MILITARY GEOGRAPHY
    FOR PROFESSIONALS AND THE PUBLIC

12. MILITARY BASES

The thoughts of others
were light and fleeting
of lovers' meeting
or luck and fame
Mine were of trouble
and mine were steady
so I was ready
when trouble came.

Alfred Edward Housman
More Poems, 1936

READINESS AND SUSTAINABILITY ARE EQUALLY IMPORTANT COMPONENTS OF MILITARY PREPAREDNESS, because neither rapidly deployable forces that lack staying power nor durable forces that arrive late can consistently accomplish assigned missions at conscionable costs. All armed forces consequently require home bases where they can hone essential skills while they await calls to action. Those with regional or global responsibilities additionally benefit from bases and facilities abroad, which buttress deterrence, shorten reaction times when far distant contingencies arise, and simplify sustainability.

U.S. HOME BASES

The armed forces of every nation need home bases where they can develop, organize, equip, train, administer, manage, logistically support, and otherwise prepare to accomplish assigned missions, as extensive installations in the United States amply illustrate. All U.S. military posts, camps, stations, forts, arsenals, air bases, naval bases, and space centers include living quarters, mess halls, and facilities associated with primary functions.¹ Most of them additionally contain commissaries, post/base exchanges, recreational outlets, hospitals, clinics, family housing, elementary and secondary schools, together with community services typified by child care centers.

Some installations are small, while others are comparable in size to thriving cities-- populations at 10 different Army bases exceeded 10,000 in 1997 (Fort Hood, Texas, with 130,000, was the largest of the lot). Many reserve huge tracts of land for basic, advanced, combined arms, and joint training. Maneuver room at the National Training Center near Fort Irwin, California, sprawls over 636,000 acres, but that seems insignificant compared with the "shooting gallery" at Nellis Air Force Base northeast of Las Vegas, Nevada, which covers 4,700 square miles (12,175 square kilometers), an area only slightly smaller than the State of Connecticut, within which aircraft armed with bombs and air-to-surface missiles can test new weapon systems and sharpen their skills.²

Some installations serve specialized purposes. The manpower intensive U.S. Army, for example, emphasizes progressive military education, which originates at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York, in the Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia, and with Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) courses at many civilian colleges. Selected commissioned officers matriculate at the Command and General Staff College (Fort Leavenworth, Kansas) and the Army War College (Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania) only after they complete basic and advanced courses at one of the following schools:

The technology intensive Air Force places great store in experimental facilities typified by the Aeronautical Systems Center and Air Force Institute of Technology at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio; the Air Force Development Test Center at Eglin AFB, Florida; Phillips Laboratory and the Air Force Operational Test and Evaluation Center at Kirtland AFB on the outskirts of Albuquerque, New Mexico; and the world famous Air Force Flight Test Center at Edwards AFB, California.

Most major U.S. Navy and Marine Corps bases, unlike those of the Army and Air Force, are close to the east and west coasts, where they respectively support the U.S. Atlantic and U.S. Pacific Fleets, as shown in the table on the next page.

U.S. COLD WAR BASES ABROAD

No nation, not even the British Empire at its zenith, deployed armed forces at as many military installations beyond its borders as the United States of America did during the Cold War. They were unusual compared with most bases abroad, being sited on the sovereign territory of allies and other friends with whom the U.S. Government negotiated mutually acceptable Status of Forces Agreements that legally prescribed U.S. rights, privileges, and limitations. All such bases and facilities exploited geographical positions that promoted U.S. security interests, affirmed U.S. global involvement, extended U.S. military reach, and strengthened U.S. alliance systems. They also positioned U.S. Armed Forces to deter Soviet aggression and respond most effectively if required.

The buildup began in 1947, after Stalin rang down an Iron Curtain in Central Europe and communism everywhere seemed to be on the march. U.S. strategists, in response, concluded eight mutual defense pacts with 42 countries by 1960, plus executive agreements and other formal pledges with 30-some others (table 23). Most U.S. military deployments on foreign

soil thereafter sought to prevent further expansion by the Soviet Union, its East European satellites, Communist China, surrogate states, and "fellow travelers" such as Cuba.

