Introduction

From a hilltop at the Guantánamo Bay naval station, you can look down
on a secluded part of the base bordered by the Caribbean Sea. There you’ll
see thick coils of razor wire, guard towers, search lights, and concrete bar-
riers. This is the U.S. prison that has garnered so much international
attention and controversy, with so many prisoners held for years with-
out trial. But the prison facilities take up only a few acres of the forty-
five-square-mile naval station. Most of the base looks nothing like the
detention center. Instead, the landscape features suburban-style housing
developments, a golf course, and recreational boating facilities. This part
of the base has received much less attention than the prison. Yet in its
own way, it is far more impor tant for understanding who we are as a
country and how we relate to the rest of the world.
What makes most of the naval station so remarkable is just how unre-
markable it is. Looking out on Guantánamo Bay, a U.S. flag flies outside
base headquarters. Nearby, an outdoor movie theater has a regular
schedule of Hollywood blockbusters. Next door, there are bright-green
artificial turf fields for football and soccer, at a new sports facility that
also features two baseball diamonds, volleyball and basketball courts, and
an outdoor roller-skating rink. In the air-conditioned gym, ESPN’s
Sportscenter plays on TV. Across the main road there’s a large chapel, a
post office, and a sun-bleached set of McDonald’s golden arches. Neigh-
borhoods with names like Deer Point and Villamar have looping drives
and spacious lawns with barbecue grills and children’s toys. There’s a

020-61287_ch01_6P.indd 1 7/1/15 5:48 PM

 2 B A S E N AT I O N

high school, a middle and elementary school, and a childcare facility. There
are pools and playgrounds, several public beaches, a bowling center,
barber and beauty shops, a Pizza Hut, a Taco Bell, a KFC, and a Subway.
From the hilltop you can also faintly see two nearby Cuban towns,
but most everywhere else on base it’s easy to forget you’re in Cuba. What
base residents call “downtown,” for example, could be almost anywhere
in the United States—or at another of the hundreds of U.S. military bases
spread around the globe, which often resemble self-contained American
towns. The downtown is where you find the commissary and the Navy’s
version of the post exchange, or PX—the shopping facility present on U.S.
military bases worldwide. Surrounded by plentiful parking, the commis-
sary and exchange feel like a Walmart, full of clothing and consumer
electronics, furniture, automotive products, and groceries. At Guantá-
namo, the base souvenir shop is one of the few reminders of where you
really are. There, along with U.S. Naval Station Guantánamo Bay post-
cards and mugs, you can buy a T-shirt bearing the words Detainee
Operations.
During years of debates over the closure of Guantánamo Bay’s prison,
few have asked why the United States has such a large base on Cuban ter-
ritory in the first place, and whether we should have one there at all. This
is unsurprising.
Most Americans rarely think about  U.S. military bases overseas.
Since the end of World War II and the early days of the Cold War, when
the United States built or acquired most of its overseas bases, Americans
have considered it normal to have U.S. military installations in other coun-
tries, on other people’s land. The presence of our bases overseas has long
been accepted unquestioningly and treated as an obvious good, essen-
tial to national security and global peace. Perhaps these bases register in
our consciousness when there’s an antibase protest in Okinawa or an acci-
dent in Germany. Quickly, however, they’re forgotten.
Of course, people living near U.S. bases in countries worldwide pay
them more attention. For many, U.S. bases are one of the most prominent
symbols of the United States, along with Hollywood movies, pop music,
and fast food. Indeed, the prevalence of Burger Kings and Taco Bells on
many of our bases abroad is telling: ours is a supersized collection of bases
with franchises the world over. While there are no freestanding foreign

