The Effectiveness of the US’ Overseas Military Base Strategy
The United States, a global superpower, has a military presence that spans the globe. The Department of Defense’s annual Base Structure Report lists 514 sites outside of its borders, but this number is far from the real count. The list omits several known bases, such as the secretive drone base in central Niger, more than ten sites in Syria, and a satellite surveillance facility in Australia’s northern territories. The real answer to how many US bases there are abroad is unknown, and the general public can only speculate based on publicly available information.
The US military’s overseas presence is not just about maintaining bases in allied countries during peacetime. It is about a military concept known as the loss of strength gradients. This concept theorizes that the further a conflict is away from a military’s home country, the less military power that nation can bring to the fight. The US has taken this concept to heart and has put quite a lot of work into trying to flatten out their loss of strength gradients. They want to ensure that they are just as likely to win a war in East Asia as North America.
The US military splits the world into six regions, each with its own infrastructure of bases. Each region has a hierarchy of sites. For example, in the case of Africa Command, the highest are those permanent full-blown bases, the one in Djibouti and the one on Ascension Island. One step below that are what are called cooperative security locations (CSLs). These are host nation facilities with little or no permanent US personnel presence, which may contain pre-positioned equipment and/or logistical arrangements. They serve both for security cooperation activities and contingency access. CSLs are much less flashy and less permanent. They don’t require the same kind of political capital to set up a full-sized base like the one in Djibouti. Bases are often unpopular and receive press scrutiny both in the US and the host country, so small, few hundred person CSLs have the advantage of being able to be set up with essentially no publicity.
The remaining known sites on the continent are what are called contingency locations. These are temporary sites established as part of ongoing missions. For example, the contingency location in Garoua, Cameroon was set up for the Americans to provide logistics and intelligence support in the Cameroonians fight against Boko Haram. What that actually means, though, when you break through the military’s PR language, is that this is a drone base.
Beyond convenience and capability, another major reason for America’s heavy overseas military presence is power projection. This is a term used by militaries that refers to the ability of a nation to apply all or some of its elements of national power. In this context, it’s essentially how fast a country can get to the fight if a fight should arise. Power projection is as much an offensive power as a defensive one. It’s about making sure that every other country in the world knows that America can and potentially will respond to whatever they decide is a threat in a timely manner.
The US military’s worldwide presence is controversial but likely effective. They certainly do make the US military seem more formidable in the international eye, which many Americans would consider a positive. But the final grand question is at what cost? With the cost in dollars, the cost in geopolitical tensions, the cost in community detriment, the simple cost in how the world views the United States as a country, is it worth it?
The US military’s network of overseas bases is only a part of its overall power projection mission, which also includes its nuclear weapons, aircraft carriers, submarines, and more. The main messaging they convey is that the US can get to anywhere fast. But predictably, these bases are controversial both at home in the US and abroad. As one example, this is the island of Okinawa, Japan, and this is the land used by the US military. On this dense island of 1.5 million, 26,000 US servicemembers man sites. While the Japanese government is supportive of the US presence in Okinawa and elsewhere in Japan, locally there have been decades of tensions between the Okinawans and the US military. The US bases there have been an economic, social, and environmental burden on the island.
In conclusion, the US military’s overseas base strategy is a complex and controversial issue. It is a strategy that has been shaped by a variety of factors, including the need for power projection, the desire to maintain a global presence, and the realities of geopolitical tensions. While it is clear that these bases provide the US with a significant military advantage, the question of whether this strategy is worth the cost — in terms of both financial expenditure and the impact on local communities — remains a contentious one.
