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Yves here. This report by David Vine describes how the US has been shifting its operations in Europe since 9/11 away from Germany and to the south, most of all to Italy. While geographic proximity to the Middle East is a superficial explanation for this shift, the bigger driver is that less wealthy countries are more compliant that Germany, which is becoming even more influential in Europe. Another factor could be that Germany imports most of its gas, and Russia is its biggest supplier. Russia is not only no longer a Cold War enemy, but some factions in Germany even favor cultivate closer ties to Russia.
But aside from the political calculus, this article also gives Americans a better sense of the sheer weight of our military spending abroad.
By David Vine, an associate professor of anthropology at American University and the author of Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia. He has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and Mother Jones, among other places. He is currently completing a book about the effects of U.S. military bases located outside the United States. For more of his writing, visit DavidVine.net. Cross posted from TomDispatch
The Pentagon has spent the last two decades plowing hundreds of millions of tax dollars into military bases in Italy, turning the country into an increasingly important center for U.S. military power. Especially since the start of the Global War on Terror in 2001, the military has been shifting its European center of gravity south from Germany, where the overwhelming majority of U.S. forces in the region have been stationed since the end of World War II. In the process, the Pentagon has turned the Italian peninsula into a launching pad for future wars in Africa, the Middle East, and beyond.
At bases in Naples, Aviano, Sicily, Pisa, and Vicenza, among others, the military has spent more than $2 billion on construction alone since the end of the Cold War — and that figure doesn’t include billions more on classified construction projects and everyday operating and personnel costs. While the number of troops in Germany has fallen from 250,000 when the Soviet Union collapsed to about 50,000 today, the roughly 13,000 U.S. troops (plus 16,000 family members) stationed in Italy match the numbers at the height of the Cold War. That, in turn, means that the percentage of U.S. forces in Europe based in Italy has tripled since 1991 from around 5% to more than 15%.
Last month, I had a chance to visit the newest U.S. base in Italy, a three-month-old garrison in Vicenza, near Venice. Home to a rapid reaction intervention force, the 173rd Infantry Brigade Combat Team (Airborne), and the Army’s component of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), the base extends for a mile, north to south, dwarfing everything else in the small city. In fact, at over 145 acres, the base is almost exactly the size of Washington’s National Mall or the equivalent of around 110 American football fields. The price tag for the base and related construction in a city that already hosted at least six installations: upwards of $600 million since fiscal year 2007.
There are still more bases, and so more U.S. military spending, in Germany than in any other foreign country (save, until recently, Afghanistan). Nonetheless, Italy has grown increasingly important as the Pentagon works to change the make-up of its global collection of 800 or more bases abroad, generally shifting its basing focus south and east from Europe’s center. Base expert Alexander Cooley explains: “U.S. defense officials acknowledge that Italy’s strategic positioning on the Mediterranean and near North Africa, the Italian military’s antiterrorism doctrine, as well as the country’s favorable political disposition toward U.S. forces are important factors in the Pentagon’s decision to retain” a large base and troop presence there. About the only people who have been paying attention to this build-up are the Italians in local opposition movements like those in Vicenza who are concerned that their city will become a platform for future U.S. wars.
Base Building
Most tourists think of Italy as the land of Renaissance art, Roman antiquities, and of course great pizza, pasta, and wine. Few think of it as a land of U.S. bases. But Italy’s 59 Pentagon-identified “base sites” top that of any country except Germany (179), Japan (103), Afghanistan (100 and declining), and South Korea (89).
Publicly, U.S. officials say there are no U.S. military bases in Italy. They insist that our garrisons, with all their infrastructure, equipment, and weaponry, are simply guests on what officially remain “Italian” bases designated for NATO use. Of course, everyone knows that this is largely a legal nicety.
No one visiting the new base in Vicenza could doubt that it’s a U.S. installation all the way. The garrison occupies a former Italian air force base called Dal Molin. (In late 2011, Italian officials rebranded it “Caserma Del Din,” evidently to try to shed memories of the massive opposition the base has generated.) From the outside, it might be mistaken for a giant hospital complex or a university campus. Thirty one box-like peach-and-cream-colored buildings with light red rooftops dominate the horizon with only the foothills of the Southern Alps as a backdrop. A chain link fence topped by razor wire surrounds the perimeter, with green mesh screens obscuring views into the base.
