David Vine — Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World

1150 published claims from this book.

• “Access, not bases” rhetoric can mask actual U.S. base construction abroad.
• A 1982 agreement addendum gave the U.S. carte blanche to build bases in Honduras
• A 1996 visiting forces agreement reopened the Philippines to U.S. troops
• A 2008 tax change preserved a loophole leaving ex-contract workers ineligible for unemployment insurance
• A 50-dollar land purchase established the US footprint in the Pacific
• A banana republic is a colony controlled through economic domination
• A banana republic is a colony in all but name
• A broad network of refueling and logistics pacts spans African countries
• A Camorra-family-built housing village once housed U.S. military families
• A century-old colonial attitude drives the military’s poor planning on Guam
• A Chamorro resident emailed firsthand testimony about military impacts
• A civilian economy and government can become dominated by continuous war preparations.
• A Class A uniform signals death to families on overseas bases
• A conservative military analyst publicly supported the Dal Molin base while insulting its opponents
• A crashed B-1 from Diego Garcia sank with its ordnance into the Indian Ocean.
• A defense contractor punished its whistleblowers while exploiting its cleanup as a marketing asset
• A floating replacement base for Futenma was blocked over cost, safety, and environmental concerns
• A force guarding Persian Gulf oil grew into CENTCOM which led four wars.
• A foreign-base arms race could eventually bring bases closer to the United States.
• A foreign-base race could put other nations’ bases near U.S. borders
• A four-star AFRICOM commander misused funds and took contractor gifts
• A grieving mother blamed US healthcare gaps for her soldier son’s death
• A key U.S. official called the Chagossian expulsion inexcusably inhuman.
• A lack of health insurance drove a father to enlist and die in combat
• A major European drug market operates next to the US Naples naval base
• A military base is any place or facility used regularly for military purposes
• A military coup suppressed a successful Honduran conservation serial drama
• A naval base on Jeju’s ‘Island of Peace’ is likely intended for U.S. forces.
• A Pentagon food-contract agency head joined the award-winning contractor months after resigning
• A perpetual lease granted the U.S. complete control over Guantánamo Bay
• A private banana businessman staged a coup in Honduras in 1905
• A private businessman financed a coup that made him master of Honduras
• A reform organization could win respect for principle while losing every major fight
• A retired general calls the military’s benefits system the purest socialism in America.
• A revolving door connects top Pentagon officials to the military-contracting industry.
• A senior U.S. diplomat equated Okinawans with Puerto Ricans using racial stereotypes
• A single food contractor grew fiftyfold on wartime Afghanistan contracts with 18-23 percent margins
• A single food-services contractor grew fiftyfold on Afghanistan wartime contracts into a billionaire’s company.
• A single named base often comprises multiple distinct base sites
• A small imperial base network preceded the postwar expansion into global dominance
• A soldier dumped formaldehyde into Seoul’s main river.
• A soldier in dress uniform on base signals death notification duty
• A sweeping 1982 agreement let the U.S. build bases at will
• A tiny group of contractors captures a third of overseas base spending
• A U.S. court confirmed soldiers tortured Honduran civilians tied to U.S. intelligence
• A U.S. official blamed Okinawa’s poverty on laziness rather than occupation
• A US base community in Vicenza can approach ten percent of a city’s population
• A World War I chemical weapons base was buried beneath Washington D.C. suburbs.
• About 80 percent of Iraq-Afghanistan war materiel transited Germany
• About 90 percent of GI partners are abandoned when soldiers finish their tours.
• About 95 percent of military spouses abroad are female
• Access agreements can circumvent constitutional bans on foreign bases
• Activists hope base-adjacent peace parks can teach about militarization
• Adams warned that seeking foreign enemies would entangle America in endless wars.
• Adams’ domestic-investment agenda offers a modern alternative to militarism.
• Admiral Boorda’s death roused widespread local suspicion of a mafia hit.
• Africom officials denied a list of its facilities citing operational security.
• After the Cold War even U.S. officials judged Soto Cano base missionless
• Agreements to close bases instead funded billions in new U.S. housing.
• All non-U.S. countries combined have about thirty foreign bases
• All non-US countries combined hold thirty bases versus America’s eight hundred
• All-volunteer recruitment pressure drove rising luxury standards on bases.
• Allied forces appointed accused murderers as mayors in occupied Sicily
• Allied officials protected Naples’ wartime contraband economy
• Allowing families overseas served to curb fraternization and satisfy U.S. wives’ political pressure
• Allowing military families overseas aimed to solve fraternization and home-front anger
• American bases in Bahrain make the U.S. complicit in human rights abuse
• American officials allowed only Caucasian Bonin islanders to return after WWII.
• American servicemembers produce about three times more trash than locals.
• American sovereignty over Guam began with its occupation
• American University traded its grounds for Army infrastructure and accepted buried chemical weapons
• American University’s campus once produced the world’s deadliest chemical weapon
• Americans treat overseas military bases as an unquestioned normal good
• An unreported rape victim blamed herself for a later attack on another girl
• Analyzing overseas bases reveals America’s economy runs on continuous war preparations.
• Anti-base activists sustained a permanent two-year encampment protest
• Antibase movements can win concessions even when they lose the main fight
• Antibase movements vary widely in aims and rarely demand full removal
• Antibase protest drove Tokyo to expand compensation payments sustaining tacit support
• Antibase protest now extends even to friendly, stable host nations
• Army cleanups of chemical weapons sites can be incomplete and dangerously flawed
• Army savings estimates for base moves have been inflated and poorly documented.
• Army stored chemical weapons on Guam and concealed a reactor-water release.
• At least eighteen documented base displacements outside the US occurred since the 1800s.
• Autocratic states have consistently been preferred U.S. base hosts since 1898
• Banana companies extracted Honduran wealth leaving peasants landless and poor
• Banana companies held nearly a million acres of Honduras’s most fertile land by 1914.
• Banana companies rendered Honduras nearly indistinguishable from themselves by 1912
• Base amenities function as retention benefits to keep troops enlisted
• Base amenities let personnel forget they are living amid war and bloodshed
• Base closures abroad tend to be offset by new base construction elsewhere
• Base closures attract rare cross-partisan political support
• Base closures do not raise local unemployment and can even help it
• Base closures have no significant or lasting regional economic impact
• Base closures rarely cause the catastrophic economic damage communities fear
• Base closures show no measurable harm to surrounding community economies
• Base comforts and amenities distance personnel psychologically from the wars they support
• Base community life depends on unpaid spouse labor under subtle coercion
• Base consolidation efforts merely relocated rather than reduced overseas footprint
• Base construction destroyed Diego Garcia’s reef and forest and leaked radioactivity and Agent Orange.
• Base contractor systems can become absurdly circular and self-serving in wartime
• Base economies offer locals mostly low-wage jobs while higher-skilled positions go to Americans
• Base expansion plans in conservative regions can trigger broad, diverse protest coalitions
• Base expansion plans united a remarkably diverse Italian opposition coalition
• Base infrastructure spending grew triple the rate deployment numbers justify
• Base infrastructure spending outpaced troop numbers threefold in Iraq and Afghanistan
• Base infrastructure that outlives its purpose actively creates insecurity
• Base land seizures destroyed Okinawa’s farming economy and livelihood.
• Base maintenance funds grew three times faster than deployed troop numbers.
• Base noise protests are driven by what the noise symbolizes
• Base officials dismissed displaced islanders as too few to matter.
• Base opponents often emphasize they oppose bases, not American people or culture
• Base opposition movements achieve mixed, non-clear-cut results globally
• Base opposition movements pursue diverse aims beyond merely removing U.S. bases
• Base opposition movements span diverse motivations and rarely demand full removal
• Base personnel believe widows self-harm while widowers hurt others after notification
• Base presence made landlords prefer Americans over native Italians for housing
• Base residents describe their communities as idyllic small American towns
• Base residents enjoy crime-free communities they compare to American cities
• Base site selection tracks landowner powerlessness more than strategic need.
• Base siting decisions are driven by bureaucratic imperatives rather than military need
• Base spending turned Germany’s poorest region into a boom economy
• Base supporters weaponized job-loss fears to sway Vicenza opinion
• Base terminology obscures the reality of U.S. control over host territories
• Base-abroad conditions drive high rates of sexual assault and sex trafficking
• Base-generated contract dollars largely return to American and offshore corporations, not hosts.
• Base-town club workers stay trapped because leaving means deportation
• Bases are sited where land acquisition is easiest, on marginalized populations.
• Bases bring fewer economic benefits than expected and can inhibit local growth.
• Bases expanded American power far beyond the small territory they occupy.
• Bases near rival borders provoke arms races and discourage diplomacy
• Bases occupy valuable urban and beachfront land worldwide
• Bases occupying land represent an economic loss rather than gain
• Bases overseas should face regular yearly review instead of one-time closure lists.
• Bases provide hosts mostly low-wage local jobs while higher-skilled work goes to Americans.
• Bases served a grand strategy of global economic access without colonies.
• Bases surrounding a rival power provoke dangerous escalation
• Battle of Okinawa deaths rivaled the combined atomic bombing tolls.
• Battlefield losses made the military unwilling to return captured Pacific islands.
• Billions in Japanese aid has not lifted Okinawa’s economy above last place
• Billions in new European base spending signals long-term warfare commitment
• Both Bush and Obama administrations endorsed overseas basing as stabilizing
• Britain cut food supplies to drive Chagossians out while denying their rootedness.
• British colonial commanders licensed and housed prostitutes within view of barracks
• Brown & Root received $2 billion in 1990s base support contracts.
