Base Nation by David Vine is on BARD.
Miriam
Welcome to "Little America": Hub for the US Military's Global Drone War
Published on
Thursday, July 14, 2016
by
The Nation
Welcome to "Little America": Hub for the US Military's Global Drone War
Ramstein Air Base in southwest Germany "is a preparation center for the next
world war"
by
Norman Solomon
"Ramstein is absolutely essential to the US drone program," says Brandon
Bryant, a former Air Force sensor operator who participated in drone attacks
on Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia for five years while
stationed in New Mexico and Nevada. (Photo: Reuters)
The overseas hub for Americas war on terror is the massive Ramstein Air
Base in southwest Germany. Nearly ignored by US media, Ramstein serves
crucial functions for drone warfare and much more. Its the most important
Air Force base abroad, operating as a kind of grand central station for
airborne warwhether relaying video images of drone targets in Afghanistan
to remote pilots with trigger fingers in Nevada, or airlifting special-ops
units on missions to Africa, or transporting munitions for airstrikes in
Syria and Iraq. Soaking up billions of taxpayer dollars, Ramstein has
scarcely lacked for anything from the home country, other than scrutiny.
Known as Little America in this mainly rural corner of Germany, the area
now includes 57,000 US citizens clustered around Ramstein and a dozen
smaller bases. The Defense Department calls it the largest American
community outside of the United States. Ramstein serves as the biggest Air
Force cargo port beyond US borders, providing full spectrum airfield
operations along with world-class airlift and expeditionary combat
support. The base also touts superior services and exceptional quality
of life. To look at Ramstein and environs is to peer into a faraway mirror
for the United States; whats inside the frame is normality for endless war.
Ramsteins gigantic Exchange store (largest in the US military) is the
centerpiece for an oversize shopping mall, just like back home. A greeting
from the Holy Family Catholic Community at Ramstein tells newcomers: We
know that being in the military means having to endure frequent moves to
different assignments. This is part of the price we pay by serving our
country. Five American colleges have campuses on the base. Ellenmarie Zwank
Brown, who identifies herself as an Air Force wife and a physician, is
reassuring in a cheerful guidebook that she wrote for new arrivals: If you
are scared of giving up your American traditions, dont worry! The military
goes out of its way to give military members an American way of life while
living in Germany.
"We touch a good chunk of the world right from Ramstein. We think of it as a
power-projection platform."
Maj. Tony Wickman
That way of life is contoured around nonstop war. Ramstein is the
headquarters for the US Air Force in Europe, and the base is now pivotal for
using air power on other continents. We touch a good chunk of the world
right from Ramstein, a public-affairs officer, Maj. Tony Wickman, told me
during a recent tour of the base. We think of it as a power-projection
platform. The scope of that projection is vast, with areas of
responsibility that include Europe, Russia, and Africa104 countries in
all. And Ramstein is well-staffed to meet the challenge, with over 7,500
active duty Airmenmore than any other US military base in the world
except the Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio.
Serving the transport needs of war efforts in Iraq and Syria (countries hit
by 28,675 US bombs and missiles last year) as well as in many other nations,
Ramstein is a central pit stop for enormous cargo jets like the C-5 Galaxy
and C-17 Globemaster. The Ramstein base currently supports fifteen
different major combat operations, moving the daily supply chain and
conducting urgent airlifts. Last July, when Ankara gave Washington a green
light to use Turkeys Incirlik Air Base for launching airstrikes in Syria,
vital equipment quickly flew from Ramstein to Incirlik so F-16s could start
bombing.
But these days a lot of Ramsteins attention is focused southward. The base
maintains a fleet of fourteen newest-model C-130 turboprops, now coming in
mighty handy for secretive US military moves across much of Africa. With its
sleek digital avionics, the cockpit of a C-130J looked impressive. But more
notable was the planes spacious cargo bay, where a pilot explained that it
can carry up to 44,000 pounds of suppliesor as many as 92 Army Airborne
jumpers, who can each be saddled with enough weapons and gear to weigh in
at 400 pounds. From the air, troops or freighteven steamrollers, road
graders, and Humveesleave the planes hold with parachutes. Or the agile
plane can land on undeveloped air fields.
With Ramstein as its home, the C-130J is ideal for flying war matériel and
special-operations forces to remote terrain in northern and western Africa.
(The Pentagon describes it as a rugged combat transporter designed to take
off and land at austere fields.) In mid-2014, the itinerary of a single
trip got into a fleeting news story when a teenage stowaway was found dead
in a wheel well of a C-130J at Ramstein, after the plane returned from a
circuit to Tunisia, Mali, Senegal, and Chad. Stealthy intervention has
escalated widely in the two years since journalist Nick Turse found that the
US military was already averaging far more than a mission a day on the
continent, conducting operations with almost every African military force,
in almost every African country.
The officers I met at Ramstein in early spring often mentioned Africa. But
the base mission of power projection hardly stops there.
* * *
In the American foreign policy lexicon, peace has become implausible, a
faded memory, a mythic rationale for excelling at war. An airlift squadron
at the Ramstein Air Base, which proudly calls itself the Fighting Doves,
displays a logo of a muscular bird with dukes up. On lampposts in a town
near Ramsteins gates, I saw campaign posters for Germanys Left Party (Die
Linke) with a picture of a dove and a headline that could hardly have been
more out of sync with the base: Wie lange wollt lhr den Frieden noch
herbei-bomben? How much longer do you want to keep achieving peace by
bombing? Such questions lack relevance when war is perceived not as a means
to an end, but an end in itself.
More than ever, with relatively few US troops in combat and air war all the
rage, the latest military technology is the filter of the American warriors
experience. When Ramsteins 60,800-square-foot Air and Space Operations
Center opened in October 2011, the Air Force crowed that it comes with 40
communication systems, 553 workstations, 1,500 computers, 1,700 monitors,
22,000 connections, and enough fiber optics to stretch from here to the
Louvre in Paris. (Mona Lisa not included.) A news release focused on the
critical mission of monitoring the airspace above Europe and Africa and
controlling the skies from the Arctic Circle to the Cape of Needles. But
the Defense Department didnt mention that the new hyper-tech center would
be vital to the USAs drone war.
"All information and data go through Ramstein. Everything. For the whole
world."
Brandon Bryant, former drone operator
Ramstein receives visual images from drones via satellite, then relays the
images to sensor operators and pilots at computer terminals in the United
States. Ramstein is absolutely essential to the US drone program, says
Brandon Bryant, a former Air Force sensor operator who participated in drone
attacks on Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia for five years
while stationed in New Mexico and Nevada. All information and data go
through Ramstein. Everything. For the whole world.
Bryant and other sensor operators had Ramstein on speed dial: Before we
could establish a link from our ground-control station in the United States
to the drone, we literally would have to call Ramstein up and say Hey, can
you connect us to this satellite feed? We would just pick up the phone and
press the button and it automatically dials in to Ramstein. Bryant
concluded that the entire system for drone strikes was set up to take away
responsibility, so that no one has responsibility for what happens.