If you manage to get inside, however, you find two barracks for up to 600 soldiers each. (Off base, the Army is contracting to lease up to 240 newly built homes in surrounding communities.) Two six-floor parking garages that can hold 850 vehicles, and a series of large office complexes, some small training areas, including an indoor shooting range still under construction, as well as a gym with a heated swimming pool, a “Warrior Zone” entertainment center, a small PX, an Italian-style café, and a large dining facility. These amenities are actually rather modest for a large U.S. base. Most of the newly built or upgraded housing, schools, medical facilities, shopping, and other amenities for soldiers and their families are across town on Viale della Pace (Peace Boulevard) at the Caserma Ederle base and at the nearby Villaggio della Pace (Peace Village).
A Pentagon Spending Spree
Beyond Vicenza, the military has been spending mightily to upgrade its Italian bases. Until the early 1990s, the U.S. air base at Aviano, northeast of Vicenza, was a small site known as “Sleepy Hollow.” Beginning with the transfer of F-16s from Spain in 1992, the Air Force turned it into a major staging area for every significant wartime operation since the first Gulf War. In the process, it has spent at least $610 million on more than 300 construction projects (Washington convinced NATO to provide more than half these funds, and Italy ceded 210 acres of land for free.) Beyond these “Aviano 2000” projects, the Air Force has spent an additional $115 million on construction since fiscal year 2004.
Not to be outdone, the Navy laid out more than $300 million beginning in 1996 to construct a major new operations base at the Naples airport. Nearby, it has a 30-year lease on an estimated $400 million “support site” that looks like a big-box shopping mall surrounded by expansive, well-manicured lawns. (The base is located in the Neapolitan mafia’s heartland and was built by a company that has been linked to the Camorra.) In 2005, the Navy moved its European headquarters from London to Naples as it shifted its attention from the North Atlantic to Africa, the Middle East, and the Black Sea. With the creation of AFRICOM, whose main headquarters remain in Germany, Naples is now home to a combined U.S. Naval Forces Europe-U.S. Naval Forces Africa. Tellingly, its website prominently displays the time in Naples, Djibouti, Liberia, and Bulgaria.
Meanwhile, Sicily has become increasingly significant in the Global War on Terror era, as the Pentagon has been turning it into a major node of U.S. military operations for Africa, which is less than 100 miles away across the Mediterranean. Since fiscal year 2001, the Pentagon has spent more on construction at the Sigonella Naval Air Station — almost $300 million — than at any Italian base other than Vicenza. Now the second busiest naval air station in Europe, Sigonella was first used to launch Global Hawk surveillance drones in 2002. In 2008, U.S. and Italian officials signed a secret agreement formally permitting the basing of drones there. Since then, the Pentagon has put out at least $31 million to build a Global Hawk maintenance and operations complex. The drones provide the foundation for NATO’s $1.7 billion Alliance Ground Surveillance system, which gives NATO surveillance capabilities as far as 10,000 miles from Sigonella.
Beginning in 2003, “Joint Task Force Aztec Silence” has used P-3 surveillance planes based at Sigonella to monitor insurgent groups in North and West Africa. And since 2011, AFRICOM has deployed a task force of around 180 marines and two aircraft to the base to provide counterterrorism training to African military personnel in Botswana, Liberia, Djibouti, Burundi, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, Tunisia, and Senegal.
Sigonella also hosts one of three Global Broadcast Service satellite communications facilities and will soon be home to a NATO Joint Intelligence, Surveillance & Reconnaissance deployment base and a data analysis and training center. In June, a U.S. Senate subcommittee recommended moving special operations forces and CV-22 Ospreys from Britain to Sicily, since “Sigonella has become a key launch pad for missions related to Libya, and given the ongoing turmoil in that nation as well as the emergence of terrorist training activities in northern Africa.” In nearby Niscemi, the Navy hopes to build an ultra high frequency satellite communications installation, despite growing opposition from Sicilians and other Italians concerned about the effects of the station and its electromagnetic radiation on humans and a surrounding nature reserve.