• Bureaucratic inertia kept a pointless U.S. base operating after its mission ended
• Bureaucratic inertia kept Soto Cano open despite vanishished rationale
• Bureaucratic inertia makes officials extremely reluctant to stop started projects
• Buried chemical weapons leaked toxins into a residential Washington neighborhood.
• Bush-era plans closed more bases than any period since the Cold War ended
• By 1900 the U.S. had an overseas base network rivaling European colonial powers
• By 2006 one in five enlisted troops had received moral waivers
• Camorra extortion rackets extracted fixed monthly payoffs tied to base construction
• Campania accounted for nearly half of Italy’s mafia-infiltration government dissolutions
• Campania accumulated six million metric tons of uncollected garbage
• Camptown sex workers were a sacrificial human cost of the U.S.-Korea alliance
• Camptown sexual exploitation normalized in training drives later military sexual violence
• Camptown sexual exploitation results from deliberate human decisions, not natural male behavior.
• Career incentives lead officials to keep overseas bases open
• Career incentives prevent officials from recommending base closures
• Central American Cold War conflicts killed over 360,000 civilians with U.S. arms
• Central American wars from U.S. involvement killed hundreds of thousands
• Chagossian children died within months of forced removal to Mauritius
• Chagossian compensation amounted to under $6,000 per adult and marginal gains.
• Chagossian compensation was small, delayed, and largely consumed by debt
• Chagossians away from home were deliberately marooned by travel bans after 1967.
• Chagossians formed a distinct society with their own culture and language.
• Chagossians lost land, work, and schooling solely for living on a Navy-desired island.
• Chamber of commerce framed Guam as America’s only Asian sovereign asset
• Chamorro opposition to the military buildup is about self-protection, not anti-militarism
• Chamorro spiritual connection to land makes military desecration a cultural assault.
• Chamorros have lacked self-determination for nearly five hundred years
• Chamorros risked torture and death to hide a U.S. soldier
• Chamorros suffer elevated cancer rates linked to base pollution
• Childhood exposure to buried chemical weapons may have caused cancer deaths.
• Chinese and North Korean missiles make Okinawa bases militarily obsolete
• CIA established six Contra bases in Honduras within a year
• Civilian contractor crimes fell outside military jurisdiction and went unprosecuted
• Closing big bases drove the Pentagon toward smaller lily pad facilities
• Closing Futenma was conditioned on building Marines a new Okinawa base.
• Closing overseas bases draws support across the US political spectrum.
• Closing overseas bases is politically easier than closing domestic ones
• Closing overseas bases yields immediate and long-term fiscal savings
• Cold War basing mentality predated the actual Cold War
• Cold War defense compacts let the US keep testing missiles at Pacific targets
• Cold War mentality of permanent mobilization set in before the Cold War began.
• Cold War peace cannot be reliably attributed to U.S. deterrence.
• Cold War-era Senate hearings on overseas bases were held entirely in secret
• Colonial and semicolonial territories suffer the worst base environmental damage.
• Colonial expansion was foreclosed by ideology and prior European division of the world
• Colonies and U.S. territories suffer the worst base environmental damage
• Combatant command overseas operations funding is omitted from official cost reports.
• Comfortable family-oriented base life normalized permanent troop deployments abroad
• Commercial redevelopment of former base land vastly outperforms the base economically
• Commercial sex zones have developed around U.S. bases worldwide.
• Commonwealth status deals ceded Pacific island territory for military live-fire ranges
• Congress excludes all war-funded base costs from official overseas tallies.
• Congress exempts U.S. territories from overseas cost reporting despite their overseas location
• Congress funded a base whose stated purpose was abandoned after most money was spent.
• Congress funds permanent facilities despite official claims bases are temporary.
• Congress had long allowed military exercises to bypass construction oversight
• Congress pushed for additional African basing and access agreements in 2015
• Congressional pressure drives base amenity creep that officers privately oppose
• Containment rationale for Japanese bases substitutes China for the USSR with weak fit
• Contra funding via Iran arms sales defied Congress and drug law
• Contra training imported Argentine death-squad techniques into Honduran territory.
• Contract data by place of performance can misattribute war support work to neutral countries
• Contract locations misrepresent where war support actually happens
• Contracting fraud in the Iraq and Afghan wars reached $31-60 billion
• Contracting fraud in US wars reached $31-60 billion, much tied to base spending.
• Contractor conferences openly frame base operations as profit opportunities
• Contractor shell companies cost the government more in lost revenue than they save.
• Contractor tax avoidance costs government more than any savings it brings
• Contractor-run base construction began in the Vietnam War era.
• Contractors made up half of deployed personnel in the Iraq War.
• Contractors punished whistleblowers but treated trafficking cover-ups as marketing wins
• Contractors usually outsource base services at higher cost than the military itself
• Cost-plus contracts structurally reward contractor overspending
• Cost-plus contracts structurally reward contractors for inflating costs.
• Covert operations produce consequences publics cannot trace to their causes
• Critics of militarization still collaborate across the political divide with former Pentagon officials.
• Cuba’s annulling the Platt Amendment did not end the Guantánamo lease.
• Current Central American migration is partly blowback from decades of U.S. military support
• Danish courts ruled the Thule Inughuit expulsion illegal but denied return.
• Death notification remains a defining symbolic role of overseas bases
• Decades of base logistics waste persisted across Iraq and Kosovo
• Decades of camptown stigma leaves elderly Korean sex workers destitute and unreconciled
• Decolonization threatened the end of Western overseas military bases
• Defense Department schools spend nearly double the US public school average per pupil.
• Defense needs regularly override U.S. environmental law through statutory exemptions
• Defensive bases can appear threatening to the nations they encircle
• Definitions of military base vary widely across services
• Deployments force military spouses to take on all household duties with little notice.
• Deported Chagossian children died within months due to destitution.
• Deported Chagossians were left destitute on Mauritius docks
• Deterrence research finds no consensus on variables that predict effectiveness.
• Deterrence research ignores the long-term deterrence that overseas bases supposedly provide
• Deterrence theory lacks evidence for effective prediction
• Deterrence theory rests on flawed assumptions and misrepresented history.
• Diego Garcia base construction destroyed reef and wildlife habitat at vast scale
• Diego Garcia’s central location and lagoon made it the Navy’s top acquisition target
• Diego Garcia’s geography made it a strategically ideal base site
• Disaster relief and closings served as pretexts for U.S. base expansion
• Discrimination against women in military-linked sex trafficking cases by prosecutors
• Displacement from Bikini destroyed the Bikinians’ self-sufficiency
• Displacing indigenous island peoples to build bases was a systemic U.S. pattern
• Dissent against the overseas base policy is dismissed as isolationism or peacenik idealism
• Domestic civilian spending creates more jobs than military spending
• DynCorp employees’ sex trafficking in Bosnia was a pattern known to multiple witnesses
• DynCorp leadership colluded with Serbian mafia supplying women to brothels
• DynCorp punished its trafficking whistleblowers while promoting its firings as a marketing success
• Easier access to bases makes US military intervention more likely
• Economic dependency forces Okinawa to accept the bases.
• Economic desperation on Guam drives unusually high military enlistment rates
• Economic dominance in aviation motivated postwar base acquisitions alongside military goals
• Economic growth shifts camptown sex work down the global labor ladder
• Ecuador and Iraq refused to renew U.S. base leases despite Pentagon desires
• Ecuador’s president forced Americans to confront the base double standard.
• Ecuador’s president refused a U.S. base lease unless given one in Miami
• End of the draft shifted military labor onto low-paid foreign contractors.
• Ending the draft drove the military to hire cheap foreign contractors.
• Environmental conditions, not innate nature, make rape likely in the military.
• EPA formally rejected the Guam buildup plan as environmentally unsatisfactory.
• Established overseas bases develop new missions to justify their continued enlargement
• Euphemistic base terminology deliberately minimizes perceived U.S. footprint
• Euphemistic base terminology lets officials deny the existence of U.S. bases.
• European bases shifted from Cold War defense to forward staging for war
• Even a Pentagon-backed study found Soto Cano serves no strategic purpose
• Even citizenship and migration to Britain left most Chagossians impoverished
• Even expert-prepared children suffer stress from a parent’s deployment
• Even GAO and officials saw Soto Cano as no longer needed
• Even pro-base analysts describe Pentagon construction as an unbounded bureaucratic machine
• Even the Pentagon does not know its own base total.
• Every empire since Portugal has eventually lost its foreign bases
• Every military service pays substantially more per person stationed overseas
• Exile destroyed the Bikinians’ self-sufficiency and dignity
• Exile destroyed the Bikinians’ self-sufficiency; compensation was about $15 per person.
• Exposure of trafficking triggered US and South Korean legal crackdowns
• Failing to propose base reforms guarantees the harmful status quo continues.
• Fallback arguments presume global military power is necessary.
• Families lived atop buried chemical weapons long after official cleanups.
• Families on overseas bases signaled U.S. commitment and improved host-country relations
• Family arrivals pushed the military to build self-contained Little Americas
• Family quality-of-life became a retention strategy after the draft ended
• Family-friendly base construction made the permanent worldwide troop deployment politically acceptable
• Fear of police questioning deterred an Okinawan rape victim from reporting
• Fear of rape in unlit latrines drove women soldiers to dehydration deaths in Iraq
• Federal contracting databases lack reliable place-of-performance data
• Federally tracked military contract data is frequently inaccurate and incomplete
• Feminist pressure drove Pentagon investment in family programs
• Fewer than 8 percent of reported military sexual assaults go to trial
• First-round base funding becomes a slippery slope to much larger costs
• For most of US history the Army gave soldiers’ families no formal support
• Forced displacement caused a persistent grief that Chagossians believe killed people
• Forced displacement caused long-term psychological harm, even death, among Chagossians.