Nearly 1,700 U.S. installations, large and small, eventually circled the Northern Hemisphere in locations selected especially to monitor military activities inside the Soviet Union, ensure early warning if Soviet Armed Forces attacked, and block the most likely land, sea, and air avenues of Soviet advance. The greatest concentrations consequently crossed the Canadian arctic, crested in NATO Europe, and appeared along East Asia's rim.

ARCTIC OUTPOSTS

The United States and Canada installed a string of warning sites to alert defenders of air and intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) attacks launched from the Eurasian land mass over North Polar paths toward North America. Three overlapping ballistic missile early warning system (BMEWS) fans extended 3,000 miles (4,825 kilometers) northward from radar sites in Clear, Alaska, Thule, Greenland, and Fylingdales Moor, England (map 31). Their mission was to detect, identify, track, compute trajectories, and predict general impact areas for use by civil defense officials and retaliatory forces assigned to U.S. Strategic Air Command (SAC).³

Eighty-one Distant Early Warning (DEW) Stations, draped 4,000 miles (6,435 kilometers) along the 70^th Parallel from the Aleutian Islands to the Atlantic Ocean, watched for enemy bombers in the early 1960s (map 32). Mid-Canada and Pine Tree Lines, augmented by a generous group of gap-filler radars, provided back-ups farther south, but that complex shrank considerably as soon as better technologies became available. SAC deployed "short-legged" B-47 bombers at Goose Bay, Labrador, and Thule until long-range B-52s obviated that requirement, whereupon interceptor aircraft and nuclear-capable Nike Hercules

Table 23. U.S. Cold War Collective Security Pacts

MULTILATERAL TREATIES

Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (Rio Pact), 1947

North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 1949

Security Treaty Between Australia, New Zealand, and the United States (ANZUS), 1951

Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), 1954, dissolved 1977

BILATERAL TREATIES

surface-to-air missiles assigned to North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) occupied the latter base. Sondrestrom on Greenland's west coast and Keflavik, Iceland, served as air traffic control centers and "stepping stones" for pilots who ferried fighter planes across the North Atlantic. Patrol aircraft based at Keflavik Naval Air Station, aided by Underwater Sound Surveillance (SOSUS) systems, swept adjacent seas looking for enemy surface ships and submarines.⁴

Map 31. Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS)

NATO'S NORTH FLANK

Norway's North Cape was ideally situated to observe Soviet activities along the ice-free Kola coast, which provided home ports for submarines and surface combatants of the Soviet Northern Fleet, but neither U.S. nor any other non-nordic NATO forces established permanent bases there or anywhere else in Norway, because the Norwegian Government forbade them to do so. Prepositioned stocks secured by Norwegians for use by a U.S. Marine Amphibious Force in emergency were the only U.S. assets ashore.⁵

NATO'S CENTER SECTOR

NATO's central region throughout the Cold War reached from the border between East and West Germany to the British Isles. U.S. and Allied aims during that protracted period, which lasted 40 years, were to deter aggression and, if deterrence failed, to defend NATO's territory with the fewest possible casualties, the least damage, and the least loss of territory.⁶

The Low Countries and the British Isles. Belgium, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom (along with Italy and West Germany) briefly accepted U.S. ground-launched cruise

Map 32. U.S. Cold War Arctic Outposts
(1960s)

