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The US Has Military Forces in Over 160 Countries, but the Pentagon Is Hiding the Exact Numbers

January 16, 2019

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The US Has Military Forces in Over 160 Countries, but the Pentagon Is Hiding the Exact Numbers

The US has 95% of the world’s foreign military bases, with personnel in more than 160 countries. But the Pentagon is leaving hundreds of outposts out of its official reports.

Editor’s Note: Nick Turse reports in TomDispatch that the US Department of Defense is operating “hundreds of off-the-books bases absent from the official rolls.” The Pentagon lists in its official property portfolio 4,775 sites, including 514 overseas outposts in 45 foreign countries. But Turse points out that this excludes hundreds of known US military bases in numerous nations.

DoD also publicly acknowledges that it has personnel in more than 160 countries on all seven continents. And the annual cost of deploying these US military personnel abroad and operating these foreign bases approaches $150 billion per year, Turse reports.

The US has 95 percent of the world’s total number of foreign military bases. And scholar David Vine tells Turse “the secrecy is mostly to prevent domestic debate about the money, danger, and death involved, as well as to avoid diplomatic tensions and international inquiries.”

Bases, Bases, Everywhere… Except in the Pentagon’s Report

The U.S. military is finally withdrawing (or not) from its base at al-Tanf. You know, the place that the Syrian government long claimed was a training ground for Islamic State (ISIS) fighters; the land corridor just inside Syria, near both the Iraqi and Jordanian borders, that Russia has called a terrorist hotbed (while floating the idea of jointly administering it with the United States); the location of a camp where hundreds of U.S. Marines joined Special Operations forces last year…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Special Ops: 133 Countries Down, 17 to Go?

July 18, 2018

Special Ops: 133 Countries Down, 17 to Go?

Give them credit. As TomDispatch’s Nick Turse has so vividly reported over the last decade, America’s previously “elite” Special Operations forces — once small, specially trained units in a large military — have now essentially become a military in their own right, all 70,000 of them (larger, in fact, than many national armed forces). And they are more or less everywhere, more or less all the time. They aren’t just “elite” forces anymore; they’re America’s secret military, which, as Turse has shown, is increasingly deployed to something startlingly close to all the countries on the planet (aside from a few obvious ones like Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea). They are raiding and fighting from Syria to Afghanistan, Somalia to Niger. They are training allied special ops types and other forces across the globe. It’s increasingly hard to think of places where they don’t show up, even, for instance, in a rain-soaked cave that recently trapped 12 Thai soccer players and their coach. And here’s the good news: if a bill sponsored by Congressman Richard Hudson, whose North Carolina district includes Fort Bragg (home of U.S. Army Special Operations Command), passes in Congress, the more America’s special operators deploy in combat-like ways to places that the IRS doesn’t consider war zones (but indeed are), the more likely that they and their families will… yep, get a special tax break for their efforts! (War, what is it good for?)

And they aren’t just “operators” anymore. They’re path-breakers in the “science” of war. As they fight terrorists around the globe, for instance, they’re developing “loitering munitions” in their Maritime Precision Engagement program that will act as “suicide drones” (operated from speedboats). Hey, if ISIS, al-Qaeda, and the rest of that crew have their version of suicide drones — humans with explosives strapped to them, not to speak of off-the-shelf drones — why shouldn’t the U.S. military have the technological equivalent?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The American Way of War: Evolution Stops Here

June 4, 2018

The American Way of War: Evolution Stops Here

America does what it wants.

This is obvious, except it’s also monstrously unnerving. Let’s at least add some quote marks: “America” does what it wants — this secretly defined, self-obsessed, unelected entity that purports to be the United States of America, all 325 million of us, but is, in fact, a narrowly focused amalgam of generals, politicians and corporate elites who value only one thing: global dominance, from now to eternity.

Indeed, they’re capable of imagining nothing else, which is the truly scary part. Until this changes, “peace” is a feel-good delusion and “disarmament” (nuclear and otherwise) is the butt of a joke. The American empire may be collapsing, but the war games continue.