• Forcible base-related displacement of local populations continued into the 2000s
• Forcing the Navy off Culebra displaced bombing activity onto Vieques.
• Foreign camptown workers are recruited through debt-bonded entertainment contracts
• Foreign governments and movements have repeatedly forced U.S. base closures historically
• Foreign military bases have underpinned imperial control since antiquity.
• Foreign war-seeking corrodes a nation’s liberty into domination, Adams warned.
• Forward basing doctrine decoupled US security from US territorial defense
• Forward basing doctrine rests on reassurance, deterrence, and rapid response
• Forward military bases have underpinned imperial rule since antiquity
• Forward-based lily pads near rival borders risk provoking reciprocal responses and blowback.
• Fourteen of thirty-four returned U.S. bases in South Korea exceed local cancer-chemical standards
• Frontier bases functioned as the advance agent of US land conquest.
• Frontier forts intended as containment lines instead drove US expansion
• Futenma air station lacks legally required safety clear zones in a dense city
• Futenma air station’s urban encroachment endangers thousands of residents.
• Futenma’s encroachment is so severe a US base would be slated for closure
• GAO found Soto Cano’s original purpose gone but the base remained
• Generous military allowances distort local overseas housing markets
• German politicians defended bases on economic rather than security grounds
• Germany’s own forces could defend it without US bases
• GI crimes abroad have repeatedly triggered mass protests against U.S. bases
• GIs committed about 350 rapes and assaults against Okinawan women from 1945 to 2011
• GIs treated Korean women as transferable property they bought and resold
• Global military construction spending in 2014 exceeded several entire civilian agencies’ budgets
• Government-funded sexually objectifying entertainment helped cause the military’s sexual assault epidemic.
• Grassroots and congressional opposition forced a major scaling back of the Guam build-up.
• Grassroots protest campaigns forced the Navy off Culebra and Vieques
• Guam functions as a single integrated base for the US arsenal
• Guam hosts the military’s most advanced weapon systems.
• Guam is militarily central yet bureaucratically treated as foreign
• Guam is regarded as among the world’s most important military bases.
• Guam residents are American citizens who lack the constitutional rights of other Americans
• Guam residents remain American citizens denied full constitutional rights
• Guam’s poverty rate and income gap worsened by 2013
• Guam’s two main bases displaced a village and control coastal land
• Guam’s wartime loyalty was answered with continued U.S. military rule rather than citizenship
• Guantánamo base functions as a self-contained American town
• Guantanamo Bay base resembles a self-contained American suburb
• Guantánamo Bay’s economic impact on Cuba is almost entirely negative
• Guantanamo’s base itself escaped the prison-closure debate
• Guantanamo’s prison occupies only a few acres of its vast naval station
• Gulf of Guinea oil drives sudden U.S. military interest in São Tomé
• Historical base cases cannot prove that overseas bases provide security
• Honduran Contra bases enabled an illegal weapons and drug scandal reaching the presidency.
• Honduras served as an unsinkable aircraft carrier for US proxy wars
• Host countries bear steep financial and social costs from U.S. bases
• Host nations paid the U.S. about $1.1 billion in 2012 to sustain bases
• Host nations pay the US for vacated base infrastructure
• Host nations, not the U.S., absorb base-related environmental and noise costs
• Host states competed to supply sex workers for GI trade
• Host-city residents resisted a base because it damaged local identity and pride
• Host-country costs rebound as rising hostility against America
• Host-country power relative to the United States determines base claims’ sincerity
• Host-nation opposition and use restrictions are driving the Pentagon toward small covert bases
• Hosting base helicopters makes locals feel complicit in distant wars
• Hosting US bases makes host countries targets for attack
• Housing and amenity plans became obsolete when the brigade stayed split
• Huge base construction implies the military plans to keep fighting abroad.
• Humanitarian and counternarcotics spending function as bases-related costs omitted from official tallies
• Humanitarian military aid functions partly to maintain overseas base access.
• Humanitarian military missions primarily serve troop deployment training and presence, not aid
• Imperial expansion across the Pacific was launched from Guantánamo Bay.
• In-kind base payments fund projects Congress would never have approved
• Independent estimates of overseas base costs exceed official figures tenfold
• Independent estimates put overseas base costs tenfold above the Pentagon’s figure
• Indigenous residents and military personnel hold incompatible relationships to the land
• Individual disease rarely links conclusively to a specific contaminant even in famous cases.
• Individual protesters embrace American culture while opposing U.S. military bases
• Institutions rarely admit their founding mission is obsolete
• Intimate relationships can challenge the military’s monopoly on soldiers’ loyalty
• Iraq’s parliament overrode Pentagon plans for fifty-eight enduring bases after occupation ended
• Iraqi base logistics created self-perpetuating contractor waste cycles
• Italy’s high court blocked a base referendum citing a secret 1954 U.S. agreement
• Japan accepted US rule of Okinawa to avoid bases on the mainland.
• Japan colonized Okinawa and used it as an imperial military outpost
• Japan colonized the independent Ryukyu Kingdom and used it as a military outpost.
• Japan covers roughly three-quarters of U.S. basing costs annually
• Japan institutionalized economic payments to secure Okinawan acquiescence to U.S. bases
• Japan institutionalized subsidies to buy Okinawan base acceptance.
• Japan no longer needs U.S. bases for its own defense
• Japan occupied Guam for thirty-two months during World War II with brutal force.
• Japan’s leaders accepted Okinawa’s US colonization to keep bases away from mainland
• Japan’s wartime occupation imprisoned thousands of Chamorros in camps.
• Japanese occupation shaped Guam’s Chamorro self-determination today
• Japanese subsidies institutionalized a quid pro quo purchasing Okinawan tolerance of U.S. bases
• Japanese taxpayers fund roughly three quarters of U.S. basing costs
• Jet fuel spills at Diego Garcia polluted soil and groundwater over decades
• Jet noise from U.S. bases harms health and learning in Japan
• Jet noise from U.S. bases harms local residents’ health.
• John Quincy Adams offered a governing alternative to expansion and military bases
• John Quincy Adams warned against seeking foreign enemies in 1821.
• Joint military exercises function as a path to permanent access without formal bases.
• Judgments about overseas base security value rest on prior beliefs, not evidence
• Juicy bars thinly disguised prostitution that officials publicly denied noticing
• KBR accounted for the vast majority of wartime fraud according to Pentagon auditors
• KBR held a monopoly-grade LOGCAP contract for eight years without facing a competitor.
• Keeping a service member overseas costs taxpayers tens of thousands more per year
• Keeping U.S. troops in Japan costs taxpayers over a billion dollars extra annually
• Kevin Maher’s derogatory Okinawa remarks cost him his diplomatic post within days
• Korean and U.S. authorities jointly institutionalized military prostitution
• Kwajalein displacement created Ebeye’s density exceeding Mumbai’s.
• Kwajalein’s troop facilities starkly outclass displaced residents’ Ebeye living conditions.
• Latin America faced few external security threats after the Cold War.
• Lease-construction concealed multi-decade costs by front-loading them onto developers.
• Lease-construction contracts produced shoddy bases built by mafia firms
• Lease-construction shifts base-building costs from upfront appropriation to decades of guaranteed rent
• Leaving Pentagon money unspent would end an officer’s career
• Lily pad base rhetoric carries racialized frontier and civilizing overtones.
• Lily pad bases are kept secret to avoid protest and accountability.
• Lily pad bases cluster in weak states with lax environmental laws and lower costs.
• Lily pad networks reproduce full military capacity while avoiding bases’ visible political costs.
• Lily pads grant the U.S. Subic-era access without the political costs of large garrisons
• Lily pads provide redundancy so base denial by one host can be bypassed
• Lily pads quietly expand US military reach into new conflict zones.
• Lily pads self-reproduce and trigger base races that heighten conflict risk.
• Lily pads serve as back doors for political and economic influence.
• Lily pads still generate local harm and protest despite their small footprint.
• Little America base versions trace to the post-WWII occupation of Germany
• Little America bases insulate troops and transform host-nation culture and economies
• Little America bases normalized permanent overseas troop presence as legitimate.
• Little Americas normalized permanent peacetime overseas troop deployment
• Live-fire training destroys ecosystems and endangered species on islands
• Local base opposition can win concessions but not full withdrawal
• Local business elites amplify security rationales to justify base expansion.
• Local economic beneficiaries skew base politics toward support even amid broad opposition
• Local Guam residents remained uninformed while mainland readers learned of the discharge.
• Local Italian rumor held that Admiral Boorda was murdered by the mafia.
• Local Korean officials formally approved UN comfort stations during the Korean War
• Local movements and host governments have forced base closures via civil disobedience and leases
• Local populations embrace base buildups for anticipated economic benefits.
• Local protest can stop new base construction even when it cannot close existing bases
• Local sovereignty norms weaken local opposition to foreign bases regardless of public sentiment.
• Local zoning laws were criminally altered to hand farmland to the Navy’s developer
• Locating bases in poor crime-ridden areas entwines the military with organized crime
• Losses of major bases drove the U.S. to build smaller lily pads worldwide
• Lucky Luciano aided the Allied invasion of Sicily from prison
• MacArthur and Kennan championed an offshore island perimeter ringing East Asia.
• Mahan argued great powers need far-flung naval bases to protect commerce
• Mahan’s naval doctrine directly drove the forward basing expansion
• Mahanian naval strategy drove the plan to make the Pacific an American lake.
• Maher denied making the remarks and accused the students of fabricating them
• Maintaining bases in undemocratic nations makes the United States complicit in their abuses
• Many dispersed bases give the US wartime redundancy and lower eviction costs.
