The Mystery Military Bases the Pentagon Doesn't Want You to Know About
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The U.S. military is finally withdrawing (or not) from its base at al-Tanf.
You know, the place that the Syrian government long claimed was a training
ground for Islamic State (ISIS) fighters; the land corridor just inside
Syria, near both the Iraqi and Jordanian borders, that Russia has called a
terrorist hotbed (while floating the idea of jointly administering it with
the United States); the location of a camp where hundreds of U.S. Marines
joined Special Operations forces last year; an outpost that U.S. officials
claimed was the key not only to defeating ISIS, but also, according to
General Joseph Votel, the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, to
countering "the malign activities that Iran and their various proxies and
surrogates would like to pursue." You know, that al-Tanf.
Within hours of President Trump's announcement of a withdrawal of U.S.
forces from Syria, equipment at that base was already being inventoried for
removal. And just like that, arguably the most important American garrison
in Syria was (maybe) being struck from the Pentagon's books - except, as it
happens, al-Tanf was never actually on the Pentagon's books. Opened in 2015
and, until recently, home to hundreds of U.S. troops, it was one of the many
military bases that exist somewhere between light and shadow, an
acknowledged foreign outpost that somehow never actually made it onto the
Pentagon's official inventory of bases.
Officially, the Department of Defense (DoD) maintains 4,775 "sites," spread
across all 50 states, eight U.S. territories, and 45 foreign countries. A
total of 514 of these outposts are located overseas, according to the
Pentagon's worldwide property portfolio. Just to start down a long list,
these include bases on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, in Djibouti
on the Horn of Africa, as well as in Peru and Portugal, the United Arab
Emirates, and the United Kingdom. But the most recent version of that
portfolio, issued in early 2018 and known as the Base Structure Report
(BSR), doesn't include any mention of al-Tanf. Or, for that matter, any
other base in Syria. Or Iraq. Or Afghanistan. Or Niger. Or Tunisia. Or
Cameroon. Or Somalia. Or any number of locales where such military outposts
are known to exist and even, unlike in Syria, to be expanding.
According to David Vine, author of Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases
Abroad Harm America and the World, there could be hundreds of similar
off-the-books bases around the world. "The missing sites are a reflection of
the lack of transparency involved in the system of what I still estimate to
be around 800 U.S. bases outside the 50 states and Washington, D.C., that
have been encircling the globe since World War II," says Vine, who is also a
founding member of the recently established Overseas Base Realignment and
Closure Coalition, a group of military analysts from across the ideological
spectrum who advocate shrinking the U.S. military's global "footprint."
Such off-the-books bases are off the books for a reason. The Pentagon
doesn't want to talk about them. "I spoke to the press officer who is
responsible for the Base Structure Report and she has nothing to add and no
one available to discuss further at this time," Pentagon spokesperson
Lieutenant Colonel Michelle Baldanza told TomDispatch when asked about the
Defense Department's many mystery bases.
"Undocumented bases are immune to oversight by the public and often even
Congress," Vine explains. "Bases are a physical manifestation of U.S.
foreign and military policy, so off-the-books bases mean the military and
executive branch are deciding such policy without public debate, frequently
spending hundreds of millions or billions of dollars and potentially getting
the U.S. involved in wars and conflicts about which most of the country
knows nothing."
Where Are They?
The Overseas Base Realignment and Closure Coalition notes that the United
Statespossesses up to 95% of the world's foreign military bases, while
countries like France, Russia, and the United Kingdom have perhaps 10-20
foreign outposts each. China has just one.
The Department of Defense even boasts that its "locations" include 164
countries. Put another way, it has a military presence of some sort in
approximately 84% of the nations on this planet - or at least the DoD
briefly claimed this. After TomDispatch inquired about the number on a new
webpage designed to tell the Pentagon's "story" to the general public, it
was quickly changed. "We appreciate your diligence in getting to the bottom
of this," said Lieutenant Colonel Baldanza. "Thanks to your observations, we
have updated defense.gov to say 'more than 160.'"
The progressive changes made to the Defense Department's "Our Story" webpage
as a result of questions from TomDispatch.
What the Pentagon still doesn't say is how it defines a "location." The
number 164 does roughly track with the Department of Defense's current
manpower statistics, which show personnel deployments of varying sizes in
166 "overseas" locales - including some nations with token numbers of U.S.
military personnel and others, like Iraq and Syria, where the size of the
force was obviously far larger, even if unlisted at the time of the
assessment. (The Pentagon recently claimed that there were 5,200 troops in
Iraq and at least 2,000 troops in Syria although that number should now
markedly shrink.) The Defense Department's "overseas" tally, however, also
lists troops in U.S. territories like American Samoa, Puerto Rico, the U.S.