The US governments far-flung system for extrajudicial killing uses Ramstein
as a kind of digital switchboard in a process that fogs accountability and
often kills bystanders. A former Air Force drone technician, Cian
Westmoreland, told me that many of the technical people staffing Ramsteins
Air and Space Operations Center are apt to be none the wiser; they would
just know a signal is going through.
Westmoreland was stationed in Afghanistan at the Kandahar Air Field, where
he helped build a signal relay station that connected to Ramstein. He never
moved a joystick to maneuver a drone and never pushed a button to help fire
a missile. Yet, in 2016, Westmoreland speaks sadly of the commendations he
received for helping to kill more than 200 people with drone strikes. I did
my job, he said, and now I have to live with that.
The Air Force Distributed Common Ground System (AF DCGS), also referred to
as the AN/GSQ-272 SENTINEL weapon system. (US Air Force)
During his work on the drone program, Westmoreland developed a new kind of
understanding of what modern warfare actually is. Were moving towards more
network-centric warfare. So, orders [are] dealt out over a network, and
making systems more autonomous, putting less humans in the chain. And a lot
of the positions are going to be maintenance, theyre technician jobs, to
keep systems up and running.
Those systems strive to reduce the lag time from target zone to computer
screen in Nevada. The delay during satellite transmission (latency in tech
jargon) can last up to six seconds, depending on weather conditions and
other factors, but once the signal gets to Ramstein it reaches Nevada almost
instantly via fiber-optic cable. Permission to fire comes from an attack
controller who could be anywhere, as Bryant put it, just looking at the
same video feeds as us pilots and sensors. He just sits in front of a screen
too. As Andrew Cockburn wrote in his recent book Kill Chain, there is a
recurrent pattern in which people become transfixed by what is on the
screen, seeing what they want to see, especially when the screenwith a
resolution equal to the legal definition of blindness for driversis
representing people and events thousands of miles and several continents
away.
For all its ultra-tech importance, the Air and Space Operations Center at
Ramstein is just a steely link in a kill chain of command, while a kind of
assembly-line Taylorism keeps producing the drone war. I think thats part
of the strength of the secrecy of the program, Bryant said. Its
fragmented. Meanwhile, We were supposed to function and never ask
questions.
Worlds away, the carnage is often lethally haphazard. For example,
classified documents obtained by The Intercept shed light on a special ops
series of airstrikes from January 2012 to February 2013 in northeast
Afghanistan, code-named Operation Haymaker. The attacks killed more than 200
people, while only 35 were the intended targets. Such numbers may be
disturbing, yet they dont convey what actually happens in human terms.
Several years ago, Pakistani photographer Noor Behram described the
aftermath of a US drone attack: There are just pieces of flesh lying around
after a strike. You cant find bodies. So the locals pick up the flesh and
curse America. They say that America is killing us inside our own country,
inside our own homes, and only because we are Muslims.
The US drone war has long been unpopular in Germany, where two out of three
citizens oppose it.
Even without a missile strike, there are the traumatic effects of drones
hovering overhead. Former New York Times reporter David Rohde recalled the
sound during his captivity by the Taliban in 2009 in tribal areas of
Pakistan: The drones were terrifying. From the ground, it is impossible to
determine who or what they are tracking as they circle overhead. The buzz of
a distant propeller is a constant reminder of imminent death.
But such matters are as far removed from Little America in southwest Germany
as they are from Big America back home.
* * *
The American drone war has long been unpopular in Germany, where polling
indicates that two out of three citizens oppose it. So President Obama was
eager to offer assurances during a visit to Berlin three years ago,
declaring: We do not use Germany as a launching point for unmanned
drones
as part of our counterterrorism activities. But such statements miss
the point, intentionally, and obscure how much the drone war depends on
German hospitality.
Attorney Hans-Christian Ströbele, a prominent Green Party member of the
Bundestag, told The Nation that the targeted killings with drones are
illegal executions at least in countries which arent in war with Germany.
These illegal executions offend against human rights, international law and
the German Grundgesetz [Constitution]. If German official institutions
permit this and do not stop these actions, they become partly responsible.
"In my view, the drone war is a form of state terrorism."
Sahra Wagenknecht, co-chair, Left Party
With 10 percent of the Bundestags seats, the Greens have the same size bloc
as the other opposition party, the Left Party. To kill people with a
joystick from a safe position thousands of miles away is a disgusting and
inhumane form of terror, Sahra Wagenknecht, co-chair of the Left Party,
told me. A war is no video gameat least not for those who have not the
slightest chance to defend themselves
. These extrajudicial killings are war
crimes, and the German government should draw the consequences and close
down the air base in Ramstein
. In my view, the drone war is a form of state
terrorism, which is going to produce thousands of new terrorists.
A lawsuit filed last year in Germany focuses on a drone attack in eastern
Yemen on August 29, 2012, that killed two members of the Bin Ali Jaber
family, which had gathered in the village of Khashamir to celebrate a
wedding. Were it not for the help of Germany and Ramstein, men like my
brother-in-law and nephew might still be alive today, said Faisal bin Ali
Jaber, one of the surviving relatives behind the suit. It is quite simple:
Without Germany, US drones would not fly. But the German judiciary has
rebuffed such civil suitsmost recently in late April, when a court in
Cologne rejected pleas about a drone strike that killed two people in
Somalia, including a herdsman who was not targeted.
Chancellor Angela Merkel has played dumb about drone-related operations in
her country. The German government claims to know nothing at all,
Bundestag member Ströbele said. Either this is a lie, or the government
does not want to know. The general secretary of the Berlin-based European
Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, Wolfgang Kaleck, sums up the
German governments strategy as See nothing, hear nothing, say nothing. He
charges that Germany is making itself complicit in the deaths of civilians
as part of the US drone war.
After an uproar over US National Security Agency spying in Germany caused
the Bundestag to set up a special committee of inquiry two years ago, it
became clear that surveillance issues are intertwined with Ramsteins role
in a drone program that relies on cell-phone numbers to find targets. The
Green Partys representative on the eight-member committee, Konstantin von
Notz, sounded both pragmatic and idealistic when I interviewed him this
spring at a Berlin cafe. We assume that there is a close connection between
surveillance and Ramstein, he said, as data collected and shared by German
and US intelligence services already led to drone killings coordinated via
Ramstein.
Left Party co-chair Wagenknecht was emphatic about the BND, Germanys
intelligence agency. The BND delivers phone numbers of possible drone
targets to the NSA and other agencies, she told The Nation. The BND and
our foreign minister bear part of the blame. They do not only tolerate war
crimes, they assist them.
The United States now has 174 military bases operating inside Germany, more
than in any other country. (Japan is second, with 113.) The military
presence casts a shadow over German democracy, says historian Josef
Foschepoth, a professor at the University of Freiburg. As long as there are
Allied troops or military bases and facilities on German soil, he wrote in
a 2014 article, there will be Allied surveillance measures carried out on
and from German soil, which means, in particular, American surveillance.
For surveillance and an array of other spooky purposes, the US government
created what would become the BND at the end of World War II. We grew it
carefully, a retired senior Defense Intelligence Agency official, W.
Patrick Lang, said in an interview. Theyve always cooperated with us,
completely and totally. Intelligence ties between the two governments
remain tightly knotted. When it comes to the secret services, Professor
Foschepoth told a public forum in Berlin last summer, there are some old
legal foundations where the federal [German] government follows the American
interests more than the interests of their own citizens.