• Marines planned a gun range atop a sacred indigenous village and burial site.
• Marrying GIs rarely rescues club workers and usually worsens their plight
• Massive Japanese spending has failed to lift Okinawa’s economy
• Massive local protest can force national attention onto a proposed base
• Medium-sized bases are designed to expand from temporary into permanent facilities.
• Micronesia’s military enlistment and war-death rates exceed every U.S. state
• Middle East bases persist to dominate oil reserves, not to deter the Soviet Union
• MilCon funding acts as a slippery slope toward far larger base expenditures.
• Militaries have depended on unacknowledged women’s labor including sex work to function
• Militaries have long institutionalized prostitution as a tool to control soldiers’ labor
• Militaries regulate soldiers’ sex access by controlling women and their labor
• Militaries use paid access to sex to deepen troops’ dependence on military salaries
• Military aid to Honduras skyrocketed in exchange for Contra sanctuary
• Military base housing strictly segregates officers from enlisted troops
• Military base terminology is chosen to minimize perceptions of occupation
• Military bases abroad are dangerous, unhealthy places despite their pleasant appearance
• Military bases concentrate environmental harm in poorer non-Western communities
• Military bases expand dramatically and accumulate amenities over time
• Military bases extend total-institution control over civilian family members.
• Military bases foster the specific conditions that enable rape across human societies
• Military bases historically acquire land through varied means, often by force
• Military bases magnify environmental harm beyond what any civilian concentration causes
• Military bases provide weaker economic benefits than commonly assumed
• Military bases served as bargaining chips for postwar commercial air rights
• Military boot camp trains recruits to equate manhood with acquisition of phallic dominance
• Military cargo flights accidentally introduced brown tree snakes that devastated Guam’s wildlife.
• Military cargo flights accidentally introduced invasive brown tree snakes to Guam
• Military cargo flights accidentally introduced snakes that extinguished Guam bird species.
• Military community-outreach meetings function as sales pitches rather than genuine consultation
• Military construction at unspecified locations likely falls mostly overseas.
• Military construction spending exemplifies unchecked military-industrial profligacy
• Military construction spending is so profligate it is out of control
• Military contractors are pivoting to UN peacekeeping and oil facilities
• Military contractors cost two to three times more than Pentagon civilians doing identical work.
• Military contractors feared post-war contraction of their markets
• Military contractors have given nearly 200 million dollars to congressmembers since 1990
• Military contractors pay far lower effective tax rates than other large U.S. companies
• Military demand distorted local housing so badly Italians pretended to be Americans
• Military deployments make spouses function as single parents and strain families
• Military Ebola mobilization piggybacked on a pre-existing African basing agenda
• Military Ebola response doubled as pre-planned African base building
• Military entertainment culture contributes to assaults the force is meant to prevent.
• Military environments structurally enable sexual assault regardless of recruits’ innate nature
• Military exchanges operate abroad tax-free and subsidized, fueling black markets
• Military exercises abroad are partly timed for leisure perks rather than strategic need
• Military exercises in the Philippines conceal near-permanent U.S. troop deployments
• Military expedience first forged the U.S.-mafia alliance in WWII
• Military expenditure is theft from social needs, Eisenhower argued.
• Military facilities occupy roughly thirty percent of Guam’s land.
• Military family support emerged as a retention strategy, not philanthropy
• Military figures urged making Guam and the Marianas full US states
• Military in-kind payments fund questionable projects Congress would never approve
• Military institutions proposed blaming victims and separating sexes instead of enforcing existing sexual-assault laws.
• Military leaders feared sex because relationships could compete with their monopoly on troops’ loyalty
• Military leaders justified retaining bases through redundancy and strategic denial principles.
• Military leadership prioritizes defending accused men over preventing sexual assault of women
• Military occupation of land is a net economic loss for Okinawa
• Military officials openly strategized to control and co-opt Chamorro community messaging
• Military PCB dumping poisoned Saipan residents who unknowingly reused the waste.
• Military policies create the camptown environments that encourage the very behavior they officially condemn.
• Military power shapes nearly every aspect of spouses’ lives on overseas bases
• Military prostitution trains soldiers in a militarized masculinity marked by violence and superiority.
• Military recruits disproportionately arrive as prior abuse victims, feeding later violence
• Military self-sufficiency gave way to contractors during the Vietnam War.
• Military service raises men’s sex-crime imprisonment odds while lowering other crime rates
• Military service raises the likelihood of sexual offending while lowering other crime rates
• Military service specifically elevates sex-crime imprisonment rates while lowering other crime rates.
• Military sexual assault is rampant, with nearly one in three female veterans raped
• Military spending creates fewer jobs per billion than social investments
• Military spending creates fewer than half the jobs of equivalent education investment.
• Military spouse hierarchies mirror their husbands’ command structures.
• Military spouses face 25 percent unemployment and 60 percent lower pay.
• Military spouses remain effectively on call even when partners are not deployed
• Military ties built early on junior officers yield later intelligence and arms procurement influence.
• Military tolerance of prostitution is limited by its threat to troop loyalty
• Military training dehumanizes women to teach soldiers to kill.
• Military wives’ clubs formalized hierarchies that paralleled husbands’ ranks
• Military-organized congressional trips corrupt oversight of overseas bases
• Misogynist training language is deliberately used to build battlefield aggression
• Missile advances make close-in Okinawa bases militarily obsolete
• Missile base construction crammed displaced Marshallese into Ebeye, denser than Mumbai today.
• Modern airlift and sealift make overseas bases save little deployment time.
• Modern airlift makes overseas troop basing nearly pointless for deployment speed.
• Modest base acreage nonetheless gave the U.S. global reach
• Most base agreements are secret executive agreements bypassing Congress
• Most Chagossians remain impoverished despite gaining UK citizenship.
• Most GI marriages to Asian women since WWII have ended in divorce
• Most Vicenza residents opposed the new U.S. base and wanted a referendum
• MPs surveilled gay bars recording service members’ license plates before 2011
• National courts can be mobilized quickly to block local challenges to foreign bases.
• Naval vessels function as floating bases excluded from overseas cost tallies.
• Navy bombing in Vieques contaminated food, water, and bodies with heavy metals.
• Navy bombing ranges contaminated Vieques so badly cleanup costs multiplied tenfold.
• Navy dumped two million pounds of military waste on Vieques, contaminating people and soil
• Navy environmental impact assessment covered the Guam Marine relocation
• Navy hid a 1988 radioactive reactor water discharge in Guam’s harbor
• Navy refused to vet contractors and prosecutors were removed after appealing
• Navy’s construction timetable caused destruction of priceless archaeological remains
• Nearly all military spouses abroad are women who bear the brunt of sacrifice
• Nearly all reported military sexual assaults escape punishment or disciplinary action
• Nearly every military base contains toxic chemicals and hazardous waste.
• Nearly half of returned U.S. bases in Korea exceed cancer-chemical standards.
• New base plans united ideologically opposed Italian groups
• New bases near China and Russia may create the threats they guard against
• New European base construction contradicts the military’s own drawdown posture
• New U.S. bases near rivals may create the very threats they aim to counter.
• New U.S. bases trigger large aid increases; closures trigger large aid cuts.
• No African country besides Liberia offered to host Africom, reflecting widespread opposition.
• No-bid Pentagon contracts nearly tripled between 2001 and 2010
• Nuclear testing displaced six Marshall Islands groups beyond just Bikini
• Objectifying military entertainment reinforces the culture behind troop violence against locals.
• Occupied Kwajalein’s base amenities starkly outpace displaced Ebeye’s slum
• Off-limits lists backfired by advertising bars and driving them to loopholes.
• Off-limits lists gave troops ideas about where to find prostitutes
• Officer spouses face career-linked pressure to perform unpaid community labor.
• Officers’ wives face informal duties that can affect their husbands’ careers
• Official base cost tallies exclude billions in classified overseas programs
• Official overseas base cost figures exclude all war-zone maintenance spending
• Official overseas base cost figures omit over a billion dollars in construction
• Official overseas base costs for 2012 totaled 22.7 billion dollars
• Official overseas base costs undercount true spending by more than threefold.
• Official overseas military cost reports omit hundreds of millions in allied spending
• Official Pentagon figures understate overseas base costs by over fivefold
• Official war appropriations exclude huge unacknowledged costs like veterans care and interest
• Official war budgets undercount true costs by tens of billions annually.
• Officials call U.S.-funded and U.S.-operated installations host-country bases
• Officials omitted the human costs of displacement from consideration
• Officials rebranded the Vicenza base to distance it from local opposition
• Officials tolerated camptown prostitution as routine troop bonding behavior
• Offshore bases lower the threshold for launching interventionist wars
• Okinawa bases buried toxic barrels near schools and veterans testify to Agent Orange there
• Okinawa bases keep Japan locked in as a U.S. client state
• Okinawa bases protect the Marine Corps from existential budget scrutiny
• Okinawa Marines cannot deploy rapidly due to transport and range constraints
• Okinawa Marines lack transport capacity to deploy rapidly in a regional crisis
• Okinawa regained nominal sovereignty in 1972 but kept long-term U.S. base tenancy.
• Okinawa remains Japan’s poorest prefecture partly due to US occupation until 1972.
• Okinawa’s ‘reversion’ to Japan was actually a purchase by Japan
• Okinawa’s 1972 return to Japan left its U.S. base burden largely unchanged
• Okinawa’s bases contaminated soil with dioxin barrels and Agent Orange.
• Okinawa’s Marine force shrank sharply during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars without harm
• Okinawa’s population crowds the paved southern third while the north remains green
• Okinawan authorities documented thousands of GI crimes and accidents since 1972.