Virgin Islands, and Wake Island. Dozens of soldiers, according to the
Pentagon, are also deployed to the country of "Akrotiri" (which is actually
a village on the island of Santorini in Greece) and thousands more are based
in "unknown" locations.
In the latest report, the number of those "unknown" troops exceeds 44,000.
Official Defense Department manpower statistics show U.S. forces deployed to
the nation of "Akrotiri."
The annual cost of deploying U.S. military personnel overseas, as well as
maintaining and running those foreign bases, tops out at an estimated $150
billion annually, according to the Overseas Bases Realignment and Closure
Coalition. The price tag for the outposts alone adds up to about one-third
of that total. "U.S. bases abroad cost upwards of $50 billion per year to
build and maintain, which is money that could be used to address pressing
needs at home in education, health care, housing, and infrastructure," Vine
points out.
Perhaps you won't be surprised to learn that the Pentagon is also somewhat
fuzzy about just where its troops are stationed. The new Defense Department
website, for instance, offered a count of "4,800+ defense sites" around the
world. After TomDispatch inquired about this total and how it related to the
official count of 4,775 sites listed in the BSR, the website was changed to
read "approximately 4,800 Defense Sites."
"Thank you for pointing out the discrepancy. As we transition to the new
site, we are working on updating information," wrote Lieutenant Colonel
Baldanza. "Please refer to the Base Structure Report which has the latest
numbers."
In the most literal sense, the Base Structure Report does indeed have the
latest numbers - but their accuracy is another matter. "The number of bases
listed in the BSR has long born little relation to the actual number of U.S.
bases outside the United States," says Vine. "Many, many well-known and
secretive bases have long been left off the list."
One prime example is the constellation of outposts that the U.S. has built
across Africa. The official BSR inventory lists only a handful of sites
there - on Ascension Island as well as in Djibouti, Egypt, and Kenya. In
reality, though, there are many more outposts in many more African
countries.
A recent investigation by the Intercept, based on documents obtained from
U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) via the Freedom of Information Act, revealed a
network of 34 bases heavily clustered in the north and west of that
continent as well as in the Horn of Africa. AFRICOM's "strategic posture"
consists of larger "enduring" outposts, including two forward operating
sites (FOSes), 12 cooperative security locations (CSLs), and 20 more austere
sites known as contingency locations (CLs).
The Pentagon's official inventory does include the two FOSes: Ascension
Island and the crown jewel of Washington's African bases, Camp Lemonnier in
Djibouti, which expanded from 88 acres in the early 2000s to nearly 600
acres today. The Base Structure Report is, however, missing a CSL in that
same country, Chabelley Airfield, a lower-profile outpost located about 10
kilometers away that has served as a drone hub for operations in Africa and
the Middle East.
The official Pentagon tally also mentions a site that goes by the confusing
moniker of "NSA Bahrain-Kenya." AFRICOM had previously described it as a
collection of warehouses built in the 1980s at the airport and seaport of
Mombasa, Kenya, but it now appears on that command's 2018 list as a CSL.
Missing, however, is another Kenyan base, Camp Simba, mentioned in a 2013
internal Pentagon study of secret drone operations in Somalia and Yemen. At
least two manned surveillance aircraft were based there at the time. Simba,
a longtime Navy-run facility, is currently operated by the Air Force's 475th
Expeditionary Air Base Squadron, part of the 435th Air Expeditionary Wing.
Personnel from that same air wing can be found at yet another outpost that
doesn't appear in the Base Structure Report, this one on the opposite side
of the continent. The BSR states that it doesn't list specific information
on "non-U.S. locations" not at least 10 acres in size or worth at least $10
million. However, the base in question - Air Base 201 in Agadez, Niger -
already has a $100 million construction price tag, a sum soon to be eclipsed
by the cost of operating the facility: about $30 million a year. By 2024,
when the present 10-year agreement for use of the base ends, its
construction and operating costs will have reached about $280 million.
Also missing from the BSR are outposts in nearby Cameroon, including a
longtime base in Douala, a drone airfield in the remote town of Garoua, and
a facility known as Salak. That site, according to a 2017 investigation by
the Intercept, the research firm Forensic Architecture, and Amnesty
International, has been used by U.S. personnel and private contractors for
drone surveillance and training missions and by allied Cameroonian forces
for illegal imprisonment and torture.
