by JESSICA JORDAN
Abstract: This article assesses local tensions that plague the U.S.-centered hub-and-spokes security framework in the Western Pacific region, which finds its most concrete expression in increasingly vulnerable legacy installations. I start by considering how people living outside the fence in places like Guam and Okinawa have tended to see the U.S. military, while summarizing global trends in U.S. base expansion and contraction outside of the continental United States (OCONUS). I tie this past to the most common dilemmas of global basing manifesting today, explain how these dilemmas have been understood, and highlight core concerns undergirding most base protest cultures. In the absence of sweeping policy changes to legal structures that disenfranchise militarized civilians in the most heavily fortified islands in the U.S. global base network, changing the way recent history is represented at U.S. controlled public sites could catalyze meaningful change within perennially troubled relationships between the U.S. military and overburdened host communities.
Keywords: military bases, colonialism, history, politics, security, protests
Indigenous Chamorro scholars from Guam have remarked that the American liberation story about Guam’s place in U.S. history cannot be taken seriously because the U.S. military never left.1 This circumstance persists both because of, and in spite of, the sacrifices Indigenous Islanders and other long-term local residents continue to make in the name of American defense. Even a cursory review of WWII history from the perspective of Indigenous Chamorro/Chamoru peoples reveals the unusually cruel suffering they endured during the Pacific War. Mariana Islanders were mobilized to fight on both sides of the Japan-U.S. conflict, and this largely unacknowledged legacy continues to inflict pain on local communities today.
I am not Indigenous, but I grew up and lived for 23 years on the island of Saipan north of Guam, where I came of age struggling to make sense of how this island chain was American since no one on the U.S. mainland seemed aware of its existence. When it did come up, Guam was the subject of middle-of-nowhere jokes. One U.S. congressman suggested that Guam could tip over if too many Marines were stationed there, a comment for which he was widely ridiculed, yet he was likely critiquing thinking that reflects the unsinkable battleship/aircraft-carrier American vision of this island as one big military base (Wilkie 2010).
A similar case of disproportionate base hosting prevails in Okinawa, the Japanese prefecture which shoulders the burden for the U.S.-Japan alliance by hosting a disproportionate share of bases. On both islands, the overwhelming role the military bases play in local socioeconomies means that bases are an unavoidable and polarizing feature of local life. Bases are polarizing because of the stark differences in power they embody that puts them outside of local decision making about their existence from the start. The degree to which an Islander embraces or rejects the military presence determines on what side of local politics they are likely to land. In general, the more “hardened”2 or old the facility, the more hardened the opinions about them.
Another way of talking about huge, hardened facilities is to describe them as “Little Americas,” as does anthropologist and military base scholar David Vine (Vine 2017: 45). This language acknowledges the messy way that bases such as Kadena (Okinawa) and Andersen (Guam) create distinct socioeconomies that embody American military-cultural qualities. In contrast, the official U.S. government description of foreign bases in the Department of Defense (DoD) Base Structure reports explain the size of bases in terms of their potential replacement value. According to the most recent report, only about ten percent of current DoD installations are overseas. However, this information does not account for overseas military expenditures in the Pentagon budget and various other defense spending outside of the continental U.S. (Vine 2017: 195-213). It also does not say anything about how foreign bases fit into the fabric of local societies.
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