US Central Command, which oversees military efforts from the Middle East to South Asia.
Over time, the desire to get troops and weapons to the Middle East on short notice morphed into a decision to permanently base tens of thousands of military personnel there. The question now—after failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and an escalating regional conflict sparked by Israel’s brutal war on Gaza—is whether the United States should keep the Middle East bases that were built over four decades ago or rethink the extent of its presence in the area.
The recent fighting in the region—Israel’s devastating attacks on Gaza and Lebanon, Houthi rebel attacks on shipping in the Red Sea, attacks and counterattacks between US troops and pro-Iranian forces in Iraq and Syria, and dueling missile attacks between Israel and Iran—has led many to argue that now is the wrong time to reduce the US military presence in the region. But it can also be argued that US troops in the Middle East are tempting targets for nonstate groups like the Houthis and Iranian-backed militias, thereby actually increasing the chances of escalation to a full-scale, region-wide conflict as a result of tit-for-tat, escalatory military moves.
A wiser strategy would be to withdraw US troops from the region altogether while making it clear that the United States will use naval or air assets in the event of a conflict in the region that requires its involvement. In addition, in no circumstance should the United States engage in prolonged nation-building efforts like the failed twenty-plus-year war in Iraq.
And contrary to the claims of militarists in and outside of government, neither China nor Russia is likely to try to build a military presence in the region that rivals current US deployments. In fact—as evidenced by China’s role in brokering a normalization of relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia—Beijing’s nonmilitary tools, most notably its strong trade relations in the region, are likely to be more effective and affordable than pouring troops and arms into the area.
DRONE STRIKES AND “POLITICALLY SUSTAINABLE WARFARE”
Even as the United States has grown more reluctant to send troops into combat, it has clung even tighter to its bases. One major reason is that a number of key bases are needed to employ the new weapon of choice: drones. The other is that the Pentagon wants the option to project traditional forces into the Middle East, South Asia, and East Asia in the event of a future conflict in any of those regions.
Why has the United States turned to drones? The direct US interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan were disasters. And as these results began sinking in among key policymakers during the Obama administration, there was a shift of emphasis in foreign and military policy toward what we have described elsewhere as “politically sustainable warfare”: forms of military intervention that—because they limit the number of troops in war zones and minimize US casualties—are less likely to spark substantial domestic opposition.
So the Obama administration substantially reduced troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan. At the same time, it stepped up drone strikes, arms sales, and deployments of small numbers of Special Forces to engage in training and, occasionally, to fight alongside the military forces of US allies—all under the guise of fighting terrorism.
But out of all these purportedly politically sustainable methods, drone strikes were the Obama administration’s military tool of choice. In fact, the United States engaged in ten times as many drone strikes during Obama’s presidency as during the two terms of George W. Bush: 563 strikes in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen alone. “The use of drones aligned with Obama’s ambition to keep up the war against al Qaeda while extricating the U.S. military from intractable, costly ground wars in the Middle East and Asia,” explains the UK-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which collected the data.42
