How Many Trillions Could we SAVE By closing Bases and Bringing Troops Home?

I mean most or all of the seven hundred something bases we have spread around the world? Starting with the places where they really hate the USA like Iraq, Japan, Korea, Afghanistan, etc. I need to see what Chalmers Johnson has to say about that.

Where did you get the map? I know Chalmers Johnson has been pounding it home how the U.S. spends in the neighborhood of a trillion dollars a year to support this empire. During all the hand-wringing about the bank bailout, I don't think I heard one person mention the size of the defense budget -- except Johnson.

so folks don't really care.

The Navy, for example, has the fewest number of hulls it's had since BEFORE the First World War.

And no, you can't spin the obese porcine defense budget to look like a little silk purse. It consumes FAR, FAR too much of the GNP in relation to its value. It is a complete waste of money, unless you are a defense contractor looking for some sap to pay for a lot of high priced hardware.

As far as counting hulls, that is like comparing apples to acorns. I'll bet that no hull before the First World War cost the equivalent of billions of dollars, as aircraft carriers do nowadays. And it fails to take into account the fact that the Second World War pretty much proved that a few airplanes are worth more than a lot of hulls.

The world today does not have large standing armies facing off at each other (save for North Korea), and war has been less effective at getting problems solved than diplomacy. The only places where war is continuing are in failed states where opposing factions (usually ethnic) are trying to prevail by force. The sooner the US demilitarizes to the point they were at in the 1920s, the better.

That was exactly what I had in mind in my OP but you said it so very well.

:thumbsup: :)

It's all relative.

Isuppose I should have added it to the OP but it can be found at numerous sites on google.

:)




I. More than 1000 US Bases and/or Military Installations

The main sources of information on these military installations (e.g. C. Johnson, the NATO Watch Committee, the International Network for the Abolition of Foreign Military Bases) reveal that the US operates and/or controls between 700 and 800 military bases Worldwide.

In this regard, Hugh d’Andrade and Bob Wing’s 2002 Map 1 entitled “U.S. Military Troops and Bases around the World, The Cost of ‘Permanent War’”, confirms the presence of US military personnel in 156 countries.

The US Military has bases in 63 countries. Brand new military bases have been built since September 11, 2001 in seven countries.

In total, there are 255,065 US military personnel deployed Worldwide.

These facilities include a total of 845,441 different buildings and equipments. The underlying land surface is of the order of 30 million acres. According to Gelman, who examined 2005 official Pentagon data, the US is thought to own a total of 737 bases in foreign lands. Adding to the bases inside U.S. territory, the total land area occupied by US military bases domestically within the US and internationally is of the order of 2,202,735 hectares, which makes the Pentagon one of the largest landowners worldwide (Gelman, J., 2007).

http://www.globalpolicy.org/empire/intervention/2003/0710imperialmap.htm

And all it took for them was one war that was not winnable.

Don

Even the Russians and Chinese depend on out Navy to keep Commerce flowing.

So the US(and the US taxpayer especially), being the last 20th century empire standing(for whatever reason), ends up being global cop. There are global, multi-national corporations. There is a global economy. Yet there are hundreds of individual, regional, acting-in-their-own-best-interest governments. They're almost privatizing the profits and socializing the risks by remaining stuck in a 20th century mindset.

You don't just need the 50 united states here in America. You don't just need the EU. You don't just need what they're trying to do in South America. You need an actual global government, where you no longer have the distinction of "America", or "China", or "Britain", or "Germany", or "Brazil". Government only works when it has monopolistic power. The reason global corporations have as much power as they do is that they can play multiple governments against each other. They can move from place to place and have different rules to play by.