Overseas bases also contribute to the shocking rate of sexual assault in the military: an estimated one in three servicewomen is now assaulted, and a disproportionate number of these crimes happen at bases abroad. Outside the base gates, meanwhile, in places like South Korea, one often finds exploitative prostitution industries that frequently rely on human trafficking.

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

Hundreds of frontier forts helped enable the westward expansion of the United States, and they were built on land that was very much abroad at the time. Fort Harmar, built in 1785 in the Northwest Territory, was the first. Others appeared in today’s Ohio and Indiana, including Forts Deposit, Defiance, Hamilton, Wayne, Washington, and Knox. Each of these bases helped waves of U.S. settlers move into the lands of Native American nations, pushing Indians progressively westward.

The U.S.-penned Platt Amendment allowed the United States to invade Cuba at will to ensure stability and so-called independence, prevented Cuba from making treaties with other governments, and permitted the construction of U.S. “coaling or naval stations.” … The two governments also signed a lease giving the U.S. military “complete jurisdiction and control” over forty-five square miles of Guantánamo Bay—an area bigger than Washington, D.C. Tellingly, the “lease” had no termination date, which effectively meant that Cuba had ceded the territory to its northern neighbor. In exchange, the United States agreed to build a fence, prevent commercial or industrial activities within the base, and pay a meager yearly fee of $2,000.

On the autobahn just outside Ramstein-Miesenbach, a small town in southwestern Germany, the exit sign simply says: AIR BASE. … It is the largest base in the middle of the largest concentration of U.S. citizens living overseas—some fifty thousand Americans spread over an area the size of Rhode Island.

In April 1945, less than 6 percent of GIs had VD. Fifteen months later, the rate was over 30 percent.

The Little Americas helped enable the permanent peacetime deployment of troops overseas, appeasing GIs, their families, and other Americans upset about the long-term presence of U.S. troops abroad. … They helped ensure a relatively friendly and stable local environment, thus allowing for the smooth operation of a military unencumbered by major protest or conflict with locals.

In the first half of the 1990s, the U.S. government gave up around 60 percent of its foreign bases and brought almost three hundred thousand troops back to the United States. … Still, despite the disappearance of the Eastern Bloc, hundreds of U.S. bases and sixty thousand U.S. troops remained in Germany alone. Globally, in 2001—more than a decade after the end of the Cold War—around one thousand bases and hundreds of thousands of troops remained overseas.

Military bases need land to exist, and throughout history, militaries have acquired such land through a variety of means. Sometimes, as in Germany and Japan, it comes with the aftermath of victory in war. Sometimes the land is bought or leased from locals or from a national government. But often, land has simply been taken.

Outright expulsion such as that faced by the Chagossians and other indigenous peoples has been far from the only method used by military leaders wanting to maintain control over “their” island bases after World War II. When the United States granted the Philippines independence in 1946, for instance, it did so on the condition of maintaining a ninety-nine-year rent-free lease on sixteen bases and military installations, including Subic Bay and Clark Air Base and even more bases in cases of “military necessity.” (Nationalist protest later forced revision of the agreement; in 1966, the base leases were changed to expire in 1991.) The agreement effectively continued colonial rule over the bases themselves, where the United States retained sovereignty and control over Filipino workers, criminal prosecutions, taxation, and the entire city of Olongapo, adjacent to the Subic Bay Naval Base.

Chamorros, whose history on Guam and the rest of the Mariana Islands dates to between 1500 and 2000 BCE, have not enjoyed the right to self-determination in nearly five hundred years. The Spanish arrived in 1521, claiming Guam and the Marianas as a Spanish possession four decades later. Like the indigenous peoples of the Americas, Chamorros were decimated by disease and violence.11 Spain ruled Guam as a colony for more than two hundred years until the U.S. Navy seized the island and its small military garrison as a prize of the 1898 war.

Since the 1850s, U.S. military interventions, primarily to protect U.S. economic interests, have been a recurring fact across Latin America. In Honduras, U.S. forces have intervened or occupied the country eight times—in 1903, 1907, 1911, 1912, 1919, 1920, 1924, and 1925.

After living in Honduras, the writer O. Henry coined the phrase to refer to weak, marginally independent countries facing overwhelming foreign economic and political domination. In other words, a banana republic is a colony in all but name.

Rather than buying land and paying for construction through congressional appropriations, the Navy invited developers to build the support site to its specifications. In exchange, the Navy promised to lease the site from the developer for thirty years. After that, the developer would get the buildings back, with the right to rent them to the Navy or anyone else. The initial costs to the U.S. government would be nearly zero—the developer would pay all the construction and land acquisition costs while getting the security of guaranteed future rent. Congress, on the other hand, would be on the hook for thirty or more years of lease payments.

In its heyday, the American University Experiment Station was the world’s second-largest chemical weapons production facility. Some call it World War I’s Manhattan Project.

