Rear Admiral Gene LaRocque (USN, Ret.)
Director, Center for Defense Information
INTERVIEWER & NARRATOR:
Sanford Gottlieb
SENIOR PRODUCER:
Sanford Gottlieb
MARKETING & OPERATIONS:
Mark Sugg
PRODUCERS:
Matthew Hansen
Nick Moore
Lori McRea
Daniel Sagalyn
PRINCIPAL ANALYST & SCRIPTWRITER:
Sanford Gottlieb
PROGRAM PRODUCER:
Matthew Hansen
ORIGINATION:
Washington, D.C.
PROGRAM NO.:
505
INITIAL BROADCAST:
20 October 1991
CONDITION OF USE: Credit "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR"
(Center for Defense Information)
(C) Copyright 1991, Center for Defense Information. All Rights Reserved.
Videotapes also available.
Dr. TED GALEN CARPENTER
Cato Institute
Dr. DIETER DETTKE
Friedrich Ebert Foundation
RICHARD FISHER
Heritage Foundation
SEVERINA RIVERA
Filipino Lawyer
Rep. PAT SCHROEDER
House Armed Services Committee, (D-CO)
Col. WILLIAM TAYLOR
Center for Strategic and International Studies
By the end of the cold war in 1990, the United States had 395 major military bases and hundreds of smaller installations around the world. Most of the bases are part of military alliances formed to contain communism.
Now the cold war his history. Communism has crumbled from Berlin to Vladivostok. The former Soviet Union is a loose, smaller, troubled confederation of separate republics, with a belt of non-communist countries to its West, asking for aid from wealthier former adversaries.
General Colin Powell has said the Soviet military threat has "vaporized."
Maybe it's really over over there.
["AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR" program introduction.]
Admiral GENE LaROCQUE: Welcome once again to "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR."
Many Americans are surprised to find that we have so many military bases in foreign countries. Many of these bases were established as an aftermath of a war. For example, the base in Cuba and the base in the Philippines were established as a result of the Spanish-American War. The bases in Germany and Japan were an outgrowth of World War II. Many bases we have established all over the world have given us the opportunity to use our military force when we might not have used them had those bases not been available to us.
So, the question we have to ask ourselves today: Does America need military bases in foreign countries? And if so, how many and for what reason? Our program is about that today.
NARRATOR: A few of the US bases date from an earlier period. Subic Bay in the Philippines and Guantanamo in Cuba, for example, were legacies of the Spanish-American War of 1898, a time when American naval vessels needed coaling stations far from home. But the cold war and hot wars in Korea and Vietnam left a lot more than US coaling stations around the world.
By 1990, 435,000 American troops, 168,000 Defense Department civilians and 400,000 family dependents were living on foreign bases. Another 47,000 sailors and Marines were stationed aboard ships in foreign waters. A million Americans abroad on the Defense Department payroll.
The host countries, contrary to what many Americans believe, do not pay the US treasury for the bases. These countries may provide services, but don't provide cash.
Piers Wood grew up on Army bases. He later graduated from West Point and served 16 years on active duty in the Army. Today he is chief of staff at the Center for Defense Information.
PIERS WOOD: Well, to those of us who grew up in the military, it was as if we were at home anywhere in the world and our Army, the United States Army, was everywhere and we were at home everywhere.
INTERVIEWER: And that seemed totally natural to you.
Col. WOOD: At the time, it seemed natural. I look back on it now as an adult and it seems amazing that we took American military presence everywhere so much for granted.
NARRATOR: Colonel Wood earned the Silver Star and two Bronze Stars as an artillery officer in Vietnam. Before going to war, he had already seen a lot of the world.
INTERVIEWER: And you traveled a lot, obviously.
Col. WOOD: Of course.
INTERVIEWER: Free?
Col. WOOD: Well, it was possible, once one got in uniform, to travel space-available free. What was remarkable was that we were able to stay for free. If there wasn't a friend of mine in a base near a town where I was headed overseas, it was a friend of my father's. And one could stay virtually free around the world.
NARRATOR: For decades, it seemed normal to have all those Americans stationed in foreign countries. American-led alliances, after all, were containing communism. But today, many Soviet troops have come out of Eastern Europe. They're all out of Afghanistan. The Soviet-led Warsaw Pact has dissolved. Soviet military aid to countries from Cuba to Ethiopia to Vietnam has stopped or is drying up. And whatever the future of his country, President Gorbachev has announced cuts of another 700,000 men from its armed forces.
Some foreign policy analysts believe the US Government is slow to adjust to the dramatically changed world situation.
TED GALEN CARPENTER: The situation in the Philippines is almost symptomatic of the larger problem, the desperate attempt by the national security bureaucracy to retain obsolete US cold war era military commitments and to retain military bases around the globe. There have been, to be sure, some cutbacks. They'll be some bases closed in Germany and elsewhere. But these are, for the most part, modest and, in some cases, just cosmetic changes. The United States does not need a globe-girdling network of military bases anymore.