Extending such talk to depict the current US military presence as bad for
democracy in Germany is a third rail in German politics. When Pentagon
Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg quoted from Foschepoths article at the
Berlin forumand pointedly asked, Why are American troops here still? Why
the bases?the panelist from the Green Party, von Notz, vehemently objected
to going there. I wouldnt open the discussion or have in the background
that this is still an occupation problem or something, he said. Its not a
problem of troops somewhereits a problem of lacking democracy, state of
law, controlling our secret services today.
Nine months later, talking with him at Café Einstein on Berlins
Kurfürstenstrasse, I asked von Notz why hed pushed back so heatedly against
the idea that US military bases are constraining German democracy. Germany
needs to take full responsibility of what is going on on its territory, he
responded. The German government can no longer hide behind a US-German
relation allegedly characterized by the postWorld War II occupation.
Germany strictly has to ensure that the US intelligence services comply with
the law without ignoring the illegal actions of its own Federal Intelligence
Service [the BND].
* * *
Whatever the state of its democracy, Germany is continuing to enable
Americas furtive warfare in Africa. Ramsteins many roles include serving
as home to US Air Forces Africa, where a press officer gave me a handout
describing the continent as key to addressing transnational violent
extremist threats. The military orders come from the United States Africa
Command (AFRICOM) headquarters in Stuttgart, a two-hour drive from Ramstein.
At first, AFRICOMwhich calls itself a full-spectrum combatant commandwas
to be a short-term guest in southwest Germany, some 800 miles from Africas
closest shores. A State Department cable, marked Secret and dated August
1, 2008, said that no decision has been made on a permanent AFRICOM
headquarters location. Two months later, just as AFRICOM was going into
full-fledged operation, a confidential cable from the US Embassy in Berlin
reported that the German government strongly supported the US decision to
temporarily base AFRICOM in Germany.
Yet at the outset, as US diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks show,
tensions existed with the host country. Germany balked at extending blanket
legal immunity under the NATO Status of Forces Agreement to every American
civilian employee at the new AFRICOM facility, and the dispute applied to
all US military commands in Germany. While the two governments negotiated
behind the scenes into late 2008 (one confidential cable from the US Embassy
in Berlin complained about the German Foreign Offices unhelpful
positions), AFRICOM made itself at home in Stuttgart.
Nearly eight years later, the temporary headquarters for AFRICOM shows no
sign of budging. AFRICOM will stay permanent in Stuttgart if Germany wont
protest against it, said the Green Partys Ströbele, who has been on the
Bundestags intelligence committee for almost twenty years. He told The
Nation: We do not know enough about the AFRICOM facility. Nevertheless
there is the assumption that this facility is used to organize and to lead
US combat missions in Africa. Because of this reason no country in Africa
wanted to have this facility. Whatever political hazards might lurk for
AFRICOM in Germany, the US government finds those risks preferable to
headquartering its Africa Command in Africa. And there are more and more
interventions to sweep under rugs.
"A network of American drone outposts" now "stretches across east and west
Africa."
Center for the Study of the Drone
A network of American drone outposts now stretches across east and west
Africa, reports the Center for the Study of the Drone, which is based at
Bard College. One of the new locations is northern Cameroon, where a base
for Gray Eagle drones (capable of dropping bombs and launching Hellfire
missiles) recently went into full operation, accompanied by 300 US troops,
including special-operations forces. In late winter The New York Times
reported that the United States is about to break ground on a new $50
million drone base in Agadez, Niger, that will allow Reaper surveillance
aircraft to fly hundreds of miles closer to southern Libya. In March the
Pentagon triumphantly announced that drones teamed up with manned jets to
kill more than 150 terrorist fighters at an al-Shabab training camp in
Somalia.
As drone attacks have widened, theyve become a growing provocation to a
vocal minority of German lawmakers. We deeply regret Germanys loss of
sovereignty, but the government keeps on acting cowardly, said Sevim
Dagdelen, the Left Partys leader on foreign affairs. Another member of the
party in the Bundestag, Andrej Hunko, told me that AFRICOM in Stuttgart and
the Air Operation Center in Ramstein are very important hubs for drone
strikes led by the US militarybut it is very difficult for German
lawmakers to control this issue.
Hunko and colleagues filed more than a dozen requests for explanation of
drone-related policy from the German government, but he says the answers
were always dodgy. The Merkel government deflects formal queries about
Ramstein and AFRICOM by claiming to have no reliable informationa stance
abetted by the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), now in its third
year of serving as a big junior partner to Merkels right-leaning Christian
Democratic Union. While Left Party legislators and some in the Green Party
denounce the stonewalling, they have scant leverage; the two parties
combined are just one-fifth of the Bundestag.
Merkels stone wall is strengthened by the fact that some Green Party
leaders have no problem with US bases. (Citing the very left-wing pasts of
several key figures in todays party, one peace activist near Ramstein
tartly remarked that the Green Party changed from red to green to olive
green.) In the affluent state of Baden-Württemberg, home to AFRICOM
headquarters, the states Green minister-president Winfried Kretschmann is a
military booster. Likewise, the drone program has nothing to fear from Fritz
Kuhn, mayor of Stuttgart, the largest city in Germany with a Green mayor.
Kuhn declined to answer any of the questions that I submitted in writing
about his views on AFRICOM and its operations in his city. Mayor Kuhn wants
to waive the interview, a spokesman said.
More than publicly acknowledged, the economic benefits of hosting AFRICOMs
headquarters were major factors in the German governments decision to allow
it to open in the first place, a member of the Bundestag told me. With the
US military footprint shrinking in the country, Germanys political
establishment saw the chance to welcome AFRICOM as very good news. Today,
AFRICOM says that 1,500 US military and civilian personnel are stationed at
its Kelley Barracks command center in Stuttgart.
* * *
Ramstein is a preparation center for the next world war, Wolfgang Jung
said as we neared the base. War has overshadowed his entire life. Jung was
born in 1938, and his childhood memories are vivid with fear and the
destruction that came with bombs (from both sides). He lost two schoolmates.
His father ended up on the Russian front and died in a POW camp just after
the wars end. As a teenager, Jung saw Ramstein open, and in the decades
since then he has become a dogged researcher. The base is not just about
drones, he stressed. Far from it.
The entire region is brandishing huge arsenals. Ten miles from Ramstein, the
Miesau Army Depot is the US militarys biggest storage area for ammunition
outside the United States. In late February the depot received what Stars
and Stripes reported as the largest Europe-bound ammo shipment in 10
yearsmore than 5,000 tons of US Army ammunition that arrived while the
Pentagon was ramping up missions on the Continent, particularly along
NATOs eastern flank, in response to concerns about a more aggressive
Russia.
June 11, 2016 protest at Ramstein Air Base. (Courtesy: Activism.org)
In many ways, this heavily militarized stretch of Germany is now a
ground-zero powder keg. The consolidated Allied Air Command, responsible
for all Air and Space matters within NATO, has been at the Ramstein base
since 2013. The command includes a center for missile defense, the nexus of
the latest US scenario for a missile shieldwhich the Kremlin views as a
threatening system that would make a first strike against Russia more
tempting and more likely. Interviewed by the German newspaper Bild in
January, Russian President Vladimir Putin said he saw striving for an
absolute triumph in the American missile defense plans.