It is no coincidence that places under colonial or semicolonial rule, such as the Philippines, Panama, Okinawa, and Puerto Rico, have experienced some of the worst environmental damage from U.S. bases. The same disregard for the environment that the military has shown at bases abroad has also been the case on bases in U.S. territories lacking the full protections of the Constitution.

The Pentagon realized that a major reason personnel were leaving the military before retirement was the poor quality of life for families. Unhappy families mean unhappy troops, and unhappy troops mean not enough troops to fight. … By 1988, the military was investing $8 billion a year in family programs around the globe.

In 2012, the unemployment rate for spouses of active duty troops was 25 percent. When they do find work, military spouses tend to earn around 60 percent less than peers married to civilians.

By 1958, there were an estimated three hundred thousand sex workers in a country whose entire population was just 22 million. More than half worked in camptowns.

After providing troops with cash, food, and housing, plying them with easy access to commercial sex has been one of the most popular strategies. That troops generally have had to pay for this readily available sex has only benefited militaries further: as working-class men burn through their pay (and, not infrequently, go into debt), their dependence on a military salary helps keep them enlisted.

At Camp Victory—the base where the two Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders performed with Al Franken—several women died of dehydration in their barracks during the first years of the occupation of Iraq.

After an extensive examination of government spending data and contracts, my calculations show that just from late 2001 (when the war in Afghanistan began) to 2013, the Pentagon has disbursed around $385 billion in taxpayer-funded contracts to private companies for work outside the United States. Most of this money has gone to overseas bases.

Almost a third of the total—more than $115 billion—was concentrated among the top ten corporate recipients alone.

The Commission on Wartime Contracting, which Congress established to investigate waste and abuse, has estimated that there has been $31 billion to $60 billion in contracting fraud in the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars alone, with most of it involving bases in and around the two countries.

In the era of the all-volunteer force, hiring contractors reduced the need for the military to recruit new troops. Instead, it passed the labor problem to the contractors, who have frequently searched the globe for the cheapest possible workers. Often, these have been Filipinos and other non-U.S. citizens from formerly colonized parts of the world who are willing to work for much less than uniformed troops. By recruiting foreign workers, the government and contractors could also often avoid paying for the health care, retirement, and other benefits provided to U.S. troops.

By the second Gulf War, contractors represented roughly half of all deployed personnel in Iraq. Brown & Root, now known as KBR, employed more than fifty thousands people in the war zone—the equivalent of five divisions or one hundred army battalions.

“Once an American overseas base is established, it takes on a life of its own,” concluded a rare congressional investigation into the little-noticed expansion of bases abroad since World War II. “Original missions may become outdated, but new missions are developed, not only with the intent of keeping the facility going, but often to actually enlarge it.”

Because of favorable basing agreements, the U.S. military generally doesn’t have to pay for environmental cleanup in Japan, South Korea, or elsewhere. These costs also come from citizens’ taxes, further reducing the net value of any local benefits.

Most Chagossians are not calling for the removal of the base on Diego Garcia, just the right to return to their islands and proper compensation for their exile; in fact, many would like the opportunity to work on the base.

Because lily pads are generally designed for rapid expansion, they often offer a nucleus from which larger bases can easily grow, with costs tending to snowball accordingly.

Unlike virtually all of the wealthy industrialized countries in which the United States maintains bases—Germany, Japan, South Korea, Britain, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Norway, and Belgium among them—the United States does not guarantee health care for all its citizens. The idea of doing so is often dismissed as too expensive. Meanwhile, the nation spends immense sums every year supporting a global base infrastructure largely born of a world war and a cold war that ended decades ago.

For the United States, overseas bases have appeared to provide protection, safety, and security. They have appeared to hold out the promise of never having to fight a world war again. Instead, these bases have in many ways damaged national security. By making it simpler to wage foreign wars, they have made military action an even more attractive option among the foreign policy tools available to American policymakers, and they have made war more likely.

The Pentagon generally considers U.S. territories including American Samoa, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands “overseas.” Given that they lack full democratic incorporation into the United States, I also count them as overseas. The District of Columbia also lacks full democratic rights, but given that it is the nation’s capital and is not overseas, I consider D.C. bases domestic. For counting purposes, it makes sense to follow the lead of the Pentagon, which uses the term “base site.” In some cases, this means that an installation generally referred to as a single base—like Aviano Air Base in Italy—actually consists of multiple base sites—in Aviano’s case, at least eight. Counting each base site makes sense because sites with the same name are often in geographically disparate locations.

When it comes to foreign bases, terminology often reflects political, legal, and public relations calculations more than analytic accuracy: using the terms military facility or forward operating location, for example, helps minimize perceptions of a base’s size and significance and the idea that an occupying military has usurped another nation’s sovereignty. Ensuring that base ownership officially remains with the “host” country and that the United States is officially a “guest” is likewise one way to try to reduce local opposition and political furor. In reality, the degree to which a host exercises effective sovereign control over its territory varies widely and generally reflects broader power relations between the United States and a host (another term that can be something of a misnomer depending on the degree of control a country actually has over its U.S. guests).