Amid the build-up, the Pentagon has actually closed some bases in Italy as well, including those in Comiso, Brindisi, and La Maddalena. While the Army has cut some personnel at Camp Darby, a massive underground weapons and equipment storage installation along Tuscany’s coast, the base remains a critical logistics and pre-positioning center enabling the global deployment of troops, weapons, and supplies from Italy by sea. Since fiscal year 2005, it’s seen almost $60 million in new construction.
And what are all these bases doing in Italy? Here’s the way one U.S. military official in Italy (who asked not to be named) explained the matter to me: “I’m sorry, Italy, but this is not the Cold War. They’re not here to defend Vicenza from a [Soviet] attack. They’re here because we agreed they need to be here to do other things, whether that’s the Middle East or the Balkans or Africa.”
Location, Location, Location
Bases in Italy have played an increasingly important role in the Pentagon’s global garrisoning strategy in no small part because of the country’s place on the map. During the Cold War, West Germany was the heart of U.S. and NATO defenses in Europe because of its positioning along the most likely routes of any Soviet attack into Western Europe. Once the Cold War ended, Germany’s geographic significance declined markedly. In fact, U.S. bases and troops at Europe’s heart looked increasingly hemmed in by their geography, with U.S. ground forces there facing longer deployment times outside the continent and the Air Force needing to gain overflight rights from neighboring countries to get almost anywhere.
Troops based in Italy, by contrast, have direct access to the international waters and airspace of the Mediterranean. This allows them to deploy rapidly by sea or air. As Assistant Secretary of the Army Keith Eastin told Congress in 2006, positioning the 173rd Airborne Brigade at Dal Molin “strategically positions the unit south of the Alps with ready access to international airspace for rapid deployment and forced entry/early entry operations.”
And we’ve seen the Pentagon take advantage of Italy’s location since the 1990s, when Aviano Air Base played an important role in the first Gulf War and in U.S. and NATO interventions in the Balkans (a short hop across the Adriatic Sea from Italy). The Bush administration, in turn, made bases in Italy some of its “enduring” European outposts in its global garrisoning shift south and east from Germany. In the Obama years, a growing military involvement in Africa has made Italy an even more attractive basing option.
“Sufficient Operational Flexibility”
Beyond its location, U.S. officials love Italy because, as the same military official told me, it’s a “country that offers sufficient operational flexibility.” In other words, it provides the freedom to do what you want with minimal restrictions and hassle.
Especially in comparison to Germany, Italy offers this flexibility for reasons that reflect a broader move away from basing in two of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful nations, Germany and Japan, toward basing in relatively poorer and less powerful ones. In addition to offering lower operating costs, such hosts are generally more susceptible to Washington’s political and economic pressure. They also tend to sign “status of forces agreements” — which govern the presence of U.S. troops and bases abroad — that are less restrictive for the U.S. military. Such agreements often offer more permissive settings when it comes to environmental and labor regulations or give the Pentagon more freedom to pursue unilateral military action with minimal host country consultation.
While hardly one of the world’s weaker nations, Italy is the second most heavily indebted country in Europe, and its economic and political power pales in comparison to Germany’s. Not surprisingly, then, as that Pentagon official in Italy pointed out to me, the status of forces agreement with Germany is long and detailed, while the foundational agreement with Italy remains the short (and still classified) 1954 Bilateral Infrastructure Agreement. Germans also tend to be rather exacting when it comes to following rules, while the Italians, he said, “are more interpretive of guidance.”
War + Bases = $
The freedom with which the U.S. military used its Italian bases in the Iraq War is a case in point. As a start, the Italian government allowed U.S. forces to employ them even though their use for a war pursued outside the context of NATO may violate the terms of the 1954 basing agreement. A classified May 2003 cable sent by U.S. Ambassador to Italy Melvin Sembler and released by WikiLeaks shows that Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s government gave the Pentagon “virtually everything” it wanted. “We got what we asked for,” wrote Sembler, “on base access, transit, and overflights, ensuring that forces… could flow smoothly through Italy to get to the fight.”
