Picking Up a $170 Billion Tab: How US Taxpayers Are Paying the Pentagon to Occupy the Planet

[unhappycamper]

http://truth-out.org/news/item/13261-picking-up-a-$170-billion-tab-how-us-taxpayers-are-paying-the-pentagon-to-occupy-the-planet

Picking Up a $170 Billion Tab: How US Taxpayers Are Paying the Pentagon to Occupy the Planet
Tuesday, 11 December 2012 10:25 By David Vine, TomDispatch | News Analysis

~snip~

We were standing in front of a massive 145-acre construction site for a “little America” rising in Vicenza, an architecturally renowned Italian city and UNESCO world heritage site near Venice. This was Dal Molin, the new military base the U.S. Army has been readying for the relocation of as many as 2,000 soldiers from Germany in 2013.

Since 1955, Vicenza has also been home to another major U.S. base, Camp Ederle. They’re among the more than 1,000 bases the United States uses to ring the globe (with about 4,000 more in the 50 states and Washington, D.C.). This complex of military installations, unprecedented in history, has been a major, if little noticed, aspect of U.S. power since World War II.

During the Cold War, such bases became the foundation for a “forward strategy” meant to surround the Soviet Union and push U.S. military power as close to its borders as possible. These days, despite the absence of a superpower rival, the Pentagon has been intent on dotting the globe with scores of relatively small “lily pad” bases, while continuing to build and maintain some large bases like Dal Molin.

~snip~

How much does the United States spend each year occupying the planet with its bases and troops? How much does it spend on its global presence? Forced by Congress to account for its spending overseas, the Pentagon has put that figure at $22.1 billion a year. It turns out that even a conservative estimate of the true costs of garrisoning the globe comes to an annual total of about $170 billion. In fact, it may be considerably higher. Since the onset of “the Global War on Terror” in 2001, the total cost for our garrisoning policies, for our presence abroad, has probably reached $1.8 trillion to $2.1 trillion.

[xchrom]

1. du rec. nt

[CaliforniaPeggy]

2. All that money to contain terror?

It seems to me that we're busy spreading it.

This is obscene and WRONG.

K&R