• Okinawan base-realignment promises have largely gone unfulfilled for two decades
• Okinawan officials documented thousands of GI crimes and accidents over four decades
• Okinawan press saw Maher’s comments as revealing true U.S. attitudes toward the island
• One in three servicewomen is sexually assaulted, with base-abroad overrepresentation
• One released rapist of an Okinawan girl later committed murder and suicide
• Only some Okinawans oppose bases despite wanting Futenma closed.
• Opposition to US base growth is led by young local activists.
• Organized crime built and maintained U.S. bases despite facing U.S. anti-crime sanctions
• Organized crime extorted subcontractors working on U.S. base construction in Italy.
• Osan Air Base’s camptown has 92 bars within 400 yards of its gate.
• Osprey deployment to Okinawa triggered 85,000-person protests in 2012.
• Osprey deployment to Okinawa triggered protests rivaling the 1995 demonstrations.
• Outsourced base construction began during the Vietnam War through Brown & Root
• Overseas base beneficiaries are concentrated interests while costs spread broadly
• Overseas base contractors sustain self-perpetuating waste on a staggering scale
• Overseas base contracts range from $43 to $301 million apiece.
• Overseas base life is now comfortable and family-oriented, benefiting children
• Overseas base maintenance costs taxpayers over $100 billion annually
• Overseas base spending exceeds every federal agency’s budget except Defense.
• Overseas base support rests on an unprovable appeasement counterfactual
• Overseas bases and troops cost around $136 billion in 2014
• Overseas bases are among the least contested policies in American politics
• Overseas bases cause environmental damage, crime, displacement, and colonial relations
• Overseas bases cost more to run than domestic ones despite host-nation support
• Overseas bases create entrenched constituencies dependent on their continuation
• Overseas bases generate dependent communities that resist closure
• Overseas bases lock the U.S. into a permanently militarized, less-secure society.
• Overseas bases make war more likely by lowering its cost
• Overseas bases offer little deployment advantage over US-based forces
• Overseas bases operate as insulated self-contained American towns
• Overseas bases reveal America’s permanent war footing and militarized economy
• Overseas bases spawn self-perpetuating communities dependent on their continued operation
• Overseas bases sustain colonial relationships that deny citizens basic democratic rights
• Overseas basing consensus survives unquestioned across both U.S. parties even without a superpower rival
• Overseas basing costs more than domestic basing despite host-nation support
• Overseas basing worsens sexual assault and fuels trafficking
• Overseas military construction routinely receives misleading justifications to secure funding.
• Overseas military health care and benefits add over $11.6 billion to the base bill.
• Overseas military labs build influence and are not purely scientific
• Overseas military labs extend US influence beyond purely scientific purposes.
• Overseas postings leave a quarter of military spouses unemployed.
• Pågat retains visible remains of a sacred indigenous village and burial ground
• Penetration and dominance define the idealized military masculinity groomed on bases
• Pentagon construction requests repeatedly lack basic cost documentation
• Pentagon contracting officials directly move into contractor executive roles
• Pentagon cost estimates for the Guam buildup are grossly unreliable
• Pentagon European base closures spared all major installations.
• Pentagon forces have quietly expanded to a dozen new African air bases
• Pentagon had preplanned African bases before the Ebola deployment
• Pentagon military construction spending routinely disregards costs and law with little Congressional oversight
• Pentagon obscures contractor identities behind a catchall label
• Pentagon officials relied on political allies to fund a Naples base project.
• Pentagon officials spend all allocated funds or risk losing future budgets
• Pentagon officials tried to leverage congressional allies to secure base funding
• Pentagon overseas cost reports omit countries with major bases and understate others.
• Pentagon rotations of special operations forces mask a de facto permanent Honduran presence
• Pentagon spending in Honduras spiked to record levels after the coup.
• Permanent overseas basing is a quasi-religious tenet of U.S. policy
• Philippine independence in 1946 was conditioned on a ninety-nine-year rent-free U.S. base lease.
• Philippine independence was conditioned on continued US colonial control of bases
• Political change and disasters forced U.S. base closures in the Philippines and Panama
• Political connections and suspected payoffs influenced the U.S. contract award to the Coppolas.
• Political passions at US bases can erupt into violence within hours
• Political pressure from American wives drove the 1945 family-reunification decision
• Political self-protection, not military necessity, drove the basing decision
• Post-1996 terror attacks drove the military to close small bases and enlarge fortress-like megabases
• Post-2001 recruitment pressures led to moral waivers for one in five enlisted troops.
• Post-Cold War Latin America faced almost no external security threats warranting U.S. bases
• Post-Cold War Southcom invented disaster and drug missions to justify itself
• Post-Cold War U.S. base closures did not damage Germany’s overall economy
• Post-dictatorship constitutions in the Philippines and Panama ended U.S. base leases
• Post-Korea US troop levels in Germany held near 260,000 for decades
• Postwar Allied occupation drove up to 60 percent of Naples cargo into black markets.
• Postwar base expansion was driven by commercial airline and economic ambitions
• Postwar base retention was justified by redundancy and strategic denial principles.
• Postwar decolonization forced the military to maintain colonies under new guises via bases
• Postwar decolonization threatened to strip the U.S. of overseas bases
• Postwar Germany’s base lifestyle was born from a crisis of GI misconduct
• Postwar Naples black markets outlasted those elsewhere in Italy.
• Postwar occupation abuse and prostitution were rampant among GIs in Germany
• Postwar occupation forces seized property and euphemized rape as liberating
• Postwar occupation troops in Germany caused rampant social problems that damaged US prestige
• Postwar Pacific bases rested on a Mahanian naval doctrine of dominance.
• Postwar U.S. land seizures destroyed Guam’s self-sufficient food economy
• Postwar US military global reach exceeded that of any prior empire
• Postwar US power substituted a global base network for direct colonial control
• Postwar US strategy shifted toward small islands to avoid decolonizing mainland populations
• Postwar weakness drove Italy to grant the US broad base and communications rights
• Pre-2007 Africa was a military afterthought, Somalia combat having bred retreat.
• Pressure over the Dal Molin base contributed to the fall of Italy’s government
• Promoters recruit Filipina women through deception and debt bondage
• Providing paid commercial sex keeps troops financially dependent and enlisted
• Proving individual illness from pollution is nearly impossible even in clear-cut cases
• Psychological isolation rather than locks mainly keeps trafficked women enslaved.
• Psychological isolation rather than physical locks is the main method of coercion
• PX shopping privileges buy the silence and complicity of foreign officials
• PX shopping privileges silence local leaders and officials critical of base operations
• Quality-of-life amenities were built to retain expensively trained personnel.
• Race has no biological reality but is a potent social force
• Race is socially constructed rather than biologically real but has powerful social effects
• Racial identity alone determined which displaced islanders received U.S. support
• Redundancy and strategic denial drive the military to keep bases it barely uses
• Removal reduced Chagossians to landless, workless poverty at the Navy’s whim
• Repeated exercises gradually convert informal access into guaranteed crisis-use rights
• Repeated U.S. military accidents have killed and injured Okinawan civilians for decades
• Reported costs for active bases like Colombia and Yemen are implausibly low.
• Repurposed bases in Okinawa produce far more economic value than the bases did
• Researchers face routine surveillance and restricted access at U.S. bases abroad.
• Residents of remote base areas feel invisible relative to mainland Americans
• Retention concerns drove the military to treat families as force multipliers
• Rising Korean incomes pushed sex work onto poorer Filipina migrants.
• Rivero was promoted to admiral for choosing Bikini, then oversaw Diego Garcia.
• Ron Paul championed overseas base closures in 2012
• Roosevelt bypassed Congress to acquire ninety-nine-year leases on Caribbean bases before Pearl Harbor
• Roosevelt planned a permanent postwar global base network before Pearl Harbor
• Roosevelt’s ‘total defense’ doctrine redefined national security to require worldwide vigilance.
• Rotating rationales always justify keeping any base open
• Rotating training teams create de facto permanent U.S. military presence
• Roughly one in nine Pentagon contractors illegally evaded taxes while holding contracts.
• Rumsfeld judged the inherited Cold War basing structure unaffordable
• Russia in 2014 announced four new overseas bases
• Russian annexation of Crimea aimed to protect its Sevastopol naval base from NATO
• Sailors felt protected by mafia landlords from ordinary crime
• Saudi public anger forced a nominal U.S. withdrawal, but bases stayed warm and secret.
• Scattered small bases force collaboration with despotic regimes and enable coups.
• Scholars documented resistance to the US military buildup on Guam
• Secret overseas base spending likely exceeds the official estimate.
• Self-contained base amenities keep troop spending from reaching host economies.
• Self-contained bases now leak few dollars into local economies
• Self-contained family base communities normalized and legitimized permanent overseas occupation
• Self-contained military bases leak little of their spending into local economies.
• Seventeen African nations opposed Africom and none except Liberia offered to host it
• Sex trade districts with uniform character develop outside U.S. bases worldwide
• Sex work dominated Korean camptown economies built around U.S. military bases
• Sex workers near US bases are trapped by debt, passport confiscation, and coercion.
• Sexually objectifying base entertainment links to epidemic of military sexual assault
• Sexually objectifying USO entertainment traditions reinforce the objectification that enables sexual assault.
• Sharing drafts with disagreeing interviewees is a test of research fairness.
• Six million tons of garbage remain scattered across Naples’ region
• Sixteen thousand US military sites worldwide may contain unexploded ordnance
• Skin color and ties to America determined who could return to their islands.