For its part, Italy appears to have benefited directly from this cooperation. (Some say that shifting bases from Germany to Italy was also meant as a way to punish Germany for its lack of support for the Iraq War.) According to a 2010 report from Jane’s Sentinel Security Assessment, “Italy’s role in the war in Iraq, providing 3,000 troops to the U.S.-led effort, opened up Iraqi reconstruction contracts to Italian firms, as well as cementing relations between the two allies.” Its role in the Afghan War surely offered similar benefits. Such opportunities came amid deepening economic troubles, and at a moment when the Italian government was turning to arms production as a major way to revive its economy. According to Jane’s, Italian weapons manufacturers like Finmeccanica have aggressively tried to enter the U.S. and other markets. In 2009, Italian arms exports were up more than 60%.
In October 2008, the two countries renewed a Reciprocal Defense Procurement Memorandum of Understanding (a “most favored nation” agreement for military sales). It has been suggested that the Italian government may have turned Dal Molin over to the U.S. military — for free — in part to ensure itself a prominent role in the production of “the most expensive weapon ever built,” the F-35 fighter jet, among other military deals. Another glowing 2009 cable, this time from the Rome embassy’s Chargé d’Affaires Elizabeth Dibble, called the countries’ military cooperation “an enduring partnership.” It noted pointedly how Finmeccanica (which is 30% state-owned) “sold USD 2.3 billion in defense equipment to the U.S. in 2008 [and] has a strong stake in the solidity of the U.S.-Italy relationship.”
Of course, there’s another relevant factor in the Pentagon’s Italian build-up. For the same reasons American tourists flock to the country, U.S. troops have long enjoyed la dolce vita there. In addition to the comfortable living on suburban-style bases, around 40,000 military visitors a year from across Europe and beyond come to Camp Darby’s military resort and “American beach” on the Italian Riviera, making the country even more attractive.
The Costs of the Pentagon’s Pivots
Italy is not about to take Germany’s place as the foundation of U.S. military power in Europe. Germany has long been deeply integrated into the U.S. military system, and military planners have designed it to stay that way. In fact, remember how the Pentagon convinced Congress to hand over $600 million for a new base and related construction in Vicenza? The Pentagon’s justification for the new base was the Army’s need to bring troops from Germany to Vicenza to consolidate the 173rd brigade in one place.
And then, last March, one week after getting access to the first completed building at Dal Molin and with construction nearly finished, the Army announced that it wouldn’t be consolidating the brigade after all. One-third of the brigade would remain in Germany. At a time when budget cuts, unemployment, and economic stagnation for all but the wealthiest have left vast unmet needs in communities around the United States, for our $600 million investment, a mere 1,000 troops will move to Vicenza.
Even with those troops staying in Germany, Italy is fast becoming one of several new pivot points for U.S. warmaking powers globally. While much attention has been focused on President Obama’s “Asia pivot,” the Pentagon is concentrating its forces at bases that represent a series of pivots in places like Djibouti on the horn of Africa and Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, Bahrain and Qatar in the Persian Gulf, Bulgaria and Romania in Eastern Europe, Australia, Guam, and Hawai’i in the Pacific, and Honduras in Central America.
Our bases in Italy are making it easier to pursue new wars and military interventions in conflicts about which we know little, from Africa to the Middle East. Unless we question why we still have bases in Italy and dozens more countries like it worldwide — as, encouragingly, growing numbers of politicians, journalists, and others are doing — those bases will help lead us, in the name of American “security,” down a path of perpetual violence, perpetual war, and perpetual insecurity.
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The U.S. has a long history also of intervention into the political affairs of Italy. Using Operation Gladio, the U.S. engineered a series of false-flag terrorist attacks in an attempt to stop the growth of the Italian CP which gained seats every election and had a reputation for honest government of a number of cities in Italy. This subversion culminated in the Kidnapping of the PM at the time Aldo Moro who was exploring bringing the Italian CP into his government. The left was blamed for all the unrest and bombings of the 70s by the right-wing Italian media. You can look up Operation Gladio it has, as far as I know, not been mentioned in the U.S. media.
I knew Italy fairly well in those days and knew the CP posed no danger and were not allied with the CPs in Eastern Europe.