Such matters preoccupy Jung and his wife Felicitas Strieffler, also a
lifelong resident of the area. She spoke of Ramstein as a grave menace to
the world and a blight on the region. Locals dread sunny days, she said,
because roaring warplanes take to cloudless skies for training maneuvers. On
a hillside, after climbing a 60-foot towera red sandstone monument built in
1900 to honor Bismarckwe looked out over a panorama dominated by Ramsteins
runways, hangars, and aircraft. Strieffler talked about a dream she keeps
having: The base will be closed and, after the chemical pollutants are
removed, it will become a lake where people can go boating and enjoy the
beauties of nature.
Such hopes might seem unrealistic, but a growing number of activists in
Germany are working to end Ramsteins drone role and eventually close the
base. On June 11, several thousand protesters gathered in the rain to form a
human chain that stretched for more than five miles near the Ramstein
perimeter. At the Stopp Ramstein Kampagne office in Berlin, a 37-year-old
former history student, Pascal Luig, exuded commitment and calm as he told
me that the goal should be the closing of the whole air base. He added,
Without Ramstein, no [US] war in the Middle East would be possible. With
no hope of persuading the US government to shut down Ramstein and its other
bases in his country, Luig wants a movement strong enough to compel the
German government to evict them.
* * *
The Pentagon top brass cant be happy about the publicity in Germany
connecting Ramstein to the drone war. They like to keep these things low
key, just because there are points of vulnerability, former drone
technician Cian Westmoreland said, noting that the military is all about
redundancies. In fact, even while Ramsteins Air and Space Operations
Center was going into action nearly five years ago, a similar facility was
on the drawing boards for the Naval Air Station Sigonella in Sicily.
According to some sources, the ultimate goal is to replace Ramstein with
Sigonella as the main site for relay of drone signals. (Replying to my
inquiry, an Air Force spokesman at Ramstein, Maj. Frank Hartnett, wrote in
an e-mail: There are currently no plans to relocate the centers
activities. He did not respond to follow-up questions.) An investigative
journalist working for the Italian newsmagazine LEspresso, Stefania
Maurizi, told me in mid-spring that progress toward such a center at
Sigonella remained at a snails pace. But on June 21, she reported that an
Italian engineering firm had just won a contract for a building similar to
Ramsteins relay center. Construction at Sigonella could be completed by
2018.
As part of the militarization process in Italythe Pentagon has turned the
Italian peninsula into a launching pad for future wars in Africa, the Middle
East and beyond, author David Vine observesSigonella already has some
infrastructure for satellite communication. Another asset is that Italy is
even more deferential to the American military than Germany is. Italy has
become the launching pad for the US wars, and in particular for the drone
wars, without any public debate, Maurizi says. Our responsibilities are
huge and the Italian public is kept in the dark. And when the Pentagon
decides to build big in Italy, it doesnt hurt the momentum thatas Vine
documents in his 2015 book Base Nationthe lucrative contracts are routinely
signed with Italian construction firms controlled by the Mafia.
In any event, no one can doubt that the Defense Department has become
utterly enthralled with drones, officially dubbed Remotely Piloted Aircraft.
Our RPA enterprise is now flying combat missions around the globe, the
general running the Air Combat Command, Herbert Carlisle, testified to a
Senate subcommittee in March. There was no mistaking his zeal to further
expand drone missions, mangled syntax notwithstanding: They are arming
decision makers with intelligence, our warfighters with targets, and our
enemies with fear, anxiety and ultimately their timely end.
The "war on terror" is a gravy train for those who spin through the
revolving doors of the military-industrial complex.
General Carlisle said the US military is now flying five times as many drone
sorties as a decade agoa boost that exemplifies the furious pace at which
we have expanded our operations and enterprise. But he warned that an
insatiable demand for RPA forces has stretched the community thin,
especially our Airmen performing the mission. Today, almost 8,000 Air Force
personnel are solely dedicated to Predator and Reaper drone missions. Of
the 15 bases with RPA units, Carlisle said, 13 of them have a combat
mission. This mission is of such value that we plan on consistent increases
in aircraft, personnel and results. Several weeks after his testimony,
Reutersciting previously unreported US Air Force datarevealed that
drones fired more weapons than conventional warplanes for the first time in
Afghanistan last year and the ratio is rising.
Some in-house government appraisals have concluded that the drone war fails
because it creates more enemies than it kills. But the war on terror is
anything but a failure for many corporations or the individuals who spin
through the revolving doors of the military-industrial complex. As a
critical node in the Pentagons global intelligence, surveillance and
reconnaissance (ISR) system, Ramstein is integral to ongoing boondoggles
for contractors like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Booz Allen
Hamilton, and General Dynamics. The bottomless pit for taxpayers is a
bottomless well for firms catering to the Air Force, with its jargon-larded
pursuit of a distributed ISR operation capable of providing world-wide,
near-real-time simultaneous intelligence to multiple theaters of operation
through
robust reachback communications architectures.
Looking back at the milieu of his work in the drone program, Westmoreland
has concluded that its more or less a for-profit venture. When you get out
of the military, you expect to get a job in the defense sector, an executive
position. And really its about racking up as many awards and decorations as
you possibly can.
At the top ranks, Westmoreland sees a conflict of interest: They have an
incentive to keep wars going. For the militarys leadership, the available
dividends are quite large. For instance, former NSA and CIA director Gen.
Michael Haydenan outspoken advocate of the drone programreceived $240,125
last year as a member of the board at Motorola Solutions. That company has
an investment in CyPhy Works, a major developer of drones.
Endless war propels an endless gravy train.
* * *
Like the other drone whistleblowers interviewed for this article, former
tech sergeant Lisa Ling was careful not to reveal any classified
information. But when we met at a coffee shop in California, what she said
at the outset could be heard as subversive of the US drone program: I would
like to see humanity brought into the political discourse. Her two decades
in the military included several years of work on assimilating Air National
Guard personnel into the drone program. Now she expresses remorse for taking
part in a program where no one person has responsibility.
The new documentary film National Bird includes these words from Ling: We
are in the United States of America and we are participating in an overseas
war, a war overseas, and we have no connection to it other than wires and
keyboards. Now, if that doesnt scare the crap out of you, it does out of
me. Because if thats the only connection, why stop?
After leaving the Air Force, Ling went on a humanitarian mission to
Afghanistan, planting trees and distributing seeds to people shed
previously seen only as indistinct pixels. The drone war haunts her. Ling
asks how we would feel if armed drones kept hovering in the sky above our
own communities, positioned to kill at any moment.
In the Little America where the Ramstein Air Base is the crown military
jewel, such questions go unasked. For that matter, we rarely hear them in
Big America. Yet those questions must be asked, or the forever war will be.
The Whistleblower & Source Protection Program at ExposeFacts provides legal
representation for the former drone operators quoted in this article.
This article was originally published by The Nation.