So I realized with a sudden start as I read Nick Turse’s analysis of a collection of U.S. military documents, which the TomDispatch website got hold of via the Freedom of Information Act. The documents contained a detailed description of the 33rd annual Joint Land, Air, and Sea Strategic Special Program, “an elaborate war game,” Turse explains, “carried out in 2016 by students and faculty from the U.S. military’s war colleges, the training grounds for its future generals and admirals.”

The war game was wrapped around a fantasy future of “dystopian dangers,” set in 2020, in which, “as the script for the war game put it, ‘lingering jealousy and distrust of American power and national interests have made it politically and culturally difficult for the United States to act unilaterally.’”

In other words, as Turse explains, quoting the war game’s summary, the threat to America’s near-future security is completely a matter of maintaining its global hegemony in the face of scientific and military advances “by both state and non-state actors” that “have increasingly constricted U.S. freedom of action.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

“We Don’t Consider You a Legitimate Journalist”–How I Got Blacklisted by the Pentagon’s Africa Command

January 14, 2018

“WE DON’T CONSIDER YOU A LEGITIMATE JOURNALIST” — HOW I GOT BLACKLISTED BY THE PENTAGON’S AFRICA COMMAND

CONVERSATIONS WITH MILITARY spokespeople can be curt, even confrontational, but they are not supposed to go this way.

“Nick, we’re not going to respond to any of your questions” Lt. Cmdr. Anthony Falvo, the head of U.S. Africa Command’s Public Affairs Branch, told me by phone last October. “We just don’t feel that we need to.”

I asked if Falvo believed AFRICOM didn’t need to address questions from the press in general, or just me in particular.

“No, just you,” he replied. “We don’t consider you a legitimate journalist, really.”

Then he hung up on me.

For the previous two months — after The Intercept revealed that Cameroonian troops tortured prisoners at a remote military base also used by U.S. personnel and private contractors for drone surveillance and training missions — AFRICOM had ignored my emails and phone calls. Finally, about a week and a half before Falvo’s flare-up, spokesperson Robyn Mack answered a call of mine. I wanted to verify some public information and clarify a few points, and Mack asked for my questions. I had only just begun relaying the first of them when she interrupted me.

“Hello, hello, Nick are you there?  Hello?” she said over the crystal-clear connection.

“Yes, I’m here,” I replied more than once.

Then she hung up on me.

I called back within seconds. No answer. I called again and again. Finally, someone picked up the phone and told me that Mack was out to lunch … along with everyone else in the entire office.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How the NSA Built a Secret Surveillance Network for Ethiopia

September 14, 2017

Photo: Minasse Wondimu Hailu/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

“A WARM FRIENDSHIP connects the Ethiopian and American people,” U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson announced earlier this year. “We remain committed to working with Ethiopia to foster liberty, democracy, economic growth, protection of human rights, and the rule of law.”

Indeed, the website for the U.S. Embassy in Ethiopia is marked by press releases touting U.S. aid for farmers and support for public health infrastructure in that East African nation. “Ethiopia remains among the most effective development partners, particularly in the areas of health care, education, and food security,” says the State Department.

Behind the scenes, however, Ethiopia and the U.S. are bound together by long-standing relationships built on far more than dairy processing equipment or health centers to treat people with HIV. Fifteen years ago, the U.S. began setting up very different centers, filled with technology that is not normally associated with the protection of human rights.

In the aftermath of 9/11, according to classified U.S. documents published Wednesday by The Intercept, the National Security Agency forged a relationship with the Ethiopian government that has expanded exponentially over the years. What began as one small facility soon grew into a network of clandestine eavesdropping outposts designed to listen in on the communications of Ethiopians and their neighbors across the Horn of Africa in the name of counterterrorism.

In exchange for local knowledge and an advantageous location, the NSA provided the East African nation with technology and training integral to electronic surveillance. “Ethiopia’s position provides the partnership unique access to the targets,” a commander of the U.S. spying operation wrote in a classified 2005 report. (The report is one of 294 internal NSA newsletters released today by The Intercept.)

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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