020-61287_ch01_6P.indd 2 7/1/15 5:48 PM

 INTRODUCTION 3

bases on U.S. soil, today there are around eight hundred U.S. bases in
foreign countries, occupied by hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops.
Although the United States has long had some bases in foreign lands,
this massive global deployment of military force was unknown in U.S.
history before World War II. Now, seventy years after that war, there are
still, according to the Pentagon, 174 U.S. bases in Germany, 113 in Japan,
and 83 in South Korea. There are hundreds more dotting the planet in
Aruba and Australia, Bahrain and Bulgaria, Colombia, Kenya, and Qatar,
to name just a few. Worldwide, we have bases in more than seventy
countries. Although few U.S. citizens realize it, we probably have more
bases in other people’s lands than any other people, nation, or empire
in world history.
And yet the subject is barely discussed in the media. Rarely does any-
one ask whether we need hundreds of bases overseas, or whether we can
afford them. Rarely does anyone consider how we would feel with a for-
eign base on U.S. soil, or how we would react if China, Russia, or Iran
built even a single base somewhere near our borders today. For most in
the United States, the idea of even the nicest, most benign foreign troops
arriving with their tanks, planes, and high-powered weaponry and
making themselves at home in our country—occupying and fencing off
hundreds or thousands of acres of our land—is unthinkable.
Rafael Correa, the president of Ecuador, highlighted this rarely con-
sidered truth in 2009 when he refused to renew the lease for a U.S. base
in his country. Correa told reporters that he would approve the lease
renewal on one condition: “They let us put a base in Miami—an Ecuador-
ian base.”
“If there’s no problem having foreign soldiers on a country’s soil,” Cor-
rea quipped, “surely they’ll let us have an Ecuadorian base in the United
States.”1

THE SCALE

At the height of the U.S. occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, the total

number of bases, combat outposts, and checkpoints in those two coun-
tries alone topped one thousand.2 With American troops largely with-
drawn, almost all of those have been shut down. Yet officially, according to

020-61287_ch01_6P.indd 3 7/1/15 5:48 PM

 4 B A S E N AT I O N

the most recent publicized count, the U.S. military currently still occupies
686 “base sites” outside the fift y states and Washington, D.C.3
While 686 is quite a figure, that tally strangely excludes many well-
known U.S. bases, such as those in Kosovo, Kuwait, and Qatar. Less sur-
prisingly, the Pentagon’s count also excludes secret (or secretive) American
bases, such as those reported in Israel and Saudi Arabia. There are so
many bases, the Pentagon itself doesn’t even know the true total.4 By my
count, eight hundred is a good estimate.
But what exactly is a “base”? Definitions and terminology vary widely,
and each of the military’s ser vices has its own preferred vocabulary,
including “post,” “station,” “camp,” and “fort.” The Pentagon defines its
generic term base site as a “physical (geographic) location”—meaning
land, a facility or facilities, or land and facilities—“owned by, leased to,
or other wise possessed” by an armed ser vice or another component of
the Department of Defense.5 To avoid linguistic debates and because it’s
the simplest and most widely recognized term, I generally use “base”
to mean any place, facility, or installation used regularly for military
purposes of any kind.6
Understood this way, bases come in all sizes and shapes, from mas-
sive sites in Germany and Japan to small radar facilities in Peru and
Puerto Rico. Other bases include ports and airfields of all sizes, repair
facilities, training areas, nuclear weapons installations, missile testing
facilities, arsenals, warehouses, barracks, military schools, listening and
communications posts, and drone bases. While I exclude checkpoints
from my definition, military hospitals and prisons, rehab facilities, para-
military bases, and intelligence facilities must also be considered part of
the base world because of their military functions. Even military resorts
and recreation areas in places such as Tuscany and Seoul are bases of a
kind; worldwide, the military runs more than 170 golf courses.7
The Pentagon says that it has just sixty-four “active major installa-
tions” overseas and that most of its base sites are “small installations or
locations.” But it defines “small” as having a reported value of up to $915
million.8 In other words, small can be not so small.
The United States is not the only country to control military bases out-
side its own territory. Britain and France have about thirteen between
them, mostly in their former colonies. Russia has around nine in former

020-61287_ch01_6P.indd 4 7/1/15 5:48 PM

 INTRODUCTION 5

Soviet republics. For the first time since World War II, Japan’s so-called
Self-Defense Forces have a foreign base, located in Djibouti alongside
American and French bases. South Korea, the Netherlands, India, Aus-
tralia, Chile, Turkey, and Israel reportedly have one foreign base apiece.
In total, all the non-U.S. countries in the world combined have about
thirty foreign bases among them—as compared to the United States and
its eight hundred or so. If we add up all the troops and the family mem-
bers living with them, plus the civilian base employees and their family
members, the bases are responsible for over half a million Americans
abroad.9