© 2015 The Nation
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Welcome to "Little America": Hub for the US Military's Global Drone War
Published on
Thursday, July 14, 2016
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The Nation
Welcome to "Little America": Hub for the US Military's Global Drone War
Ramstein Air Base in southwest Germany "is a preparation center for the next
world war"
by
Norman Solomon
9 Comments
"Ramstein is absolutely essential to the US drone program," says
Brandon Bryant, a former Air Force sensor operator who participated in drone
attacks on Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia for five years
while stationed in New Mexico and Nevada. (Photo: Reuters)
The overseas hub for Americas war on terror is the massive
Ramstein Air Base in southwest Germany. Nearly ignored by US media, Ramstein
serves crucial functions for drone warfare and much more. Its the most
important Air Force base abroad, operating as a kind of grand central
station for airborne warwhether relaying video images of drone targets in
Afghanistan to remote pilots with trigger fingers in Nevada, or airlifting
special-ops units on missions to Africa, or transporting munitions for
airstrikes in Syria and Iraq. Soaking up billions of taxpayer dollars,
Ramstein has scarcely lacked for anything from the home country, other than
scrutiny.
Known as Little America in this mainly rural corner of Germany,
the area now includes 57,000 US citizens clustered around Ramstein and a
dozen smaller bases. The Defense Department calls it the largest American
community outside of the United States. Ramstein serves as the biggest Air
Force cargo port beyond US borders, providing full spectrum airfield
operations along with world-class airlift and expeditionary combat
support. The base also touts superior services and exceptional quality
of life. To look at Ramstein and environs is to peer into a faraway mirror
for the United States; whats inside the frame is normality for endless war.
Ramsteins gigantic Exchange store (largest in the US military) is
the centerpiece for an oversize shopping mall, just like back home. A
greeting from the Holy Family Catholic Community at Ramstein tells
newcomers: We know that being in the military means having to endure
frequent moves to different assignments. This is part of the price we pay by
serving our country. Five American colleges have campuses on the base.
Ellenmarie Zwank Brown, who identifies herself as an Air Force wife and a
physician, is reassuring in a cheerful guidebook that she wrote for new
arrivals: If you are scared of giving up your American traditions, dont
worry! The military goes out of its way to give military members an American
way of life while living in Germany.
"We touch a good chunk of the world right from Ramstein. We think of
it as a power-projection platform."
Maj. Tony Wickman
That way of life is contoured around nonstop war. Ramstein is the
headquarters for the US Air Force in Europe, and the base is now pivotal for
using air power on other continents. We touch a good chunk of the world
right from Ramstein, a public-affairs officer, Maj. Tony Wickman, told me
during a recent tour of the base. We think of it as a power-projection
platform. The scope of that projection is vast, with areas of
responsibility that include Europe, Russia, and Africa104 countries in
all. And Ramstein is well-staffed to meet the challenge, with over 7,500
active duty Airmenmore than any other US military base in the world
except the Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio.
Serving the transport needs of war efforts in Iraq and Syria (countries hit
by 28,675 US bombs and missiles last year) as well as in many other nations,
Ramstein is a central pit stop for enormous cargo jets like the C-5 Galaxy
and C-17 Globemaster. The Ramstein base currently supports fifteen
different major combat operations, moving the daily supply chain and
conducting urgent airlifts. Last July, when Ankara gave Washington a green
light to use Turkeys Incirlik Air Base for launching airstrikes in Syria,
vital equipment quickly flew from Ramstein to Incirlik so F-16s could start
bombing.
But these days a lot of Ramsteins attention is focused southward. The base
maintains a fleet of fourteen newest-model C-130 turboprops, now coming in
mighty handy for secretive US military moves across much of Africa. With its
sleek digital avionics, the cockpit of a C-130J looked impressive. But more
notable was the planes spacious cargo bay, where a pilot explained that it
can carry up to 44,000 pounds of suppliesor as many as 92 Army Airborne
jumpers, who can each be saddled with enough weapons and gear to weigh in
at 400 pounds. From the air, troops or freighteven steamrollers, road
graders, and Humveesleave the planes hold with parachutes. Or the agile
plane can land on undeveloped air fields.
With Ramstein as its home, the C-130J is ideal for flying war matériel and
special-operations forces to remote terrain in northern and western Africa.
(The Pentagon describes it as a rugged combat transporter designed to take
off and land at austere fields.) In mid-2014, the itinerary of a single
trip got into a fleeting news story when a teenage stowaway was found dead
in a wheel well of a C-130J at Ramstein, after the plane returned from a
circuit to Tunisia, Mali, Senegal, and Chad. Stealthy intervention has
escalated widely in the two years since journalist Nick Turse found that the
US military was already averaging far more than a mission a day on the
continent, conducting operations with almost every African military force,
in almost every African country.
The officers I met at Ramstein in early spring often mentioned Africa. But
the base mission of power projection hardly stops there.
* * *
In the American foreign policy lexicon, peace has become implausible, a
faded memory, a mythic rationale for excelling at war. An airlift squadron
at the Ramstein Air Base, which proudly calls itself the Fighting Doves,
displays a logo of a muscular bird with dukes up. On lampposts in a town
near Ramsteins gates, I saw campaign posters for Germanys Left Party (Die
Linke) with a picture of a dove and a headline that could hardly have been
more out of sync with the base: Wie lange wollt lhr den Frieden noch
herbei-bomben? How much longer do you want to keep achieving peace by
bombing? Such questions lack relevance when war is perceived not as a means
to an end, but an end in itself.
More than ever, with relatively few US troops in combat and air war all the
rage, the latest military technology is the filter of the American warriors
experience. When Ramsteins 60,800-square-foot Air and Space Operations
Center opened in October 2011, the Air Force crowed that it comes with 40
communication systems, 553 workstations, 1,500 computers, 1,700 monitors,
22,000 connections, and enough fiber optics to stretch from here to the
Louvre in Paris. (Mona Lisa not included.) A news release focused on the
critical mission of monitoring the airspace above Europe and Africa and
controlling the skies from the Arctic Circle to the Cape of Needles. But
the Defense Department didnt mention that the new hyper-tech center would
be vital to the USAs drone war.
"All information and data go through Ramstein. Everything. For the whole
world."
Brandon Bryant, former drone operator
Ramstein receives visual images from drones via satellite, then relays the
images to sensor operators and pilots at computer terminals in the United
States. Ramstein is absolutely essential to the US drone program, says
Brandon Bryant, a former Air Force sensor operator who participated in drone
attacks on Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia for five years
while stationed in New Mexico and Nevada. All information and data go
through Ramstein. Everything. For the whole world.
Bryant and other sensor operators had Ramstein on speed dial: Before we
could establish a link from our ground-control station in the United States
to the drone, we literally would have to call Ramstein up and say Hey, can
you connect us to this satellite feed? We would just pick up the phone and
press the button and it automatically dials in to Ramstein. Bryant
concluded that the entire system for drone strikes was set up to take away
responsibility, so that no one has responsibility for what happens.
The US governments far-flung system for extrajudicial killing uses Ramstein
as a kind of digital switchboard in a process that fogs accountability and
often kills bystanders. A former Air Force drone technician, Cian
Westmoreland, told me that many of the technical people staffing Ramsteins
Air and Space Operations Center are apt to be none the wiser; they would
just know a signal is going through.