NARRATOR: Ted Galen Carpenter is director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. He is a leading advocate of a demilitarized foreign policy.
Richard Fisher, a policy analyst the Asian Studies Center of the Heritage Foundation, wants to keep the bases, at least for awhile.
RICHARD FISHER: Clearly, our alliance system is much more important to our ability to deter conflict on a global scale than the maintenance of specific bases in any given area. As long as our alliance system provides for necessary access to foreign military facilities in the medium term, over the next ten to twenty years, our military forces can most likely meet any future contingency.
NARRATOR: President Bush provided the administration's overview in the March 1990 report, "National Security Strategy of the United States." He said, "As the world's most powerful democracy, we are inescapably the leader, the connecting link in a global alliance of democracies. The pivotal responsibility for ensuring the stability of our international balance remains ours."
However, the American people are beginning to show in public opinion polls that they look to the United Nations, not to Uncle Sam, to carry out that "pivotal responsibility." And a big backlog of domestic problems has created a majority in favor of shoring-up the home front.
Representative Pat Schroeder, the energetic chairwoman of the Armed Services Subcommittee on Military Installations, has been pressing for a smaller US military force overseas.
Rep. PAT SCHROEDER (D-CO): And then just the constant rotation of American troops, and families, and pets, and furniture, and in keeping the hospitals and everything else going, it's a very expensive thing. You have to reinvent America in Europe.
Col. WOOD: It's kind of shocking to me now when I realize how much the American taxpayer had to pay for that sort of thing, that sort of presence overseas.
INTERVIEWER: 'Cause there are a lot of dependents, as well as troops.
Col. WOOD: Oh, that's correct. Dependents traveled with their sponsors, as they were called, everywhere they went.
INTERVIEWER: What's a sponsor?
Col. WOOD: A sponsor is the military member, the head of the household. and he brought all of his -- brought his spouse and his children, his car, his dog and his dog food, his life-style with him when he went overseas.
NARRATOR: Under the pressure of world events and tighter federal budgets, the Defense Department has begun what it calls a "drawdown" of forces and equipment. Smaller armed forces are supposed to defend in the future against uncertainty and instability.
Secretary of Defense DICK CHENEY ("Updating the Threat,"
29 January '91): We've seen the risk of instability I think increase and it's that instability, as much as anything else, that needs to be guarded against."
NARRATOR: By 1995, about half of the American troops in Europe are expected to come home. A few of their bases will close. A slimmer NATO, searching for a new mission in the absence of a credible Soviet threat, is expected to remain intact.
Along the Asia Pacific rim, US military forces will be reduced an estimated 10 to 12 percent over two years. The Pentagon decided on those figures before Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines, effectively closing down the US air base at Clark Field, and before the Philippine Senate voted not to renew the lease for the US naval base at Subic Bay.
Mr. FISHER: Americans should expect that we will be decreasing our military forces and withdrawing from many of our overseas bases. But I think it would be very unwise to totally junk a system of bases and alliances that has kept the peace and still has very much of a residual capability of maintaining a system of stability to keep the peace.
NARRATOR: Meanwhile, Congress, upset by the expected economic impact of military base closings at home, is showing new interest in closing foreign bases. By a lopsided vote of 412 to 14, the House of Representatives voted for a measure sponsored chiefly by Congresswoman Schroeder. The measure added foreign bases to the jurisdiction of the independent commission that now recommends which domestic bases to close.
At present, the Defense Department has sole decision-making power over the closure of foreign bases.
To get a closer look at the tug-of-war over US foreign military bases, we review the situation in three key countries: Germany, Korea and the Philippines.
Of the three, reunified Germany is the one where military and political conditions have changed the most dramatically. There West Germans no longer worry about an attack from the east by Soviet armies; instead they are preoccupied with integrating the East Germans into their prosperous capitalist economy.
DIETER DETTKE: I would argue that there is no military threat as such as we have known it in the past.
NARRATOR: We talked with Dieter Dettke to get an informed German perspective on the US bases. Dr. Dettke is executive director of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation's Washington office. The foundation is affiliated with Germany's Social Democratic Party.
Dr. DETTKE: I think the German population, the large majority, would assume that now is the time to reduce standing military forces and to come to much smaller units, to come to a different concept, to demilitarize, if you want to; that's the expectation. And that is true for German forces. That's true for stationing troops, too.
NARRATOR: The Germans are cutting their armed forces from a total of 633,000 in the formerly hostile East and West German nations to 370,000 for the single reunified country. The US Defense Department has decided to close or reduce the size of ten major bases out of 226 in Germany. In addition, some smaller installations will be affected by closure. That will leave most of the US bases in Germany untouched, even as half of the American troops prepare to leave in coming years.