I read about Gladio twenty years ago in The Village Voice. I think it was Doug Ireland who did the reporting. The whole thing was coordinated with the Masons and the Vatican ostensibly as a “stay behind” resistance force if the commies ever took over or invaded (and yes, that sounds stupid, but it’s amazing what otherwise intelligent people convinced themselves was possible during the Cold War).
didn’t we (or our elites) fund the parties that put Mussolini in power, out of fear that communism would take hold in Italy?
same with Germany, by the way.
naturally, that is probably just a conspiracy theory.
it does make you wonder, though.
Actually, its well documented that Mussolini was funded by MI5 of Great Britain while he was still a journalist, before he was a dictator. The money was to campaign for Italy to continue to fight alongside the allies in WW1. Oh, and besides journalism, he had henchmen beat up peace protesters. Classy…
This isnt conspiracy theory stuff, its been reported by the Guardian on down.
Officially he didnt have connections with MI5 after the war, but that doesnt mean it didnt happen.
i’m not up on history, but remember watching something (was it Paul Jay) where they were discussing the money pouring into Italy to fight the commies. also, didn’t we allow Hitler to invade certain countries, and only got ticked off when he went after the “wrong” countries? my juvenile assessment is that he was fine until he got too big for his britches, and started biting someone else’s apple.
to me, it sounds like our elites have no problem, and may even prefer fascism (see Greek problems today) but the red scare is, for some reason, all too real to them.
Communism threatened capitalist absentee ownership of industries. Fascism protected it, in some ways even better than liberal democracy can.
Profits Uber Alles is a good paper for reading about how much American capitalists (Like Henry Ford. Lol he was praised in Mein Kampf, and Hitler even invited over to give him some kind of reward, aside from him being a nazi sympathizer/supporter) LOVED/profited from Nazi Germany. Google it.
Authoritarianism is alright for capitalists if it lets them profit from it. They say there isnt much difference between fascism and communism, and for the working man that may be true, but to the wealthy capitalist class the difference wass their very existence.
“Last month, I had a chance to visit the newest U.S. base in Italy, a three-month-old garrison in Vicenza, near Venice.”
From “Operation Gladio” to “Eyes Wide Shut” and the death of Kubrick. The “tell” in Kubrick’s last film anent the RothWindsorVENETO connection for wealth extraction and organized crime is the “Cafe VERONA” in the stalking scene.
Such a pretty little Masquerade with orgies, murder, and child pimping. Because, as they assure us: “TINA”.
are there really tells in that, or is it just the overarching theme that money buys any depravity you can name, that all are meat for sale under a system that worships money as power. that money buys beauty and the artifacts of history, and turns them into meaningless decorative tchotckes. the doctor is a whore just as all the whores he comes across. it buys death, and silence over it as well.
there was a really good review of Eyes Wide Shut someone posted up a few months ago. I forced myself to watch that movie (despise Cruise, and yet he’s in everything. I thought Kubrick WAS making a joke about him in the scene where he’s walking along at night and a bunch of jock types start harassing him and calling him “homo”, so perhaps you’re right about those tells.)
I remain rather bemused at the “retreat from empire” meme that many writers and commentators are propounding as a consequence of the failed US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, the US military seems to be “doubling down” and extending its “global reach” ever more persistently. Many countries such as Italy and Japan are only too happy to lay down for US demands of permanently installed bases, and more are added, it seems, daily. AFRICOM has now let its presence be publicly known by US involvement (with the French) in Mali, and now we read of the video-game raids in Tripoli and Somalia, as a sort of “they can run but they can’t hide” statement from Obama/JSOC. Let’s not too prematurely declare that the hegemon has spent its strength, and is in a so-called “pullback” mode.