Map 33. U.S. Cold War Bases in Great Britain
(1979)

missiles (GLCMs) in the late 1980s until all were scrapped in accord with the bilateral U.S.-Soviet Intermediate Nuclear Force (INF) Treaty of May 1988.⁷ U.S. military installations in the Netherlands otherwise never exceeded a tactical fighter wing at Soesterberg, three Army communication sites, a logistical center that supported Headquarters, Allied Forces Central Europe (AFCENT), and prepositioned stocks for two U.S. Army divisions. Most U.S. personnel in Belgium were associated in some way with the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) after French officials in 1967 banished the Supreme Allied Commander and his staff from Roucancourt, just outside Paris, but U.S. installations in Great Britain were diversified as well as numerous, as map 33 indicates. Six bases once housed tactical fighter wings, theater airlift aircraft, and tankers for in-flight refueling. Holy Loch, Scotland, was the forward operating base for a U.S. nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine squadron, together with a tender. U.S. Air Force and Navy communication stations, radio relays, and logistical centers speckled the countryside.⁸

France. The French Government on March 7, 1966, declared its intent to regain "full sovereignty [over] French Territory--in other words, no longer to accept the presence of foreign units, installations, or bases in France falling in any respect under the control of authorities other than French authorities" and told NATO to comply or leave not later than April 1, 1967.⁹ NATO's leaders elected eviction, whereupon the exodus code-named FRELOC (Fast Relocation) uprooted or resulted in the abandonment of many military installations accumulated at great expense over the previous 18 years.

Command and control arrangements were comparatively simple when SHAPE and Headquarters, U.S. European Command (EUCOM) were based in Parisian suburbs 15 minutes apart and lay within easy reach of AFCENT at Fontainbleau as well as Headquarters, U.S. Army Communications Zone (COMMZ), in Orléans. Not so after SHAPE displaced to Casteau, Belgium, and EUCOM took up residence in Stuttgart, 265 airline miles/425 kilometers away (maps 34-35). It took months and cost millions for U.S. and NATO command posts at every level to transplant a vast array of computers, data processors, and information retrieval gear connected by space communication satellites, tropospheric scatter stations, microwave networks, radio relays, and countless miles of cable. FRELOC, when complete, concentrated terminals, reduced routing alternatives, and thereby increased vulnerabilities among communication systems that depended heavily on redundancy to survive in wartime. Access to air defense communications in France and to French segments of ACE HIGH, Allied Command Europe's secure voice network that stretched from Norway to Turkey, was no longer guaranteed, because the French Government professed "no automaticity" policies.¹⁰

U.S. Air Forces Europe (USAFE) shifted several squadrons from France to Great Britain and West Germany shortly after General de Gaulle's 1959 decision to ban U.S. nuclear weapons on French soil, but USAFE even so had to vacate five fully operational bases, plus four on standby. The loss of aerial ports at Evreux and Chateauroux disrupted contingency plans to airlift armored and mechanized division personnel from the United States to France, where they could receive weapons, equipment, and supplies prepositioned at relatively secure locations.

Belgian, Dutch, and German ports, more easily overrun than counterparts in France, replaced logistical lines of communication that previously emanated from Le Havre,

Cherbourg, La Rochelle, Bordeaux, and Marseille. NATO's Central European Pipeline System and the U.S. petroleum pipeline that connected Donges with Melun, Châlons-sur-Marne, and Metz continued peacetime operations, but "no automaticity" policies made wartime availability questionable. The time required to reoccupy installations if French leaders later saw fit varied from 2 to 6 weeks under benign conditions, much longer if armed conflict interfered.¹¹

Federal Republic of Germany

Congestion was severe in West Germany after U.S. Armed Forces completed FRELOC. U.S. Army Europe (USAREUR), two U.S. corps, five U.S. divisions, three separate brigades, an air defense command, three support commands, and Medical Command Europe stood shoulder-to-shoulder where Germany's waist was barely 150 miles (240 kilometers) wide. USAFE flew fighter, tactical reconnaissance, and C³ missions from six saturated airfields clustered west of the Rhine (immense Rhein-Main on the east bank served Military Airlift Command). Main supply routes, perilously perpendicular to Warsaw Pact avenues of approach, ran south from Bremerhaven to feed COMZ depots in prospective combat zones.¹²