Some Germans are thinking of what to do with closed US bases.
Dr. DETTKE: As you go to southern Germany to the big cities, Frankfurt, Ehrlangen and other cities in Germany and, given the problems of the housing market in Germany, it is clear that there is an interest, of course, particularly in cities like Frankfurt and other big cities, to use the space, to use the real estate, of course, of the barracks that take up large proportions for housing projects, for civilian housing.
NARRATOR: Dieter Dettke favors a reduction of American troops, after consultation with their German hosts, to fewer than 100,000. He wants a smaller NATO to rely much more on European forces in the future.
Dr. DETTKE: I think what America should understand is that NATO has been very beneficial
for both the United States and for Europe, has been an enormous stabilizing factor and everybody
is grateful for it, and that we should now all be ready for change and for some fundamental
change, in order to keep up an alliance that both sides can maintain and both sides want to
maintain, and that allows a transition to a situation in Europe that depends much less on military
forces.
NARRATOR: Now let's move to the other side of the world, South Korea. Like Germany, South Korea is a prosperous country and an economic competitor of the United States. Unlike Germany, South Korea still fears its communist neighbor, hardline, isolated North Korea.
South Korea's economy is ten times bigger than the North's. The South's population is twice as large, and the 650,000-man South Korean army is backed by over four million reservists, available in 24 hours.
An American general commands the South Korean and the US forces. The Pentagon says it wants the United States eventually to play only a supporting military role on the Korean Peninsula. But of the 43,000 Americans stationed there at the end of 1990, only 7000 are expected to be withdrawn over a two-year period. This amounts to a very modest thinning out and no US bases, except for a golf course in Seoul, are slated for closure.
The fact that for years US tactical nuclear weapons, such as those carried on F-16 fighter planes, have been stationed in South Korea complicates the picture. So does the growing concern in some quarters that North Korea is trying to develop its own nuclear weapons, even though it signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1985.
Colonel WILLIAM TAYLOR (US Army, Ret.): They say that the reason for their nuclear activities is for peaceful uses, but many people think their excuse, hidden, sub rosa is to offset the advantage which they see the South Koreans as having by virtue of US weapons being there on the ground.
Dr. Bill Taylor is a retired US Army colonel who served in Korea, Germany and Vietnam. Today he is a vice president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Col. Taylor, a bold strategic thinker, has advanced a proposal that could change the status quo on the Korean Peninsula. He wants the United States to pull all of its tactical nuclear weapons out of South Korea.
President Bush's decision to withdraw US landbased and naval tactical nuclear weapons from foreign countries, a decision that President Gorbachev has said will be matched and surpassed by his country, will go a long way toward implementing Taylor's suggestion.
Taylor offers six reasons why his proposal makes practical sense.
Dr. TAYLOR: If we have nuclear weapons on the ground in South Korea, they are redundant. There are many ways to deliver nuclear weapons.
Number two: If they are there, they're an impediment to any kind of arms control, confidence-building arrangements between North Korea and South Korea.
Number three: If the weapons are there on the ground, they are subject to terrorist seizures.
Number four: If those weapons are on the ground in South Korea, and many in South Korea believe they are, and every-body else in the region believes they are, they are a political liability for the South Korean government. They give student radicals and leftists in Korea an excuse to beat the government on that issue.
Number five: If there are nuclear weapons on the ground in South Korea, they are bound to be old tactical nuclear weapons. Old nuclear weapons are, number one, dangerous to handle and, number two, very expensive to maintain.
And I guess finally, number six, it doesn't match the interests of any regional power in Northeast Asia to have those nuclear weapons on the ground.
NARRATOR: Taylor's proposal is based on unilateral US action, independent of any linkage to a North Korean response.
INTERVIEWER: But it could have the additional spinoff of having an impact, a positive impact on the North Koreans.
Dr. TAYLOR: You've got that exactly right. But some people criticize my position on this by saying you imply linkage. I say I don't imply any linkage. Get 'em out.
NARRATOR: President Bush took unilateral action in ordering the withdrawal of tactical
nuclear weapons, except those carried on planes, from foreign countries. North Korean officials
quickly issued favorable public statements. The US move could help unfreeze the hostility
between North and South Korea that has served to prevent American disengagement since the
1950s.
Now let's look at US bases in the Philippines, the former American colony with some of the oldest and largest bases and powerful political opposition to the American military presence.
SEVERINA RIVERA: Filipino nationalists have always looked at those bases as an insult to Philippine sovereignty.
NARRATOR: Severina Rivera is a Filipino lawyer and human rights activist who headed the Corazon Aquino government's search for the estimated $10 billion stolen and hidden by the late dictator, Ferdinand Marcos. Rivera resigned her post in the government, accusing her superiors of corruption.