Westmoreland was stationed in Afghanistan at the Kandahar Air Field, where
he helped build a signal relay station that connected to Ramstein. He never
moved a joystick to maneuver a drone and never pushed a button to help fire
a missile. Yet, in 2016, Westmoreland speaks sadly of the commendations he
received for helping to kill more than 200 people with drone strikes. I did
my job, he said, and now I have to live with that.
https://www.thenation.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/rammstein_airbase_inter
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The Air Force Distributed Common Ground System (AF DCGS), also referred to
as the AN/GSQ-272 SENTINEL weapon system. (US Air Force)
During his work on the drone program, Westmoreland developed a new kind of
understanding of what modern warfare actually is. Were moving towards more
network-centric warfare. So, orders [are] dealt out over a network, and
making systems more autonomous, putting less humans in the chain. And a lot
of the positions are going to be maintenance, theyre technician jobs, to
keep systems up and running.
Those systems strive to reduce the lag time from target zone to computer
screen in Nevada. The delay during satellite transmission (latency in tech
jargon) can last up to six seconds, depending on weather conditions and
other factors, but once the signal gets to Ramstein it reaches Nevada almost
instantly via fiber-optic cable. Permission to fire comes from an attack
controller who could be anywhere, as Bryant put it, just looking at the
same video feeds as us pilots and sensors. He just sits in front of a screen
too. As Andrew Cockburn wrote in his recent book Kill Chain, there is a
recurrent pattern in which people become transfixed by what is on the
screen, seeing what they want to see, especially when the screenwith a
resolution equal to the legal definition of blindness for driversis
representing people and events thousands of miles and several continents
away.
For all its ultra-tech importance, the Air and Space Operations Center at
Ramstein is just a steely link in a kill chain of command, while a kind of
assembly-line Taylorism keeps producing the drone war. I think thats part
of the strength of the secrecy of the program, Bryant said. Its
fragmented. Meanwhile, We were supposed to function and never ask
questions.
Worlds away, the carnage is often lethally haphazard. For example,
classified documents obtained by The Intercept shed light on a special ops
series of airstrikes from January 2012 to February 2013 in northeast
Afghanistan, code-named Operation Haymaker. The attacks killed more than 200
people, while only 35 were the intended targets. Such numbers may be
disturbing, yet they dont convey what actually happens in human terms.
Several years ago, Pakistani photographer Noor Behram described the
aftermath of a US drone attack: There are just pieces of flesh lying around
after a strike. You cant find bodies. So the locals pick up the flesh and
curse America. They say that America is killing us inside our own country,
inside our own homes, and only because we are Muslims.
The US drone war has long been unpopular in Germany, where two out of three
citizens oppose it.
Even without a missile strike, there are the traumatic effects of drones
hovering overhead. Former New York Times reporter David Rohde recalled the
sound during his captivity by the Taliban in 2009 in tribal areas of
Pakistan: The drones were terrifying. From the ground, it is impossible to
determine who or what they are tracking as they circle overhead. The buzz of
a distant propeller is a constant reminder of imminent death.
But such matters are as far removed from Little America in southwest Germany
as they are from Big America back home.
* * *
The American drone war has long been unpopular in Germany, where polling
indicates that two out of three citizens oppose it. So President Obama was
eager to offer assurances during a visit to Berlin three years ago,
declaring: We do not use Germany as a launching point for unmanned
drones
as part of our counterterrorism activities. But such statements miss
the point, intentionally, and obscure how much the drone war depends on
German hospitality.
Attorney Hans-Christian Ströbele, a prominent Green Party member of the
Bundestag, told The Nation that the targeted killings with drones are
illegal executions at least in countries which arent in war with Germany.
These illegal executions offend against human rights, international law and
the German Grundgesetz [Constitution]. If German official institutions
permit this and do not stop these actions, they become partly responsible.
"In my view, the drone war is a form of state terrorism."
Sahra Wagenknecht, co-chair, Left Party
With 10 percent of the Bundestags seats, the Greens have the same size bloc
as the other opposition party, the Left Party. To kill people with a
joystick from a safe position thousands of miles away is a disgusting and
inhumane form of terror, Sahra Wagenknecht, co-chair of the Left Party,
told me. A war is no video gameat least not for those who have not the
slightest chance to defend themselves
. These extrajudicial killings are war
crimes, and the German government should draw the consequences and close
down the air base in Ramstein
. In my view, the drone war is a form of state
terrorism, which is going to produce thousands of new terrorists.
A lawsuit filed last year in Germany focuses on a drone attack in eastern
Yemen on August 29, 2012, that killed two members of the Bin Ali Jaber
family, which had gathered in the village of Khashamir to celebrate a
wedding. Were it not for the help of Germany and Ramstein, men like my
brother-in-law and nephew might still be alive today, said Faisal bin Ali
Jaber, one of the surviving relatives behind the suit. It is quite simple:
Without Germany, US drones would not fly. But the German judiciary has
rebuffed such civil suitsmost recently in late April, when a court in
Cologne rejected pleas about a drone strike that killed two people in
Somalia, including a herdsman who was not targeted.
Chancellor Angela Merkel has played dumb about drone-related operations in
her country. The German government claims to know nothing at all,
Bundestag member Ströbele said. Either this is a lie, or the government
does not want to know. The general secretary of the Berlin-based European
Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, Wolfgang Kaleck, sums up the
German governments strategy as See nothing, hear nothing, say nothing. He
charges that Germany is making itself complicit in the deaths of civilians
as part of the US drone war.
After an uproar over US National Security Agency spying in Germany caused
the Bundestag to set up a special committee of inquiry two years ago, it
became clear that surveillance issues are intertwined with Ramsteins role
in a drone program that relies on cell-phone numbers to find targets. The
Green Partys representative on the eight-member committee, Konstantin von
Notz, sounded both pragmatic and idealistic when I interviewed him this
spring at a Berlin cafe. We assume that there is a close connection between
surveillance and Ramstein, he said, as data collected and shared by German
and US intelligence services already led to drone killings coordinated via
Ramstein.
Left Party co-chair Wagenknecht was emphatic about the BND, Germanys
intelligence agency. The BND delivers phone numbers of possible drone
targets to the NSA and other agencies, she told The Nation. The BND and
our foreign minister bear part of the blame. They do not only tolerate war
crimes, they assist them.
The United States now has 174 military bases operating inside Germany, more
than in any other country. (Japan is second, with 113.) The military
presence casts a shadow over German democracy, says historian Josef
Foschepoth, a professor at the University of Freiburg. As long as there are
Allied troops or military bases and facilities on German soil, he wrote in
a 2014 article, there will be Allied surveillance measures carried out on
and from German soil, which means, in particular, American surveillance.
For surveillance and an array of other spooky purposes, the US government
created what would become the BND at the end of World War II. We grew it
carefully, a retired senior Defense Intelligence Agency official, W.
Patrick Lang, said in an interview. Theyve always cooperated with us,
completely and totally. Intelligence ties between the two governments
remain tightly knotted. When it comes to the secret services, Professor
Foschepoth told a public forum in Berlin last summer, there are some old
legal foundations where the federal [German] government follows the American
interests more than the interests of their own citizens.