NATO'S SOUTH FLANK

NATO's south flank during the Cold War was a watery domain that stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to easternmost Asia Minor, where Turkey touched the Soviet Union. Common threats were uncommon, common fronts were infeasible, deterrent postures depended primarily on sea and air power, member nations were isolated from the center sector as well as from each other, and widely-separated U.S. bases occupied three sub-theaters. Installations on the Iberian Peninsula guarded approaches to Gibraltar, those in Greece and Turkey guarded the Dardenelles and Aegean Sea, those at midpoint in the Mediterranean were positioned to influence actions in either direction (maps 36-38).¹³

U.S. Naval Bases in the Mediterranean. Rota Naval Base, a neighbor of Cadiz, Spain, ministered to ballistic missile submarines, three of which reportedly responded to SACEUR, the rest to the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. Rota additionally provided an admirable location from which to conduct aerial ASW operations for U.S. Sixth Fleet, an occupation it shared with counterparts in the Azores (a Portuguese possession) and Sicily. Patrol aircraft, in turn, worked hand-in-glove with hunter-killer submarines home-ported in Naples and La Maddalena, a small island on Sardinia's shelf. The Souda Bay complex on Crete's northwestern coast included a splendid airfield, enough anchorage to accommodate most of Sixth Fleet, and a missile range at nearby Namfi which, like the Bardenas Reales Firing Range near Zaragosa, Spain, furnished USAFE as well as naval aviators with open spaces for air-to-air and air-to-surface weapons training.

U.S. Air Bases in the Mediterranean. USAFE south of the Alps maintained fewer combat bases than the U.S. Navy--Torrejon, Spain, Aviano, Italy, and Incerlik, Turkey, were most conspicuous--but Military Airlift Command (later U.S. Transportation Command) flew countless sorties into and out of airfields from one end of the Mediterranean to the other. Lajes Air Base in the Azores was a welcome way station between the United States, southern Europe, and the Middle East even after in-flight refueling became feasible (500 to 600 transatlantic flights per month were about average in the 1970s). Hellenikon Air Base outside Athens, which handled intratheater airlift, was much busier, whereas Moron AB, on standby in Spain, simply remained ready to receive, stage and, support reinforcements whenever required.

U.S. Listening Posts Along NATO's South Flank. Electronic intelligence specialists assigned to the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and its affiliates conducted invaluable electronic surveillance activities at San Vito Air Base by Brindisi, Italy, at Iraklion and, perhaps most importantly, from listening posts in Turkey, the only NATO member with a "window" that overlooked the Soviet Union. Sophisticated equipment at Karamursel monitored air and naval traffic around Bulgaria's Black Sea coast and through the Turkish Straits, Sinop and Samsun devoted similar attention to the Soviet Black Sea Fleet and missile testing sites farther north, while intelligence collectors at Diyarbakir in Turkey's interior looked toward the Caucasus and Transcaucasus. Sensitive machines at Belbasi Station, a seismographic facility on the outskirts of Ankara, felt tremors from all but the smallest Soviet nuclear tests above or below ground.

U.S. Logistical Installations in the Mediterranean. Logistical support for all U.S. Military Services throughout the Mediterranean region included nuclear weapon storage sites in Italy, Greece, and Turkey, along with well-spaced conventional ammunition dumps, fuel, and general supply depots. Communication stations in the Azores, Morocco, Spain, Sicily, Italy, Crete, and Greece connected senior U.S. headquarters across NATO's south flank with principal subordinates ashore, with Sixth Fleet afloat and, through Defense Communications Agency (DCA) channels, with the United States.