Before Aquino was elected president of the Philippines, she opposed the US bases. When the Filipino Senate was voting recently on whether to extend the basing agreement, President Aquino lobbied for the bases. Rivera says there was an early and intense US pressure.
Ms. RIVERA: The kinds of pressures that she'd been subjected to, I believe and I have knowledge of, include threats by the US Government to overthrow her, in so many words, if she did not move for the passage of this bases agreement.
NARRATOR: Strong words that deserve further investigation.
The Senate of the Philippines has voted to reject a treaty that would have extended US basing rights for ten years. President Aquino, after considering ways to reverse the Senate's action, has agreed to phase out the bases by 1994.
Before the situation clarified, we asked Richard Fisher and Ted Galen Carpenter their views on the US bases.
Mr. FISHER: We need access to Subic Base, Subic Naval Base in the Philippines for at least another decade in order to be able to give our military commanders the flexibility they need to respond to a rapidly changing military and political situation in the Middle East and in East Asia.
For example, if our forces had been denied access to the Suez Canal in the last Gulf war, most of our forces would have transited through the Philippines.
Dr. CARPENTER: Even if one assumes that the United States really does have vital security interests in the Persian Gulf region -- And I would not accept that proposition for one minute. But even granting that argument, the recent Persian Gulf crisis demonstrated that the US can project power into that region through the Eastern Mediterranean and the surrounding area. It does not need a back door entry through the Indian Ocean.
NARRATOR: The US bases in the Philippines were not supposed to be used in that government's internal fight against communist-led guerillas. In practice, there has been some US training assistance. But Richard Fisher sees a larger US role to offset Chinese and Soviet forces in the region.
Mr. FISHER: Clearly, the threat from the Soviet Union is on the wane. However, it is a fact that the Soviet Pacific fleet is the largest naval force in East Asia. Possible threats from China cannot be discounted, as well. The Chinese maintain a very expan-sive set of territorial claims in the South China Sea and have ongoing disputes over these claims with most of the countries in Southeast Asia.
Dr. CARPENTER: China is hardly an expansionist threat. This is a country that has, as does the Soviet Union, a lot of internal problems. China would have to create a significant deep water navy and a modern sophisticated air force before it could pose any kind of serious expansive military threat in that region.
NARRATOR: How should Americans understand the opposition to the bases that's reflected in the Filipino decision to phase them out?
Mr. FISHER: In general, Filipinos like Americans. They like the opportunities provided, opportunities for employment provided by our bases and they view their country's alliance with the United States as something to maintain.
NARRATOR: But there is another side to the economic oppor-tunities provided to some Filipinos by the American bases.
Ms. RIVERA: Well, economically, I believe that the monies that have been generated by the bases' presence in the Philip-pines are essentially dirty monies, monies that have come in at the price of Philippine sovereignty, monies that have come in at the price of Philippine women subjected to prostitution.
NARRATOR: What will the United States do to replace Clark Air Force Base and Subic Naval Base? The Pentagon has been looking at alternatives in Southeast Asia and the Pacific.
Are there alternatives to a global network of US military bases? There are military answers and there are broader political answers. Piers Wood offers a military answer.
Col. WOOD: So, I'm in favor of bringing all troops back from all bases overseas, stationing them in the continental United States. And if there's a crisis, if there's a conflict to which we must, absolutely must respond, we should do so by deploying forces from the continental United States at that time.
NARRATOR: To have that kind of mobility, the Pentagon would need large numbers of cargo ships and transport planes, and it already has large numbers.
There's a broader political alternative to a globe-girdling network of bases: dropping the notion, still held strongly in some quarters, that the United States is the world's policeman.
Now that the cold war is over, we could consider build-ing on the foundation written into the United Nations Charter. The UN Security Council was supposed to have at its disposal contingents from the member nations' armed forces under the strategic direction of a Military Staff Committee. The committee, made up of the chiefs of staff of the five permanent members of the Security Council, was to advise on the military requirements for maintaining international peace.
The cold war prevented that blueprint from becoming reality. Now the UN Charter could show the way to a less expensive, less one-sided approach to maintaining the peace.
Adm. LaROCQUE: Well, pretty clearly, the Pentagon is trying very hard to find a reason to maintain a large number of military bases in foreign countries. Two things have happened since the end of World War II to make the need for military bases in foreign countries less likely. First of all, is the development of ICBMs, the long range strategic jet fighters and bombers. And the second is the end of the cold war. There simply are no good reasons today to maintain nearly 400 bases in foreign countries and a half-a-million men and women in foreign countries. We ought now to look seriously at a rapid removal of those bases from foreign countries and bring the troops home. It can't be done overnight, but it certainly could be done much more rapidly than the Pentagon now proposes to do.
Until next time, for "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR," I'm Gene LaRocque.
[End of broadcast.]
CONDITION OF USE: Credit "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR"
(Center for Defense Information).
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