THE FORWARD STRATEGY

Since the end of World War II, the idea that our country should have a
large collection of bases and hundreds of thousands of troops perma-
nently stationed overseas has been a quasireligious dictum of U.S. for-
eign and national security policy. The opening words of a U.S. Army War
College study bluntly declare: “U.S. national security strategy requires
access to overseas military bases.”10
The policy underlying this deeply held belief is known as the “forward
strategy.” These two words, this wonky term of art, have had profound
implications. Cold War policy held that the United States should main-
tain large concentrations of military forces and bases as close as possible
to the Soviet Union, in order to hem in and “contain” supposed Soviet
expansionism. Suddenly, as the historian George Stambuk explains, “the
security of the United States, in the minds of policy-makers, lost much
of its former inseparability from the concept of the territory of the United
States.”11
Two decades after the Soviet Union’s collapse, in a world without
another superpower rival, people across the political spectrum still believe
as a matter of faith that overseas bases and troops are essential to pro-
tecting the country. At a time when bipartisanship has hit all-time lows,
there are few issues more widely agreed upon by both Republicans and
Democrats alike. The George W. Bush administration, for example, pro-
claimed that bases abroad have “maintained the peace” and provided
“symbols of . . . U.S. commitments to allies and friends.”12 The Obama

020-61287_ch01_6P.indd 5 7/1/15 5:48 PM

 8 B A S E N AT I O N

administration, for its part, declared that “forward-stationed and rota-

tionally deployed U.S. forces continue to be relevant and required” as they
“provide a stabilizing influence abroad.”13
And these are just two prominent examples. The forward strategy has
been the overwhelming consensus among politicians, national security
experts, military officials, journalists, and many others. It’s hard to
overestimate how unquestioned this policy has been and remains. Any
opposition to maintaining large numbers of overseas bases and troops is
generally pilloried as peacenik idealism, or isolationism of the sort that
allowed Hitler to conquer Europe.
Superficially, it seems hard to argue against maintaining U.S. bases
overseas. It seems logical enough that more bases mean more security.
Since the bases have been there for decades, it’s easy to assume that there
must be good military reasons for them. U.S. leaders often portray our
bases as a double gift to host countries, offering both security and eco-
nomic benefits; thanks to the jobs and business contracts that bases
provide and the money that U.S. military personnel and their families
spend off base, many locals covet their presence. Why would anyone
not want  U.S. bases and troops in their countries? Many Americans
assume that any “Yankee go home” sentiment must reflect a seething
anti-Americanism. With bases in Eu rope and Asia, some might go so
far as to invoke the old joke that if it weren’t for us, the locals would
probably be speaking German or Japanese right now.
Nevertheless, for the first time in decades, an unusually bipartisan
group has slowly begun to question the conventional wisdom. “In a sense
it’s unnatural that any country be the host to large numbers of foreign
forces,” former Pentagon official and base expert Andy Hoehn told me.
“It was a necessary condition for a long time. And it’s a situation that we
should be celebrating that we’re able to make that change, not one that
we should be bemoaning.”

A TROUBLING REC ORD

The most obvious reason to question the overseas base status quo is eco-
nomic. Especially in an era of budget austerity, it makes sense to ask
whether closing bases abroad can be an easy source of savings. Like many

020-61287_ch01_6P.indd 8 7/1/15 5:48 PM

 INTRODUCTION 9

things far from home, overseas bases are very expensive. Even when host
countries like Japan and Germany cover some of the costs, U.S. taxpay-
ers still pay an average of $10,000 to $40,000 more per year to station a
member of the military abroad compared to in the United States. The
costs of transportation, the higher cost of living in some host countries,
and the expense of providing schools, hospitals, housing, and other sup-
port to family members of military personnel abroad all contribute to the
extra expense. With more than half a million troops, family members,
and civilian employees on bases overseas, the expenses add up quickly.
By my very conservative calculations, the total cost of maintaining
bases and military personnel overseas reaches at least $71.8 billion every
year and could easily be in the range of $100–$120 billion. That’s larger
than the discretionary budget for every government agency except the
Defense Department itself. And this number doesn’t even include spend-
ing on bases in overseas war zones. If we include the cost of bases
and  troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, in 2012 the total easily topped
$170 billion.
Other financial losses add up, too. When military personnel and
family members spend their paychecks overseas rather than in communi-
ties at home, the U.S. economy is that much worse off. Allocating U.S. tax-
payer dollars to build and run overseas bases means forgoing investments
in areas like education, infrastructure, housing, and health care, which
generally create more jobs and increase economic productivity far more
than military spending does.
But beyond such financial costs, there are also human ones. The fam-
ilies of military personnel are among those who suffer from the spread
of overseas bases, given the strain of distant deployments, family sepa-
rations, and frequent moves. Overseas bases also contribute to the shock-
ing rate of sexual assault in the military: an estimated one in three
ser vicewomen is now assaulted, and a disproportionate number of these
crimes happen at bases abroad. Outside the base gates, meanwhile, in
places like South Korea, one often finds exploitative prostitution indus-
tries that frequently rely on human trafficking.
And once one begins to look closely at U.S. bases abroad, the list of
problems only grows. Worldwide, bases have caused widespread envi-
ronmental damage because of leaks, accidents, and, in some cases, the