• Small ‘forward operating site’ terminology lets officials deny that US bases exist
• Small forward bases provoke local controversies just as much as large ones do
• Small forward bases still harm local communities and provoke opposition.
• Small lily pad bases routinely expand into behemoth installations.
• Small military outposts advance U.S. business and deepen host-country dependence.
• Small secret U.S. outposts avoid scrutiny and use contractors the government can disown
• Small temporary bases routinely grow into large permanent ones with rising costs.
• Smaller bases do not reliably avoid the local controversies large bases provoke
• Smaller lily pad bases still harm local communities despite hopes they would avoid controversy.
• SOFA restrictions shrink as US power relative to host nations grows.
• Soldiers’ sexual exploitation of local women is socially constructed, not natural male behavior.
• Some Okinawan deaths at U.S. hands were deliberate murders by servicemen
• Some U.S. officials may benefit from perpetuating Korean tensions.
• Soto Cano Air Base was a stop in the 2009 Honduran coup against Zelaya.
• Soto Cano base in Honduras is treated as temporary but indefinitely permanent
• South Korea and the US both criminalized prostitution near bases in 2004-2005.
• South Korea forcibly evicted farmers for a U.S. base expansion in 2006.
• South Korea replaced Korean camptown sex workers with imported Filipina and Russian women
• South Korea violently evicted villagers to expand a U.S. base in 2006-2007.
• South Korean camptowns suspended sovereignty and depended wholly on GI spending
• South Korean in-kind payments fund unauthorized discretionary military projects
• South Korean officials actively promoted prostitution as a state strategy
• South Korean officials actively promoted sex work to attract GI dollars.
• Southcom exploited disasters and the drug war to expand
• Southcom invented new missions to justify its own continuation
• Split basing forces soldiers on a nine-hundred-mile round-trip for training
• Splitting one rapid-reaction brigade between two countries undermines its deployment speed
• Spouses do unpaid community-building labor under pressure that may affect partners’ reviews
• Spouses of service members are effectively on call to the military.
• Stakeholder benefits from the status quo stall base closures.
• States committed illegal acts to expel stateless persons whom no country would accept
• Stationing a soldier abroad costs each taxpayer $10,000–$40,000 more annually
• Stationing troops overseas costs tens of thousands more per person annually
• Strategic gain calculations discounted the humanity of displaced peoples
• Supporting dictators harms the United States as much as host nations
• Supporting repressive regimes gives the U.S. military incentive to block democratization.
• Systematic male-on-male rape is pervasive across US military institutions
• Tax-law change left contractor employees ineligible for unemployment insurance
• Taxpayer-funded troop salaries generate economic spillover in host countries.
• Technological advances have made overseas deployment nearly no faster than domestic deployment.
• Ten corporations captured over $115 billion of overseas base contracts
• Ten corporations captured over $115 billion of Pentagon base-contract spending.
• Ten private contractors captured nearly a third of Pentagon base spending abroad
• Terrorist attacks since 1996 drove consolidation into larger fortified bases.
• The 1940 destroyers-for-bases deal founded today’s U.S. global base system.
• The 1945 Battle of Okinawa razed nearly every structure on the island
• The 1945 decision allowing military families overseas was a radical historical departure
• The 1945 family-reunification decision created today’s overseas base communities
• The 1954 Guatemalan coup was staged from a United Fruit plantation in Honduras
• The 1954 U.S.-Italy base agreement remains classified and may violate Italy’s constitution
• The 1972 reversion actually increased Okinawa’s share of US bases.
• The 1975 Washington Post broke the Chagossian expulsion story as a mass kidnapping.
• The 1979 Iranian revolution and Soviet invasion of Afghanistan triggered the Middle East buildup
• The 1995 rape of an Okinawan schoolgirl finally forced base-reduction negotiations
• The 1996 Futenma response resulted in billions in new base housing construction.
• The 2006 Guam buildup moved Okinawa forces while expanding all military branches’ footprint.
• The 2009 Honduran coup conspirators stopped at the US base.
• The 2015 military construction bill curtailed unapproved overseas building.
• The all-volunteer force made military families an $8 billion annual expense
• The Army abandoned a base’s stated purpose after spending most of the construction funds
• The Army abandoned its stated consolidation purpose after spending most of the build funds.
• The Army broke a 2000 promise and manufactured the split-basing problem in 2006
• The Army built Dal Molin but never used it for its stated purpose
• The Army chose a free-site base in Italy over a costly, better-located one.
• The Army could not produce a cost analysis supporting its changed basing decision
• The Army created the split-basing problem it used to justify a new base.
• The Army manufactured a basing problem to justify new base funding
• The Army redirected troops to keep Grafenwoehr visibly occupied and justify its funding
• The arrival of families forced the military to build self-contained American-style towns on bases.
• The base site was chosen partly because its population was deemed negligible
• The Battle of Okinawa killed as many people as both atomic bombings combined
• The Battle of Okinawa razed nearly every settlement on the island.
• The Bikini islanders were displaced with no real choice in the matter
• The Bikini relocation was a disastrous mistake dismissed with racist press coverage.
• The Bikinians’ consent was a fiction; removal was pre-approved before asking.
• The Bikinians’ relocation was executed hastily and catastrophically planned
• The buildup planned military infrastructure while leaving civilian water and utilities underfunded.
• The Bush administration planned to consolidate most forces on a few enormous main bases.
• The Carter Doctrine spawned the largest base-building effort in history
• The Chagossian eviction was never militarily necessary and cheap to remedy.
• The CIA built Contra bases that overwhelmed Honduran provinces
• The CIA has become a major overseas war-fighting force since 2001.
• The CIA now operates as a major military war-fighting force
• The CIA overthrew Guatemala’s democracy to protect United Fruit’s monopoly
• The CIA supported the Sicilian Mafia during the Cold War
• The CIA trained Guatemalan rebels on a United Fruit plantation in Honduras in 1954.
• The codified drinky system structures sex-for-pay transactions near bases.
• The Cold War outcome does not prove deterrence worked
• The containment rationale for Okinawa bases now rests on weaker threats
• The cost report excludes bases in U.S. territories lacking full voting representation.
• The Cuban Missile Crisis shows bases provoke the encircled power
• The Cuban missile crisis shows encircling bases provoke dangerous reactions
• The Dal Molin base decision helped topple Italy’s prime minister.
• The destroyers-for-bases deal marked the start of US global basing empire
• The destroyers-for-bases deal transformed the US into a global military power.
• The Dharan base was built for oil access despite having no military use
• The Diego Garcia base deal bypassed congressional and parliamentary approval
• The Diego Garcia deal bypassed legislative approval and was signed in secret
• The Ebola military deployment served pre-existing base-building plans
• The family policy aimed to retain skilled soldiers facing overseas deployments
• The flexible terrorist category is repurposed against domestic movements threatening empire
• The forward strategy detached US security from national territory
• The forward strategy transformed the US from opposing standing armies to global military patrol.
• The Futenma replacement base proposal drew cost, safety, and environmental objections.
• The Futenma response agreement produced billions in new US housing funded by Japan.
• The global base network is what enables the U.S. to wage distant wars
• The global base network predates and exceeds any empire’s military footprint in history
• The global base system stems from pre-WWII total-defense thinking
• The Guam buildup planned a nearly 50 percent population increase in four years.
• The Guam buildup would add nearly fifty percent to the island’s population
• The Guantánamo lease is perpetual and eviction-proof, reverting only by mutual consent.
• The Guantánamo prison occupies only a tiny fraction of the base
• The harms of base-area prostitution reach troops’ families back home
• The human cost of capturing Pacific islands emotionally justified keeping them after war.
• The Iranian revolution and Soviet invasion of Afghanistan triggered the Carter Doctrine
• The Korean and Vietnam wars drove further base expansion waves
• The Middle East base network persisted after its Cold War justification vanished
• The militarized suburban base lifestyle originated as a 1940s response to occupation tensions
• The military built its largest overseas facility as a taxpayer-funded mall
• The military burned solid waste in open-air pits despite building $11.5 million incinerators
• The military displaces locals rather than coexist with them.
• The military displaces populations to avoid dealing with local people entirely.
• The military downsized overseas bases but kept its same global footprint.
• The military functions as a total institution governing nearly every aspect of life.
• The military is a total institution controlling members’ bodies and life choices
• The military manufactures operational justifications after projects are already chosen.
• The military markets bases abroad by promising local benefits
• The military used bases to suppress anti-Chinese railroad riots
• The military uses ‘operating site’ nomenclature to deny bases exist.
• The military’s own defense university deemed Soto Cano counterproductive
• The Navy admiral’s 1996 death left unresolved suspicions of Naples corruption
• The Navy awarded contracts to a mafia-indicted contractor
• The Navy awarded Mafia-linked contractors despite murder and bid-rigging indictments
• The Navy chose Bikini Atoll partly for its tiny indigenous population
• The Navy concealed its use of the mafia for the Sicily invasion
• The Navy defined forward deployment as the first requirement of its strategy.
• The Navy disguised a major base as a $17.8 million communications facility
• The Navy disguised Diego Garcia base construction as a communications facility
• The Navy knowingly leased housing owned by sanctioned Camorra bosses’ families.
• The Navy now blocks sailors from using local water due to contamination
• The Navy refused to hand over its housing database to Italian anti-mafia investigators.
• The Navy seized three quarters of Vieques and nearly evicted all remaining inhabitants.
• The Navy’s construction timetable pressured developers to plow through priceless archaeological sites
• The Navy’s crime links flow from how it secures stable base locations.
• The Navy’s lease-construction contract structure structurally invited Camorra criminal involvement
• The new base network mirrors the nineteenth-century global coaling-station system
• The new hospital barely improves transit time over the existing facility.