MIDDLE EAST, Africa, and australia

The United States maintained no Cold War military bases in Africa, save two communication stations on Morocco's coast. U.S. installations in other Arab lands were limited to berthing privileges in Bahrain for a minuscule Middle East Force (MIDEASTFOR), which consisted of a flagship and two (later four) elderly destroyers. Electronic listening posts in Iran closed down in 1980 after Islamic radicals overthrew Muhammad Reza Shah Palavi. U.S. facilities in the Indian Ocean and along its fringe were largely confined to satellite tracking stations in the Seychelles and at Alice Springs in the center of Australia, which also furnished room for a naval communications station on its Northwest Cape. Assets at Diego Garcia, which played a prominent role during U.S. and allied efforts to oust Iraq from Kuwait in 1990-91, were little developed until improvements began in 1980.¹⁴

EAST ASIA

The most beneficial U.S. bases east of Suez congregated in the Philippines, Korea, Japan, and Okinawa. Together, they permitted U.S. Pacific Command to maintain a powerful military presence and stabilizing influence west of Pearl Harbor and Guam.

The Philippine Republic. Cold War bases in the Philippines, which afforded flexibility not available to U.S. Armed Forces elsewhere along the rim of East Asia, routinely proved logistically useful, especially during the Korean War (1950-53) and again from 1965 to 1972, when U.S. military involvement flourished in Vietnam.¹⁵ Philippine installations moreover enabled U.S. Seventh Fleet to straddle critical sea lines of communication that connected Middle Eastern oil producers with Far Eastern consumers and deploy periodically in the

Map 34. U.S. Cold War Bases in France
(1966)

Map 35. U.S. Cold War Bases in West Germany
(1979)

Map 36. U.S. Cold War Bases in Iberia
(1979)

Map 37. U.S. Cold War Bases in Italy
(1979)

Map 38. U.S. Cold War Bases in Greece and Turkey
(1979)

Indian Ocean despite the absence of permanent base rights anywhere in that huge basin (map 39). Subic Bay Naval Base and associated facilities 50 miles (80 kilometers) west of Manila constituted the centerpiece. Port Olongapo, which boasted storage space for 110 million gallons of petroleum, oil, and lubricants, featured four floating drydocks able to overhaul all ships except aircraft carriers. Aprons at Cubi Point Naval Air Station could park a full complement of carrier aircraft next to their ship at pierside with room for an equal number elsewhere, while the Naval Magazine at Camayan Point stored 3.8 million cubic feet (107,400 cubic meters) of ammunition by a wharf that berthed the largest surface combatants. The communication station at nearby San Miguel kept U.S. naval forces ashore in constant touch with Seventh Fleet while collocated DCS facilities linked Philippine installations with the Worldwide Military Command and Control System (WWMCCS). Clark Air Base, a huge logistical hub that could handle any aircraft in the U.S. inventory, possessed immense parking space, POL storage capacities approximately comparable to those of Kennedy International Airport in New York City, 34 ammunition igloos, and superlative communication links. Aviators of all U.S. Services sharpened their skills under simulated combat conditions at Clark's Crow Valley gunnery range.

Senior U.S. defense officials in the early 1980s seriously began to consider relocation if insurgents defeated the Philippine Government and, as promised, ousted U.S Armed Forces.¹⁶ Concerns about base rights intensified in 1985, when President Ferdinand Marcos himself threatened to abrogate base agreements and implied plans to improve relations with the Soviet Union.¹⁷ U.S. Armed Forces indeed did depart in 1991-92, but the Cold War was over and the value of Philippine bases concurrently diminished.

Republic of Korea. The Republic of Korea (ROK) contained the only U.S. military bases anywhere on the Asian mainland after the Vietnam War wound down and relations with Red China improved in the early 1970s (map 40). The U.N. Command and U.S. Eighth Army remained in Yongson when the dust settled, while the 2d Infantry Division centered at Camp Casey stayed put along the demilitarized zone astride a high-speed avenue from Pyongyang into Seoul. An air division headquarters and one composite wing still occupied Osan Air Base, a fighter wing flew out of Kunsan, the naval base at Chinhae stood fast, and Taegu persisted as the principal U.S. supply depot. Rapid reinforcements since then have been limited to air and naval elements in Japan and on Okinawa if North Korea reinvaded, because the nearest U.S. Army troops elsewhere are in far away Hawaii.¹⁸