Extending such talk to depict the current US military presence as bad for
democracy in Germany is a third rail in German politics. When Pentagon
Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg quoted from Foschepoths article at the
Berlin forumand pointedly asked, Why are American troops here still? Why
the bases?the panelist from the Green Party, von Notz, vehemently objected
to going there. I wouldnt open the discussion or have in the background
that this is still an occupation problem or something, he said. Its not a
problem of troops somewhereits a problem of lacking democracy, state of
law, controlling our secret services today.
Nine months later, talking with him at Café Einstein on Berlins
Kurfürstenstrasse, I asked von Notz why hed pushed back so heatedly against
the idea that US military bases are constraining German democracy. Germany
needs to take full responsibility of what is going on on its territory, he
responded. The German government can no longer hide behind a US-German
relation allegedly characterized by the postWorld War II occupation.
Germany strictly has to ensure that the US intelligence services comply with
the law without ignoring the illegal actions of its own Federal Intelligence
Service [the BND].
* * *
Whatever the state of its democracy, Germany is continuing to enable
Americas furtive warfare in Africa. Ramsteins many roles include serving
as home to US Air Forces Africa, where a press officer gave me a handout
describing the continent as key to addressing transnational violent
extremist threats. The military orders come from the United States Africa
Command (AFRICOM) headquarters in Stuttgart, a two-hour drive from Ramstein.
At first, AFRICOMwhich calls itself a full-spectrum combatant commandwas
to be a short-term guest in southwest Germany, some 800 miles from Africas
closest shores. A State Department cable, marked Secret and dated August
1, 2008, said that no decision has been made on a permanent AFRICOM
headquarters location. Two months later, just as AFRICOM was going into
full-fledged operation, a confidential cable from the US Embassy in Berlin
reported that the German government strongly supported the US decision to
temporarily base AFRICOM in Germany.
Yet at the outset, as US diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks show,
tensions existed with the host country. Germany balked at extending blanket
legal immunity under the NATO Status of Forces Agreement to every American
civilian employee at the new AFRICOM facility, and the dispute applied to
all US military commands in Germany. While the two governments negotiated
behind the scenes into late 2008 (one confidential cable from the US Embassy
in Berlin complained about the German Foreign Offices unhelpful
positions), AFRICOM made itself at home in Stuttgart.
Nearly eight years later, the temporary headquarters for AFRICOM shows no
sign of budging. AFRICOM will stay permanent in Stuttgart if Germany wont
protest against it, said the Green Partys Ströbele, who has been on the
Bundestags intelligence committee for almost twenty years. He told The
Nation: We do not know enough about the AFRICOM facility. Nevertheless
there is the assumption that this facility is used to organize and to lead
US combat missions in Africa. Because of this reason no country in Africa
wanted to have this facility. Whatever political hazards might lurk for
AFRICOM in Germany, the US government finds those risks preferable to
headquartering its Africa Command in Africa. And there are more and more
interventions to sweep under rugs.
"A network of American drone outposts" now "stretches across east and west
Africa."
Center for the Study of the Drone
A network of American drone outposts now stretches across east and west
Africa, reports the Center for the Study of the Drone, which is based at
Bard College. One of the new locations is northern Cameroon, where a base
for Gray Eagle drones (capable of dropping bombs and launching Hellfire
missiles) recently went into full operation, accompanied by 300 US troops,
including special-operations forces. In late winter The New York Times
reported that the United States is about to break ground on a new $50
million drone base in Agadez, Niger, that will allow Reaper surveillance
aircraft to fly hundreds of miles closer to southern Libya. In March the
Pentagon triumphantly announced that drones teamed up with manned jets to
kill more than 150 terrorist fighters at an al-Shabab training camp in
Somalia.
As drone attacks have widened, theyve become a growing provocation to a
vocal minority of German lawmakers. We deeply regret Germanys loss of
sovereignty, but the government keeps on acting cowardly, said Sevim
Dagdelen, the Left Partys leader on foreign affairs. Another member of the
party in the Bundestag, Andrej Hunko, told me that AFRICOM in Stuttgart and
the Air Operation Center in Ramstein are very important hubs for drone
strikes led by the US militarybut it is very difficult for German
lawmakers to control this issue.
Hunko and colleagues filed more than a dozen requests for explanation of
drone-related policy from the German government, but he says the answers
were always dodgy. The Merkel government deflects formal queries about
Ramstein and AFRICOM by claiming to have no reliable informationa stance
abetted by the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), now in its third
year of serving as a big junior partner to Merkels right-leaning Christian
Democratic Union. While Left Party legislators and some in the Green Party
denounce the stonewalling, they have scant leverage; the two parties
combined are just one-fifth of the Bundestag.
Merkels stone wall is strengthened by the fact that some Green Party
leaders have no problem with US bases. (Citing the very left-wing pasts of
several key figures in todays party, one peace activist near Ramstein
tartly remarked that the Green Party changed from red to green to olive
green.) In the affluent state of Baden-Württemberg, home to AFRICOM
headquarters, the states Green minister-president Winfried Kretschmann is a
military booster. Likewise, the drone program has nothing to fear from Fritz
Kuhn, mayor of Stuttgart, the largest city in Germany with a Green mayor.
Kuhn declined to answer any of the questions that I submitted in writing
about his views on AFRICOM and its operations in his city. Mayor Kuhn wants
to waive the interview, a spokesman said.
More than publicly acknowledged, the economic benefits of hosting AFRICOMs
headquarters were major factors in the German governments decision to allow
it to open in the first place, a member of the Bundestag told me. With the
US military footprint shrinking in the country, Germanys political
establishment saw the chance to welcome AFRICOM as very good news. Today,
AFRICOM says that 1,500 US military and civilian personnel are stationed at
its Kelley Barracks command center in Stuttgart.
* * *
Ramstein is a preparation center for the next world war, Wolfgang Jung
said as we neared the base. War has overshadowed his entire life. Jung was
born in 1938, and his childhood memories are vivid with fear and the
destruction that came with bombs (from both sides). He lost two schoolmates.
His father ended up on the Russian front and died in a POW camp just after
the wars end. As a teenager, Jung saw Ramstein open, and in the decades
since then he has become a dogged researcher. The base is not just about
drones, he stressed. Far from it.
The entire region is brandishing huge arsenals. Ten miles from Ramstein, the
Miesau Army Depot is the US militarys biggest storage area for ammunition
outside the United States. In late February the depot received what Stars
and Stripes reported as the largest Europe-bound ammo shipment in 10
yearsmore than 5,000 tons of US Army ammunition that arrived while the
Pentagon was ramping up missions on the Continent, particularly along
NATOs eastern flank, in response to concerns about a more aggressive
Russia.
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June 11, 2016 protest at Ramstein Air Base. (Courtesy: Activism.org)
In many ways, this heavily militarized stretch of Germany is now a
ground-zero powder keg. The consolidated Allied Air Command, responsible
for all Air and Space matters within NATO, has been at the Ramstein base
since 2013. The command includes a center for missile defense, the nexus of
the latest US scenario for a missile shieldwhich the Kremlin views as a
threatening system that would make a first strike against Russia more
tempting and more likely. Interviewed by the German newspaper Bild in
January, Russian President Vladimir Putin said he saw striving for an
absolute triumph in the American missile defense plans.