No one in their right mind, who looks at budgets, the US-military/police-state based economy, and the military presence around the world would argue that the US interventionist empire is not expanding, or doubling down. What can be argued and seen, is that it is doomed to fail, not productive, enormously expensive from many measuring sticks, and completely asinine. I was wondering when if ever we will do a citizen/taxpayer/consumer shut-down– send a message… general strike over Thanksgiving weekend, Starting Wednesday (I call in sick), Black Friday buy-nothing, extended through the weekend. Likely never gonna happen, we can’t collectively agree on much if anything these days… oh, maybe pick an hour or two to turn out and bang on some pots and raise a deafening din
Whether other function of the U.S. government refrain from the latest attempted virtual coup by the fascist/feudalist right the U.S. national security state will survive and continue to expand. The military is the most admired organization in U.S. society which I expect will eventually translate into a partially military-run country within the next couple of decades.
Note that the Pentagon is back to being in full force and show-operations were in the news as a show of strength. I think people all over the world know that there are several Americas some are in decline but the national security state is not. BTW, if you’re worried about intel not getting funding–don’t worry much of their funding is “black” and the rest is generate through illegal activity from smuggling to financial manipulations and offering services to those that can pay.
The Italian and Sicilian puppets will want to recall the fate of the puppets of Iraq, Libya, etc., in order to “predict” their future.
“The business of NATO is betrayal.”
Thanks for this post. Very interesting. Italy is the perfect outpost to police all the oil and natural gas in the eastern Mediterranean. Also interesting is how we and Japan have financed the purchase of Africa by our corporations with QE. Looks like Japan Inc, and USA Inc. to me. And how socialist France – still Vichy – has gone into Mali and North Africa without remorse. The UK is looking for a way to raise money to get more of Africa too – they are proposing to put up the Monarchy’s palaces for 12 billion in loans. How hilarious. China is not constrained – they are just going into Africa without restraint – they don’t need no stinkin’ accounting, because they are wise enough to know its all nonsense. Not sure how Germany is grabbing African assets. So why Africa? Is it the last unexploited place? Does the rest of the world really need all those new plantations and factories? Or is this climate related?
I think it’s the one place you can extract the food and let the locals starve and nobody cares. The big push into Africa of late has been buying vast tracts of farm land and (at least in Ethiopia) the government then turns the locals off their land (which they’ve probably been tilling for about 4000 years). People dying of starvation in Africa has become a cliché, so who will notice (or care), especially as food prices skyrocket in the advanced capitalist world (or whatever the hell China is) if millions of Africans are starving to death. The US and German militaries is certain that climate change is happening; the Chinese Communist Party is, too. They’re buying up land and resources for a raining day they are sure is coming. If the indigenous people die, expect AFRICOM, the French, and the local warlords to keep the flow of goods out of Africa moving smoothly and the Main Stream Media to label the starving masses “terrorists” and “Islamic extremists” or in a rare honest moment say, “hey Mr. and Mrs. America, it’s you or them.”
Capitalism HAS to expand.
If capitalism doesnt expand, the whole damn thing collapses. This drive to expand for profits is what drove the first round of colonization of africa in the 19th century.
Its colonialism redux. The great powers all want to colonize it again, but this time it will be neocolonialism, with ostensibly independent on paper puppet governments, with all the property inside said nation states belonging to neocolonial powers like USA and China…
Its not so much a part of climate change. Its mostly capitalism IMO. That and great power politics. If its a factor, its not the main one, IMO. But of course this is pure speculation.
We were talking about this over the weekend. Now communism is dead, Keynesianism out of favour, it seems we have discovered a new enemy of capitalism in God. Who would have thought it? I mean we are the good guys, aren’t we? How could God have screwed-up so egregiously to find himself opposed to us?
The problem requiring our hatred of Muslims is usury. Moses said God banned it but we essentially need it to underwrite our entire system of global control. Without usury, our enormous money supply is useless. We will become unable to intervene anywhere. We will have to compete on level terms. That means our crass inabilities in negotiating are going to be exposed again and we are going to make all the bad deals we used to make. The only good thing is that any humour at our expense will be muted (the rest of the world knows how prickly we are on that score – bang, bang).
@ Banger: BBC did an excellent doc on “Operation Gladio” that you can youtube. Regarding the PCI, they too were deeply opposed to what was called the “anti-parliamentary left”–the constellation of radical worker and student groups from at least 1965 through the late 1970s. Unsurprisingly, the militarization of Italy has had diverse responses within the Italian left, which was the basis for Berlusconi’s return to head of state several years ago. Important article.