020-61287_ch01_6P.indd 9 7/1/15 5:48 PM

 10 B A S E N AT I O N

deliberate burial or discharge of toxic materials. In Okinawa, U.S. troops

have repeatedly committed rapes and other crimes against the local pop-
ulation. In Italy, twenty died after a Marine jet severed a gondola cable.
The military has also repeatedly built installations by displacing local
peoples from their lands, in areas ranging from Greenland to the tropi-
cal island of Diego Garcia. Today, the disproportionate presence of
bases in places that lack full democratic rights within the United States,
such as Guam and Puerto Rico, helps perpetuate a twenty-first-century
form of colonialism, tarnishing our country’s ability to be a model for
democracy.
Indeed, despite rhetoric about spreading democracy, the government’s
track record shows a clear preference for bases in undemocratic and often
despotic states such as Qatar and Bahrain. The willingness to partner
with unsavory characters for the sake of bases has also entangled the U.S.
military with mafia organizations in Italy. Meanwhile, imprisonment,
torture, and abuse at bases from Guantánamo Bay to Abu Ghraib have
generated international anger and damaged the country’s reputation.
Similarly, drone bases enabled missile strikes that have killed hundreds
of civilians, producing outrage, opposition, and new enemies. In Iraq,
Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia, foreign bases have created fertile breed-
ing grounds for radicalism and anti-Americanism; the presence of our
bases in the Muslim holy lands of Saudi Arabia was a major recruiting
tool for al-Qaeda and part of Osama bin Laden’s professed motivation
for the September 11, 2001, attacks.
The hundreds of bases around the globe are a major (though largely
unacknowledged) aspect of the “face” our country presents to the world,
and bases often show us in an extremely unflattering light. Given the track
record, it’s little wonder that the base nation has frequently generated
grievances, protest, and antagonistic relationships with others.

UNDERMINING SECURITY

Most crucially, it’s not at all clear that U.S. bases overseas actually pro-
tect national security and global peace. During the Cold War, there was
an argument to be made that to some extent U.S. bases in Europe and
Asia played a legitimate defensive role. In the absence of a superpower

020-61287_ch01_6P.indd 10 7/1/15 5:48 PM

 INTRODUCTION 11

enemy today, however, the argument that bases many thousands of miles
from U.S. shores are necessary to defend the United States—or even its
allies—is much harder to sustain. To the contrary, the global collection
of bases has generally been offensive in nature, making it all too easy to
launch interventionist wars of choice that have resulted in repeated disas-
ters, costing millions of lives from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan.
There are also questions about the degree to which bases actually
increase host country safety. The presence of U.S. bases can turn a coun-
try into a target for foreign powers or militants. On Guam, a dark Cold
War joke said that Soviet nuclear missile targeters were just about the only
people who could locate the island on a map; with a China-focused U.S.
military buildup under way, some are expressing similar concerns about
Chinese missiles potentially targeting the island today.14
For those concerned that closing bases abroad might slow deployment
times in case of a legitimate defensive war or peacekeeping operation,
studies by the Pentagon and others have shown that in most cases,
advances in transportation technology have largely erased the advantage
of stationing troops overseas. Nowadays, the military can generally deploy
troops just as quickly from bases in the continental United States and
Hawaii as it can from many bases abroad.
Rather than stabilizing dangerous regions, foreign bases frequently
heighten military tensions and discourage diplomatic solutions to
conflicts. Placing U.S. bases near the borders of countries such as China,
Russia, and Iran, for example, increases threats to their security and
encourages them to respond by boosting their own military spending.
Again, imagine how U.S. leaders would respond if Iran were to build even
a single small base in Mexico, Canada, or the Caribbean.
Notably, the most dangerous moment during the Cold War—the
Cuban missile crisis—revolved around the creation of Soviet nuclear mis-
sile facilities roughly ninety miles from the U.S. border. Similarly, one of
the most dangerous episodes in the post–Cold War era—Russia’s seizure
of Crimea and its involvement in the war in Ukraine—has come after the
United States encouraged the enlargement of NATO and built a growing
number of bases closer and closer to Russian borders. Indeed, a major
motivation behind Russia’s actions has likely been its interest in main-
taining perhaps the most important of its small collection of foreign bases,

020-61287_ch01_6P.indd 11 7/1/15 5:48 PM

 12 B A S E N AT I O N

the naval base in the Crimean port Sevastopol. West-leaning Ukrainian

leaders’ desire to join NATO posed a direct threat to the base, and thus
to the power of the Russian navy.
Perhaps most troubling of all, the creation of new U.S. bases to pro-
tect against an alleged future Chinese or Russian threat runs the risk of
becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. By provoking a Chinese and Russian
military response, these bases may help create the very threat against
which they are supposedly designed to protect. In other words, far from
making the world a safer place, U.S. bases overseas can actually make
war more likely and America less secure.