Such matters preoccupy Jung and his wife Felicitas Strieffler, also a
lifelong resident of the area. She spoke of Ramstein as a grave menace to
the world and a blight on the region. Locals dread sunny days, she said,
because roaring warplanes take to cloudless skies for training maneuvers. On
a hillside, after climbing a 60-foot towera red sandstone monument built in
1900 to honor Bismarckwe looked out over a panorama dominated by Ramsteins
runways, hangars, and aircraft. Strieffler talked about a dream she keeps
having: The base will be closed and, after the chemical pollutants are
removed, it will become a lake where people can go boating and enjoy the
beauties of nature.
Such hopes might seem unrealistic, but a growing number of activists in
Germany are working to end Ramsteins drone role and eventually close the
base. On June 11, several thousand protesters gathered in the rain to form a
human chain that stretched for more than five miles near the Ramstein
perimeter. At the Stopp Ramstein Kampagne office in Berlin, a 37-year-old
former history student, Pascal Luig, exuded commitment and calm as he told
me that the goal should be the closing of the whole air base. He added,
Without Ramstein, no [US] war in the Middle East would be possible. With
no hope of persuading the US government to shut down Ramstein and its other
bases in his country, Luig wants a movement strong enough to compel the
German government to evict them.
* * *
The Pentagon top brass cant be happy about the publicity in Germany
connecting Ramstein to the drone war. They like to keep these things low
key, just because there are points of vulnerability, former drone
technician Cian Westmoreland said, noting that the military is all about
redundancies. In fact, even while Ramsteins Air and Space Operations
Center was going into action nearly five years ago, a similar facility was
on the drawing boards for the Naval Air Station Sigonella in Sicily.
According to some sources, the ultimate goal is to replace Ramstein with
Sigonella as the main site for relay of drone signals. (Replying to my
inquiry, an Air Force spokesman at Ramstein, Maj. Frank Hartnett, wrote in
an e-mail: There are currently no plans to relocate the centers
activities. He did not respond to follow-up questions.) An investigative
journalist working for the Italian newsmagazine LEspresso, Stefania
Maurizi, told me in mid-spring that progress toward such a center at
Sigonella remained at a snails pace. But on June 21, she reported that an
Italian engineering firm had just won a contract for a building similar to
Ramsteins relay center. Construction at Sigonella could be completed by
2018.
As part of the militarization process in Italythe Pentagon has turned the
Italian peninsula into a launching pad for future wars in Africa, the Middle
East and beyond, author David Vine observesSigonella already has some
infrastructure for satellite communication. Another asset is that Italy is
even more deferential to the American military than Germany is. Italy has
become the launching pad for the US wars, and in particular for the drone
wars, without any public debate, Maurizi says. Our responsibilities are
huge and the Italian public is kept in the dark. And when the Pentagon
decides to build big in Italy, it doesnt hurt the momentum thatas Vine
documents in his 2015 book Base Nationthe lucrative contracts are routinely
signed with Italian construction firms controlled by the Mafia.
In any event, no one can doubt that the Defense Department has become
utterly enthralled with drones, officially dubbed Remotely Piloted Aircraft.
Our RPA enterprise is now flying combat missions around the globe, the
general running the Air Combat Command, Herbert Carlisle, testified to a
Senate subcommittee in March. There was no mistaking his zeal to further
expand drone missions, mangled syntax notwithstanding: They are arming
decision makers with intelligence, our warfighters with targets, and our
enemies with fear, anxiety and ultimately their timely end.
The "war on terror" is a gravy train for those who spin through the
revolving doors of the military-industrial complex.
General Carlisle said the US military is now flying five times as many drone
sorties as a decade agoa boost that exemplifies the furious pace at which
we have expanded our operations and enterprise. But he warned that an
insatiable demand for RPA forces has stretched the community thin,
especially our Airmen performing the mission. Today, almost 8,000 Air Force
personnel are solely dedicated to Predator and Reaper drone missions. Of
the 15 bases with RPA units, Carlisle said, 13 of them have a combat
mission. This mission is of such value that we plan on consistent increases
in aircraft, personnel and results. Several weeks after his testimony,
Reutersciting previously unreported US Air Force datarevealed that
drones fired more weapons than conventional warplanes for the first time in
Afghanistan last year and the ratio is rising.
Some in-house government appraisals have concluded that the drone war fails
because it creates more enemies than it kills. But the war on terror is
anything but a failure for many corporations or the individuals who spin
through the revolving doors of the military-industrial complex. As a
critical node in the Pentagons global intelligence, surveillance and
reconnaissance (ISR) system, Ramstein is integral to ongoing boondoggles
for contractors like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Booz Allen
Hamilton, and General Dynamics. The bottomless pit for taxpayers is a
bottomless well for firms catering to the Air Force, with its jargon-larded
pursuit of a distributed ISR operation capable of providing world-wide,
near-real-time simultaneous intelligence to multiple theaters of operation
through
robust reachback communications architectures.
Looking back at the milieu of his work in the drone program, Westmoreland
has concluded that its more or less a for-profit venture. When you get out
of the military, you expect to get a job in the defense sector, an executive
position. And really its about racking up as many awards and decorations as
you possibly can.
At the top ranks, Westmoreland sees a conflict of interest: They have an
incentive to keep wars going. For the militarys leadership, the available
dividends are quite large. For instance, former NSA and CIA director Gen.
Michael Haydenan outspoken advocate of the drone programreceived $240,125
last year as a member of the board at Motorola Solutions. That company has
an investment in CyPhy Works, a major developer of drones.
Endless war propels an endless gravy train.
* * *
Like the other drone whistleblowers interviewed for this article, former
tech sergeant Lisa Ling was careful not to reveal any classified
information. But when we met at a coffee shop in California, what she said
at the outset could be heard as subversive of the US drone program: I would
like to see humanity brought into the political discourse. Her two decades
in the military included several years of work on assimilating Air National
Guard personnel into the drone program. Now she expresses remorse for taking
part in a program where no one person has responsibility.
The new documentary film National Bird includes these words from Ling: We
are in the United States of America and we are participating in an overseas
war, a war overseas, and we have no connection to it other than wires and
keyboards. Now, if that doesnt scare the crap out of you, it does out of
me. Because if thats the only connection, why stop?
After leaving the Air Force, Ling went on a humanitarian mission to
Afghanistan, planting trees and distributing seeds to people shed
previously seen only as indistinct pixels. The drone war haunts her. Ling
asks how we would feel if armed drones kept hovering in the sky above our
own communities, positioned to kill at any moment.
In the Little America where the Ramstein Air Base is the crown military
jewel, such questions go unasked. For that matter, we rarely hear them in
Big America. Yet those questions must be asked, or the forever war will be.
The Whistleblower & Source Protection Program at ExposeFacts provides legal
representation for the former drone operators quoted in this article.
This article was originally published by The Nation.
© 2015 The Nation