Japan and Okinawa. The Yokosua-Yokohama complex in Tokyo Bay, which served as a forward operating base for the Seventh Fleet flagship, two aircraft carriers, and a destroyer squadron, was the U.S. Navy's jewel in Japan (map 40).¹⁹ A first-rate labor force manned first-class installations that included a naval ammunition magazine, a communications station, a supply depot, a hospital, and ship repair shops. No other U.S. base west of Pearl Harbor possessed a big enough dry dock to handle nuclear-powered Nimitz class attack carriers. Sasebo on Kyushu Island furnished additional logistical, ordnance, and dry docking facilities.

U.S. Forces Japan, Fifth Air Force, and an airlift wing held on at Yokota Air Base, which was the "Rhein-Main" of Northeast Asia. Air Force fighters and naval patrol aircraft near Honshu's northernmost tip at Misawa conducted reconnaissance, surveillance, electronic intelligence, and antisubmarine warfare missions over the Seas of Japan and Okhotsk, the Kuril Island chain, Sakhalin, and the coast of Kamchatka. Most of the 1st Marine Air Wing remained at Iwakuni Air Station on the Inland Sea.

Four Fifth Air Force fighter squadrons were assigned to Okinawa, where (in those days) they were politically less sensitive than deployments that periodically caused disruptive demonstrations in pacifist Japan, yet within easy reach of potential "hot spots" in the western Pacific. Okinawa also housed two-thirds of the 1st Marine Division and the rest of the 1st Marine Air Wing, which together stood ready to reinforce South Korea and constituted a "fire brigade" that evacuated U.S. noncombatants and selected foreign nationals from Saigon and Phnom Penh in April 1975, retrieved the USS Mayaguez and rescued its crew the very next month, and performed assorted "peacetime" missions.

LATIN AMERICA

No permanent U.S. military bases blossomed in Central or South America during the Cold War, despite U.S. support for anti-Communist counterinsurgents in several countries, but major installations in the Panama Canal Zone included:

• Southern Command at Quarry Heights

• An infantry brigade at Forts Amador, Clayton, Kobbe, and Davis

• Rodman Naval Station

• Howard Air Force Base and Albrook Field

• Marine barracks and communications facilities

• A jungle warfare training center at Fort Sherman.

Guantanamo Naval Base and two associated airfields (Leeward and McCalla) in southeastern Cuba overlooked Caribbean Sea approaches to the Panama Canal, provided logistical support for recurring naval exercises in surrounding waters, and prepared to deal with contingencies if directed. Installations such as Roosevelt Roads Naval Station, Ramey Air Force Base, and Fort Buchanan did likewise in Puerto Rico, a self-governing U.S. commonwealth. U.S. outposts in British Bermuda and the Bahamas promoted intelligence collection, communications, and research programs.²⁰

POST-COLD WAR RETRENCHMENT

The U.S. Government began to reduce force levels and military infrastructure at home and abroad when requirements to contain the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact declined.²¹ The Department of Defense, in response to the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Act of 1990, will have closed 97 major domestic bases and many smaller installations by the time congressionally approved recommendations of four commissions have been fully implemented.²² About one-third of all U.S. bases and facilities overseas were scheduled to close, curtail activities, or assume standby status as early as 1991.²³ That budget-cutting process continues.

Reduced deterrent, combat, and peacetime involvement capabilities accompanied a smaller U.S military establishment and lower costs. Fewer U.S. crisis response forces were located near far distant contingencies by the late 1990s; dependence on long-haul airlift and sealift increased commensurately; naval forces relied more extensively on underway replenishment ships; air forces leaned more heavily on tankers for in-flight refueling; and fewer convenient locations for prepositioned stocks ashore multiplied requirements for additional storage afloat. The wear and tear on overworked forces was considerable.

Map 39. U.S. Cold War Bases in the Philippines
(1979)

Map 40. U.S. Cold War Bases in Japan and Korea
(1979)

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