BEHIND THE FENCES

To cast light on this long-overlooked world of bases, I traveled around

the world, conducting research over the course of six years at more than
sixty current and former bases in twelve countries and territories, includ-
ing Japan, South Korea, Italy, Germany, Britain, Honduras, El Salvador,
Ecuador, Cuba, the United States, and the U.S. territories of Guam and
the Northern Mariana Islands.
In many cases, U.S. officials were very helpful in accommodating my
research, arranging base tours and interviews, and answering questions.
At other times, bases denied my requests to visit, sent me from office to
office in endless quests for visiting rights, or never responded to my inqui-
ries. After exchanging more than fift y emails with military representa-
tives over several months about visiting U.S. bases in Afghanistan, I am
still waiting for an official response to my application.
At the naval station on Guam, I made it on base only by attending ser-
vices for the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur. On several occasions in Ger-
many and Italy, I was stopped and questioned by police or private security
guards while on public property outside a base. Outside the main caserma
in Vicenza, Italy, I was taking photographs of a protest against the planned
construction of a new base in the city when law enforcement seized my
passport. After a few ner vous moments and some brief questioning, the
Italians and U.S. military personnel allowed me to enter the base—which
was holding an open-to-the-public Fourth of July celebration. Within a
few minutes I got another polite questioning from a civilian working on

020-61287_ch01_6P.indd 12 7/1/15 5:48 PM

 INTRODUCTION 13

base, and I realized that I was going to be followed for the rest of the night
by two friendly members of the Italian military police who asked me to
call them “Starrrskeee and Huuutch.”
Off base, I used a range of local contacts to meet as many people with
as many perspectives as possible, including government officials, local
residents, journalists, business leaders, academics, activists, military retir-
ees, and many others both supportive of and opposed to bases in their
communities. In Washington, D.C., and elsewhere in the United States,
I interviewed Pentagon and State Department officials (one of whom, as
you will see, I inadvertently helped get fired), military analysts, report-
ers, veterans, and many others with knowledge about overseas bases. In
most cases, I recorded my interviews or took detailed notes. In the sto-
ries that follow, I have used quotation marks only when I know that I
captured a speaker’s exact words.
With the military having closed most of its bases and withdrawn most
troops from Afghanistan after the longest war in  U.S. history, we’ve
reached a moment of transition in U.S. foreign and military policy. There’s
no better moment to ask whether the hundreds of overseas bases that keep
on running whether the country is technically at war or at peace are a
positive and necessary presence in the world, and whether they reflect
how we should be engaging with the rest of the planet.
I say “we” because although I have written this book for readers world-
wide, at times I address a U.S. audience directly. Ultimately, I believe all
Americans bear responsibility for the base nation we’ve become and
for the lives that our largely forgotten bases have shaped around the
world. This book tells the stories of some of those lives—the U.S. troops
and their families who live and work on foreign bases, the locals who
live nearby, and others. And beyond the bases themselves, I examine
the impact that the Pentagon’s foreign-base strategy has on the lives of
all of us in the United States and around the world, whether we know
it or not.
In this respect, Base Nation is about more than bases alone. Overseas
bases offer a lens through which we can look honestly and unflinchingly
at our country, our place in the world, and how we interact with the rest
of the planet. Examining America’s sprawling collection of bases abroad
can help us see how the United States has placed itself on a permanent

020-61287_ch01_6P.indd 13 7/1/15 5:48 PM

 14 B A S E N AT I O N

war footing, with an economy and a government dominated by continu-

ous preparations for battle.
Ultimately, the story of our bases abroad is a chronicle of the United
States in the post–World War II era. In a certain sense, we’ve all come to
live behind the fences—“ behind the wire,” as military folks say. We may
think these bases have made us safer. Instead, they’ve helped lock us inside
a permanently militarized society that in many ways has made all of us
less safe and less secure, damaging lives at home and abroad.

020-61287_ch01_6P.indd 14 7/1/15 5:48 PM