• The official overseas military cost report omits Navy vessel costs.
• The official who orchestrated the Chagossian eviction later admitted it was militarily unnecessary
• The overseas base network is what enables sustained distant warfare
• The Overseas Cost Summary omits entire categories of overseas spending
• The Panama Canal Zone granted the U.S. quasi-colonial sovereignty in perpetuity
• The peace-keeping rationale for overseas bases lacks supporting evidence.
• The Pentagon accepted $60 million in advance payments without Congress’s knowledge
• The Pentagon accused a single food contractor of $757 billion in overbilling
• The Pentagon achieved measurable environmental reductions on bases beginning in 1989.
• The Pentagon circumvented Congress by building Honduran bases under exercise cover.
• The Pentagon cost report omits overseas troop health care.
• The Pentagon counts ‘small’ overseas bases valued up to $915 million
• The Pentagon deliberately obscures who receives billions in overseas contracts
• The Pentagon denies a Honduran coup role despite heavy spending there
• The Pentagon disbursed roughly $385 billion to overseas contractors from 2001 to 2013.
• The Pentagon evaded Congress by building bases under exercise cover
• The Pentagon funded new European bases and schools before completing consolidation reviews.
• The Pentagon has quietly built roughly a dozen African air bases since 2007
• The Pentagon is the only federal agency that cannot pass a financial audit
• The Pentagon kept contracting with a criminally indicted supplier via suspension overrides.
• The Pentagon lacked basic documentation for its billion-dollar hospital funding requests.
• The Pentagon legally must report total overseas base spending each year
• The Pentagon lobbied São Tomé’s president to host a military support port
• The Pentagon quietly built dozens of African bases despite Africom’s official claims.
• The Pentagon reported major environmental improvements since 1989
• The Pentagon routinely spends billions on construction with flawed cost analysis and minimal oversight
• The Pentagon routinely violates the law requiring cash settlements for returned bases
• The Pentagon secretly paid $14 million for Diego Garcia, bypassing Congress
• The Pentagon shifted to small covert ‘lily pad’ bases to evade local opposition.
• The Pentagon spent $67.4 million on Honduran military contracts in 2012.
• The Pentagon spent heavily upgrading bases it shortly thereafter closed
• The Pentagon spent roughly $385 billion on overseas contractor work from 2001 to 2013
• The Pentagon uses private contractors and front companies to conceal its overseas base footprint.
• The Pentagon was a relatively early adopter of environmental awareness within U.S. government
• The Pentagon’s cost report omits a dozen known base-hosting countries
• The Pentagon’s cost-saving justifications for European base moves are unreliable
• The Pentagon’s Guam buildup budget massively understates true relocation costs by more than half.
• The Pentagon’s housing allowances raise rents for local communities abroad
• The Pentagon’s own university called Soto Cano base pointless and costly
• The Pentagon’s top overseas contracting recipient is an unnamed catchall category worth $47 billion.
• The Philippines and Panama expelled U.S. bases in the early 1990s
• The pre-1900 base network presaged later American global military dominance.
• The promised Futenma closure was conditioned on building another Okinawa base
• The proposed floating US base replacement was blocked by costs, safety, and dugongs
• The reciprocal scenario of foreign bases in America is unthinkable
• The same naval officer chose both nuclear test sites and Diego Garcia
• The same Navy officer who chose Bikini later led the Diego Garcia takeover.
• The security benefits of overseas bases rest on unproven deterrence theory
• The social costs of military prostitution spread to families and communities beyond the bases
• The split-basing problem justifying Vicenza expansion was self-inflicted
• The stated reason for a new hospital, faster transit, addressed no real medical problem.
• The stated reason for building a new base proved false after construction
• The Supreme Court denied constitutional protections to Guam’s people.
• The transit-time justification for the new hospital addresses no real medical problem
• The Tyler administration opened sixty-nine Chinese ports to US forces and trade
• The U.S. and Britain forcibly deported Diego Garcia’s entire population with no resettlement aid
• The U.S. base network exceeds any prior empire’s footprint
• The U.S. bombardment to retake Guam killed 1,170 Chamorros.
• The U.S. can project force globally without any permanent overseas bases.
• The U.S. continued colonial rule over Okinawa after Japan regained sovereignty in 1952
• The U.S. drug war shifted trafficking routes without reducing consumption, creating a balloon effect
• The U.S. forcibly deported an entire indigenous population to build a military base
• The U.S. governed Guam as a colony denying constitutional rights
• The U.S. holds more foreign bases than any empire in history
• The U.S. is the one extracting subsidies from Japan
• The U.S. lacks universal health care while spending heavily on overseas bases.
• The U.S. military deliberately minimized its overseas footprint to ease host-nation friction.
• The U.S. military has secured exemptions from major environmental laws
• The U.S. military invents new threats to justify its size after the Cold War.
• The U.S. military likely moves more households internationally than any private firm
• The U.S. military network has expanded geographically despite closing giant Cold War bases
• The U.S. military once discouraged soldier marriage and ignored families entirely
• The U.S. military repeatedly displaced indigenous peoples to build bases, impoverishing them
• The U.S. Navy freed Lucky Luciano to use mafia dock alliances against Axis saboteurs
• The U.S. Navy has worked with the Camorra since World War II
• The U.S. sought to stockpile basing rights before decolonization made islands unavailable
• The United States commonly pays host nations rather than the reverse.
• The United States commonly pays host nations rent for bases
• The United States denies universal health care while spending heavily on overseas bases
• The United States has shifted toward imperial ambitions despite unprecedented military strength
• The United States planned its postwar base network before Pearl Harbor.
• The United States retains overseas territories primarily for military power projection.
• The United States tends to support dictators in nations hosting its bases
• The United States used coerced lease terms to keep permanent control of Guantánamo.
• The US and UK carved up colonies to build Diego Garcia despite decolonization treaties
• The US announced Okinawa troop reductions while simultaneously increasing local forces
• The US chose Diego Garcia over better-positioned Indian Ocean islands because of its isolation
• The US displaced half of Okinawa’s population by the mid-1950s.
• The US has repeatedly intervened militarily across Latin America for two centuries
• The US made nineteen land expropriations in Panama between 1908 and 1931.
• The US military can deploy power faster than any rival without foreign bases.
• The US military is probably the world’s largest international moving company
• The US military prizes territories precisely for their lack of democratic rights
• The US Navy again chose a mafia-linked developer for its Naples housing.
• The US Navy rented housing from Camorra money-laundering fronts
• The US relocated over 3,200 Okinawans to Bolivia with broken promises
• The US resettled over 3,200 Okinawans to Bolivia with unfulfilled promises.
• The US secretly helped Denmark expel 150 Inughuit for a Greenland base
• The US secured rent-free Philippine base leases for ninety-nine years.
• The Vicenza base lacks nearby training areas, forcing costly training trips to Germany
• Third-country nationals form a lower tier of segregated base labor from the poorest countries
• Today’s Central American migrants are blowback from U.S. interventions
• Total overseas base costs reached $170 billion for fiscal year 2012.
• Traffickers take over half the earnings of women they import for camptown bars
• Trafficking victims near US bases face debt bondage enforced by passport confiscation
• Training soldiers to kill requires dehumanization that extends to women and ethnic others
• Transportation advances have erased the deployment-time advantage of overseas bases
• Treaties gave the U.S. perpetual sovereign rights over the Panama Canal Zone
• Troop impunity and power abroad produce crimes that traumatize entire host populations
• Troop salaries spent abroad leak economic benefit out of the US economy
• Troops internalize comfort as moral failure while deployed
• True objectivity is unknowable yet still worth striving toward in research.
• True overseas base costs exceed the official Pentagon total by over threefold
• Truman announced permanent postwar bases framed as protecting world peace
• Truman framed postwar bases as protection for US interests and world peace.
• U.S. and British forces deported Chagossians under conditions compared to slave ships.
• U.S. backed the Contras knowing they were brutal and couldn’t win
• U.S. base construction produced local economic booms in host regions.
• U.S. base expansion plans were kept hidden from affected local citizens
• U.S. base expansion threatened Vicenza’s drinking water, green space, and cultural fabric
• U.S. base occupation in Okinawa and Puerto Rico follows a shared colonial pattern
• U.S. base strategy has returned to a nineteenth-century coaling-station model.
• U.S. bases abroad are walled enclaves of plenty amid surrounding poverty
• U.S. bases and troops abroad cost about $170 billion in 2012
• U.S. bases created 28,538 toxic waste sites needing $50 billion in cleanup
• U.S. bases displaced about 250,000 Okinawans, nearly half the island’s population.
• U.S. bases have produced generations of abandoned children worldwide
• U.S. bases in Italy rest on agreements lacking genuine democratic consent
• U.S. bases in the Philippines may violate the country’s constitutional ban
• U.S. bases left behind undisclosed toxic burial pits under a Korean ambassador’s home
• U.S. basing favors despotic states over democratic ones
• U.S. basing in Italy rests on secret agreements that bypassed parliamentary consent
• U.S. bombardment of Guam disregarded the local population’s safety.
• U.S. bombardment of Guam killed over a thousand Chamorros
• U.S. colonial rule seeded the Philippines’ massive sex industry
• U.S. combatant commanders make basing decisions without access to cost data.
• U.S. congressional influence or payoffs may have secured a Navy construction contract
• U.S. covert support in Central America produced blowback against the United States.
• U.S. covert wars seeded gangs that now supply its drug markets
• U.S. exercises at Morón Air Base rehearsed defending Franco’s dictatorship
• U.S. exercises were designed to keep Franco’s regime in power.
