Astonishing!

I was squatting in our garden patch weeding when Brigitte came out with a printout in her hand. “How many military bases do you think we have in Germany?” she asked. She sat down on a garden chair. Her question suggested that the figure was bigger than I had imagined, so I said, going over the top: “Thirty?” She smiled. “Would you believe 227?”

Now in the background here, for me, was remembering Grafenwöhr firing range just a few days ago—and remembering it, looking it up—and looking it up being amazed that it was still a U.S. Army installation! Still? Today? Even in my own days in U.S. Army Europe, I would have been astonished at that number—despite the fact that I actually served at three different bases in Germany when I was there and had been to at least six others, one being Grafenwöhr.

The numbers are there—but tough to find. Brigitte was quoting a story in The Nation. That story, in turn, referenced a Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and the Bulletin, finally, linked to a FY 2007 Base Structure Report issued by the Department of Defense (link). In that report itself I discovered that the number was 287 bases; sixty of them were evidently typographical casualties. In FY 2007, DOD had 823 bases the world over, the majority in Germany, in Japan (130), and in South Korea (106). Three hundred others were strewn across 36 other countries, according to the DOD—although other sources report a U.S. military presence in 150 countries all told. If the bases in Iraq and Afghanistan were included, according to The Nation (they were not, in this report), the total would be more than 1,000.

A later story in the Huffington Post, publishing comments by Senator Jon Tester of Montana (here), provides what seem to be updated numbers: 268 bases in Germany, 124 in Japan, and 87 in South Korea. The numbers are still in the same ballpark.

So when, again, did World War II end? It ended in August 1945. Sixty-six years later we still have nearly 270 bases in Germany and more than a hundred in Japan. The cost of maintaining these and the other bases, per The Nation, runs $102 billion a year.

My oddly ricocheting conclusion from all this—a couple of more hours of weeding and another day of hard outdoor work later? It is that human collectives behave quite unlike rational individuals. I’ve got to believe, indeed I’ve no reason not to, that the vast majority of our public officials are well-meaning, honest, and reasonably intelligent. Nevertheless, the great public outcomes that we see all around us present something strangely and alarmingly mad. And when I myself served as a little cell in the body of the great Military Industrial Complex, I was just doing my duty. Wasn’t I?

Recalling Arlie House

Back in the 1970s I once attended an interesting conference at Arlie House, just west of Washington, DC. Arlie House is a prestigious conference center out in lovely Virginia countryside. All those making presentations were members of the defense and aerospace industry. All those attending were bureaucrats, leaders, and opinion-makers in urban renewal. The message of the Military-Industrial Complex might have been summed up thus: “We have built fantastic weapons system, atomic and conventional. We have lifted people to the moon and brought them safely back. All the things that we routinely do are at a level of complexity vastly greater than anything involved in urban renewal and development, social welfare distribution, roads and highways, or you name it. Ask us to help you. We’re willing and able.”

I listened in wonderment. The single thought that occurred to me might have been put like this: “There is a big difference between the urban chaos and material nature that you shape into weapons systems, rockets, and delivery systems. Material nature has no lobbies. You are supported by a single budget deployed in a line-management thrust. You never have to find matching funds. If every infantry company had to collect money from the soldiers, to contribute to battalion, the battalions sending dollars to divisions, the divisions to corps and army group—just to come up with a 25 percent matching share for those new tanks, there wouldn't be any—new tanks. You operate under a single will and in a political environment incapable of denying the military anything.”