The presence of families and the comforts of Little Americas normalized the peacetime deployment of U.S. troops abroad and the long-term occupation of sovereign countries in Western Europe and Japan for Americans and people in the occupied countries alike.

There is a discrepancy in this report, which cites more than 92,000 acres (37,260 hectares) returned by the United States in total and more than 100,000 (40,500 hectares) returned by the U.S. Army alone.

U.S. Undersecretary of Defense John McGovern wrote, “Congressman Ron Dellums will be the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. Tom Foglietta has assumed a new role in the appropriations subcommittee on military construction, which provides funds for the projects. These two friends are in a powerful position to ensure the authorization and the appropriation of the project in Naples.”

55. Lorenzo Cremonese, “NATO Commander Tells Government: Protect Our Men from Casalesi Clan,” Corriere della Sera, translated by BBC Monitoring Europe, November 6, 2008; Paola Totaro, “NATO Pours Rent Money into Mafia Coffers,” Sydney Morning Herald, November 6, 2008; Paul Bompard, “Nato Officers Rent Villa Owned by Naples Mafia Boss,” Times (London), October 27, 2008; U.S. Treasury, “Treasury Sanctions Members of the Camorra,” press release, Washington, DC, August 1, 2012.

In the United States, the military won exemptions to parts of the Endangered Species and Marine Mammal Protection acts and has sought exemption from the Clean Air Act and other environmental laws. Congress provided an exemption to the Migratory Bird Treaty Act in 2003 in response to a court ruling that naval training on Farallon de Medinilla violated the act.

As the Korean anthropologist Joowon Park explained to me, there is a direct connection between the militarized masculinity bred in the camptowns and the frequent bar fights in popular Seoul nightspots between GIs and local Korean men stemming from feelings of the “racial superiority of the American.”

The Pentagon comptroller prepares the Overseas Cost Summary, at the instruction of Congress, by compiling individual cost reports submitted by each of the armed forces. Thus, the summary appears to omit most “Defense-wide” spending.

The more than $1.3 billion includes $1.24 billion for DoDDS schools in fiscal year 2012. The Department of Defense Educational Activity considers schools in Guam and Puerto Rico to be domestic schools

The OCS says it accounts for “all” the costs of supporting the children of military personnel and civilian employees. My repeated inquiries to the Pentagon went unanswered. The more than $1.3 billion includes $1.24 billion for DoDDS schools in fiscal year 2012. The Department of Defense Educational Activity considers schools in Guam and Puerto Rico to be domestic schools, so there would be additional costs from the Department of Defense Domestic Dependent Elementary and Secondary Schools’ $504.7 million budget as well as funding for schooling at non-DOD schools in Canada, Mexico, and the Americas.

11. Linda Bilmes, “Who Profited from the Iraq War?” EPS Quarterly 24, no. 1 (March 2012), 6. The Federal Procurement Data System that’s supposed to track government contracts “often contains inaccurate data,” according to the Government Accountability Office (“Federal Contracting: Observations on the Government’s Contracting Data Systems,” report, GAO-09-1032T, Washington, DC, September 29, 2009). For example, my research showed hundreds of thousands of contracts with no “place of performance” listed. On the other hand, some of the contacts included in the list are unrelated to the provision of goods and services for overseas bases; however, the simultaneous omission of base-related contracts means this methodology provides a useful portrait of where contracts and taxpayer dollars are going overseas. Still, the totals listed should be treated as rough estimates.

Prior to 1972, local officials were powerless to arrest or investigate crimes.

Four days after the protest, Prodi resigned as prime minister over the lack of support for his foreign policy, including the Dal Molin base.

Two principles that have guided the acquisition and maintenance of large numbers of overseas bases since World War II still appear to be at work today. They are “redundancy”—the more bases, the safer the nation—and “strategic denial”—preventing supposed enemies from using a territory by denying them access—both of which hold that even if the military has little interest in using a base or a territory, it should acquire as many as possible for every possible contingency and almost never cede its acquisitions.

The unpublicized multiagency campaign also outlined a “public-private partnership” involving a major real estate development firm, General Electric, and humanitarian aid groups (including one directed by the son of Undersecretary of State Maria Otero).

The total troop size at the two largest bases in Latin America, Guantánamo Bay and Soto Cano, totals around 2,500 to 4,000 at most. Small numbers of troops are deployed elsewhere in Latin America.

Some members of Congress favor an even larger presence. In its fiscal year 2015 national defense bill, the House asked the Pentagon to increase the U.S. presence and “achieve the associated basing and access agreements to support such forces across the Continent of Africa.”

Nick Turse identified 134 countries in 2014, although Robert D. Kaplan cites 170 countries before 2001.

In an era of unprecedented military strength, leaders of the United States, the global hyperpower, have increasingly embraced imperial ambitions. How did this significant shift in purpose and policy come about? And what lies down the road?

The one clear exception is Guantánamo Bay, where the local economic impact is almost entirely negative. The base is entirely self-sufficient, and there is no economic activity connecting the base and Guantánamo city or other surrounding communities.