• U.S. firms indefinitely defer corporate taxes on foreign income not repatriated
• U.S. forces abandoned hazardous ordnance and toxins when leaving the Philippines and Panama.
• U.S. forces built a recreation center inside a volcano crater near Naples.
• U.S. forces have intervened or occupied Honduras eight times
• U.S. forces in Korea spent in-kind funds on bases without review
• U.S. forces paid Italian workers with pistols visibly displayed on the pay table
• U.S. infrastructural control at bases blocks host-country development projects.
• U.S. intervention in Italy’s 1948 election secured decades of base access.
• U.S. lily pads turn allied militaries into proxy adjuncts that do the fighting
• U.S. maintained military relations with Honduras despite no-contact policy
• U.S. military administration regulated Korean sex workers through a VD control bureaucracy
• U.S. military aid to Honduras more than tripled in exchange for Contra sanctuary
• U.S. military arrests of mafia bosses simply rotated which gangster ran Naples.
• U.S. military base creation has repeatedly displaced indigenous island peoples into poverty.
• U.S. military base environmental harms fall disproportionately on colonized, poorer people of color
• U.S. military bases abroad have dramatically lower income inequality than the civilian economy
• U.S. military buildup displaced nearly half of Okinawa’s population
• U.S. military collaboration with repressive base-host regimes contradicts its democracy rhetoric.
• U.S. military construction spending in 2014 exceeded the budgets of several major federal agencies.
• U.S. military courts have acquitted service members who killed civilians abroad
• U.S. military operations in Africa exceed publicly disclosed scope
• U.S. military presence helped the Camorra outgrow the Sicilian Cosa Nostra economically
• U.S. military presence in Africa now exceeds that in Latin America and the Caribbean
• U.S. military reach now extends to nearly every country on earth.
• U.S. military relationships helped the Camorra surpass the Sicilian Cosa Nostra in power.
• U.S. naval sewage dumping polluted Diego Garcia’s protected coral lagoon for decades.
• U.S. Navy fleet stations circled five continents by the 1830s to protect trade.
• U.S. Navy personnel in Naples rent villas from Camorra crime families at inflated prices
• U.S. Navy Seabees assisted in deporting the Chagossians under slave-ship conditions
• U.S. occupation authorities continued Japan’s comfort station system in Korea
• U.S. occupation authorities continued Japan’s system of sexual slavery in Korea.
• U.S. occupation authorities embedded mafia figures into Allied governance in Naples.
• U.S. officials allowed only white Bonin islanders to return home
• U.S. officials collaborated with murderous regimes to secure base access overseas.
• U.S. officials deliberately demanded the removal of the Chagossian population.
• U.S. officials may have deliberately relied on the Mafia to secure base sites
• U.S. officials used Contras as a harassment proxy because direct intervention was impossible.
• U.S. overseas base operations long predate the 1898 Spanish-American War.
• U.S. personnel lived for decades in mafia-built housing condemned for crime and disrepair.
• U.S. planners feared decolonization would force withdrawal of overseas bases
• U.S. presence at Soto Cano makes America complicit in Honduran human rights abuses
• U.S. Seabees helped deport Chagossians in shipboard conditions compared to slave ships.
• U.S. security aid to Honduras may fuel deadly political violence
• U.S. ships dumped sewage into Diego Garcia’s lagoon and crashed a loaded B-1 there.
• U.S. support for Contras fueled Central America’s dirty wars and migration
• U.S. support for repression creates a cycle preventing democratization
• U.S. support produced unbroken one-party rule in the largest base hosts.
• U.S. tax law structurally incentivizes contractors to favor overseas bases.
• U.S. taxpayers are largely exempt from environmental cleanup abroad
• U.S. territories are retained mainly to host military bases
• U.S. territories persist as colonial relationships granting the military unmatched autonomy.
• U.S. territories remain colonial arrangements under new vocabulary.
• U.S. troop presence agreements on foreign soil more than doubled between 1991 and 2007.
• U.S. troops buried hundreds of leaky Agent Orange barrels at a Seoul base
• U.S. troops outnumbered Filipino troops in Philippine joint exercises
• U.S. wars and bases created sex industries across Okinawa, Thailand, and Vietnam.
• Underground water at Camp Kim exceeded petroleum limits by nearly a thousand times
• Unexploded ordnance contaminates thousands of U.S. military sites worldwide.
• US ‘temporary’ facilities in the Philippines may evade its constitutional ban on foreign bases.
• US aid made Honduras its closest ally yet poorest exception
• US base spending dwarfs the cost of universal health care
• US base spending persists while universal healthcare is deemed unaffordable
• US base-building destroyed Okinawa’s farmland economy and left its people in poverty.
• US bases abroad breed anti-Americanism and feed terrorist recruitment
• US bases create jurisdictional gaps that shield civilian contractors from prosecution
• US bases displaced Vieques residents and gutted its local economy
• US bases enforce strict class segregation between officers and enlisted troops
• US bases followed and assisted seizure of half of Mexico’s territory
• US bases in Italy rest on a secret 1954 agreement with undemocratic decision-making
• US bases near China and Russia borders raise confrontation risk
• US bases on Puerto Rico and Okinawa form colonial relationships that impoverish both islands.
• US bases run on a segregated underclass of third-country nationals
• US bulldozers destroyed century-old Okinawan terraced fields within minutes
• US conducts covert wars and undisclosed operations across Africa and Yemen
• US containment strategy treated Iran as the region’s central threat
• US counter-narcotics campaigns in Honduras bundled military presence with corporate and aid partners
• US diplomats pressured Italy by threatening to relocate the base elsewhere
• US displaced nearly half of Okinawa’s population and half its farmland
• US domination of Central America has been nearly unchallenged for two centuries
• US forces enjoy unrestricted access to all Honduran bases with no status agreement.
• US frontier forts operated as foreign bases enabling westward conquest
• US interest in African basing runs parallel to Gulf of Guinea oil exploration
• US military ‘incidents and accidents’ killed dozens of Okinawans.
• US military base construction was driven partly by oil interests in Saudi Arabia.
• US military bases abroad can be isolated enclaves of affluence contrasting with local poverty
• US military bases abroad routinely avoid environmental standards mandated by US law
• US military can project power farther than any rival without overseas bases
• US military facilities occupy nearly a third of Guam’s land
• US military has spent $30 billion on African bases and programs since 2001
• US military police actively protected bars trafficking women near bases
• US military police protected bars and trafficked women near South Korean bases.
• US military presence in Africa grew from hundreds to up to eleven thousand troops
• US missile testing displaced Marshallese to extreme overcrowding on Ebeye
• US NATO spending is excluded from official overseas base cost tallies.
• US officials pressured Italy into accepting a base by threatening relocation and sunk costs
• US officials regarded the Chagossians’ expulsion as colonial-era afterthought.
• US officials tolerated mafias for their efficiency and deniability.
• US officials treated Chagossian welfare as a trivial detail never discussed.
• US overseas base footprint is shrinking after budget cuts
• US overseas bases cost taxpayers at least $71.8 billion annually
• US overseas bases extend an ancient imperial strategy of encircling domination
• US overseas bases fall into three tiers, from Little Americas to lily pads
• US overseas bases make war more likely by easing military action
• US overseas bases predated the Spanish-American War by nearly a century
• US overseas bases vary sharply from suburban-style complexes to utilitarian single-soldier campuses
• US overseas military expansion has displaced indigenous peoples at least eighteen times
• US policy has adopted force as a fundamental maxim contrary to Adams’ warning.
• US regional support for democracy served only to displace old colonial powers
• US rivalry with China relies on military might while China uses economic investment
• US seized 550,000 square miles of Mexico and built bases to consolidate it.
• US servicemen murdered at least seventeen women in Okinawa during the Vietnam War
• US strategic thinking discounted displaced populations as too few to matter.
• US taxpayers paid Camorra clans for housing at inflated rates
• US troop withdrawals had no significant effect on Germany’s overall economy
• US troop-presence agreements abroad more than doubled between the Cold War’s end and 2007
• US troops describe remote base deployments using racialized frontier and colonizing language.
• US troops policed 600,000 impoverished Okinawans after the war.
• US trusteeship of Pacific islands functioned as de facto annexation
• Veterans buried Agent Orange barrels at a Seoul base in the 1970s.
• Vicenza base construction risked puncturing the city’s drinking-water aquifer
• Vicenza is a wealthy industrial and Renaissance-heritage city hosting major U.S. bases.
• Vicenza residents held an unofficial referendum that voted 95 percent against the base
• Vicenza residents opposed the base by a 61 percent majority
• Video calls can intensify children’s distress about an absent military parent
• Video calls during deployment can worsen children’s separation distress.
• Vietnam-era troop degradation and economic strain fueled GI crime in Germany.
• Vietnam-era troops in Germany committed crimes that eroded local support for the American presence.
• War appropriations added about $80.6 billion in 2012 toward maintaining overseas bases
• War contractors migrate from depleted militaries to peacekeeper and mining markets
• War-driven base growth continued through Korea and Vietnam into the 1960s.
• War-zone base maintenance added roughly eighty billion dollars yearly in 2012
• Wartime displacements were never reversed and enabled further peacetime evictions.
• Washington’s Korea crisis was driven by global proliferation fears, not local ones
• West African oil reserves drive the US push for African military bases
• Western frontier forts functioned as instruments of Native land conquest.
• Widespread corruption made bypassing permits more profitable than legal construction in Italy.
• Without a superpower rival the military invents new missions to justify itself
• Without a superpower rival, overseas bases enable offensive wars of choice
• Worst base pollution coincides with places lacking full constitutional protections.
• Young Chamorros formed opposition to expose the buildup’s infrastructure strains