According to Vine, keeping America's African bases secret is advantageous to
Washington. It protects allies on that continent from possible domestic
opposition to the presence of American troops, he points out, while helping
to ensure that there will be no domestic debate in the U.S. over such
spending and the military commitments involved. "It's important for U.S.
citizens to know where their troops are based in Africa and elsewhere around
the world," he told TomDispatch, "because that troop presence costs the U.S.
billions of dollars every year and because the U.S. is involved, or
potentially involved, in wars and conflicts that could spiral out of
control."
Those Missing Bases
Africa is hardly the only place where the Pentagon's official list doesn't
match up well with reality. For close to two decades, the Base Structure
Report has ignored bases of all sorts in America's active war zones. At the
height of the American occupation of Iraq, for instance, the United States
had 505 bases there, ranging from small outposts to mega-sized facilities.
None appeared on the Pentagon's official rolls.
In Afghanistan, the numbers were even higher. As TomDispatch reported in
2012, the U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) had about
550 bases in that country. If you had added ISAF checkpoints - small
baselets used to secure roads and villages - to the count of mega-bases,
forward operating bases, combat outposts, and patrol bases, the number
reached an astounding 750. And counting all foreign military installations
of every type - including logistical, administrative, and support facilities
- hiked ISAF Joint Command's official count to 1,500 sites. America's
significant share of them was, however, also mysteriously absent from the
Defense Department's official tally.
There are now far fewer such facilities in Afghanistan - and the numbers may
drop further in the months ahead as troop levels decrease. But the existence
of Camp Morehead, Forward Operating Base Fenty, Tarin Kowt Airfield, Camp
Dahlke West, and Bost Airfield, as well as Camp Shorab, a small installation
occupying what was once the site of much larger twin bases known as Camp
Leatherneck and Camp Bastion, is indisputable. Yet none of them has ever
appeared in the Base Structure Report.
Similarly, while there are no longer 500-plus U.S. bases in Iraq, in recent
years, as American troops returned to that country, some garrisons have
either been reconstituted or built from scratch. These include the Besmaya
Range Complex, Firebase Sakheem, Firebase Um Jorais, and Al Asad Air Base,
as well as Qayyarah Airfield West - a base 40 miles south of Mosul that's
better known as "Q-West." Again, you won't find any of them listed in the
Pentagon's official count.
These days, it's even difficult to obtain accurate manpower numbers for the
military personnel in America's war zones, let alone the number of bases in
each of them. As Vine explains, "The military keeps the figures secret to
some extent to hide the base presence from its adversaries. Because it is
probably not hard to spot these bases in places like Syria and Iraq,
however, the secrecy is mostly to prevent domestic debate about the money,
danger, and death involved, as well as to avoid diplomatic tensions and
international inquiries."
If stifling domestic debate through information control is the Pentagon's
aim, it's been doing a fine job for years of deflecting questions about its
global posture, or what the late TomDispatch regular Chalmers Johnson called
America's "empire of bases."
In mid-October, TomDispatch asked Heather Babb, another Pentagon
spokesperson, for details about the outposts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria
that were absent from the Base Structure Report, as well as about those
missing African bases. Among the other questions put to Babb: Could the
Pentagon offer a simple count - if not a list - of all its outposts? Did it
have a true count of overseas facilities, even if it hadn't been released to
the public - a list, that is, which actually did what the Base Structure
Report only purports to do? October and November passed without answers.
In December, in response to follow-up requests for information, Babb
responded in a fashion firmly in line with the Pentagon's well-worn policy
of keeping American taxpayers in the dark about the bases they pay for - no
matter the theoretical difficulty of denying the existence of outposts that
stretch from Agadez in Niger to Mosul in Iraq. "I have nothing to add," she
explained, "to the information and criteria that is included in the report."
President Trump's decision to withdraw American troops from Syria means that
the 2019 Base Structure Report will likely be the most accurate in years.
For the first time since 2015, the Pentagon's inventory of outposts will no
longer be missing the al-Tanf garrison (or then again, maybe it will). But
that still potentially leaves hundreds of off-the-books bases absent from
the official rolls. Consider it one outpost down and who knows how many to
go.
Nick Turse / TomDispatch
Reviewer
Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com, the co-founder of
Dispatch Books, and a fellow at the Nation Institute. An award-winning
journalist, his work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The.
Nick Turse
