:a global history of AThe United states of war merica endless conflicts, from columbus to the islamic state,DAVID VINE

 – Résumé

This book offers a new way to think about why the U.S. military seems to fight wars without end. The approach I take is simple but somewhat unusual. Rather than looking primarily at the wars themselves, this book looks at the infrastructure that made the wars possible. Rather than being a book about battles, this book uses military bases as windows to understand the pattern of endless U.S. wars.

To fight wars, especially wars far from home, armies and navies generally need bases to organize, support, and sustain combat. Bases are logistical centers for organizing military personnel, weaponry, and supplies and for deploying troops to wage war. Domestic bases serve that role.

 But if a military wants to fight a war far from home, as the United States has generally done, it needs to move and maintain its forces over long distances. Extraterritorial bases, bases far from home, bases in foreign lands, make this much easier, facilitating the logistics of war hundreds or thousands of miles away.

Since independence the U.S. government has built the largest collection of military bases occupying foreign lands in world history. Today the military controls around eight hundred military bases in some eighty-five countries outside the fifty states and Washington, DC.

 At other times the total has been higher. While many in the United States take it for granted that the U.S. military maintains hundreds of bases in places as far flung as Germany and Japan, Djibouti and Honduras, Greenland and Australia, the thought of finding a foreign base in the United States is basically unimaginable. For most it’s a challenge to imagine what it would feel like to have a single foreign base anywhere near a U.S. border, for example in Mexico, Canada, or the Caribbean, let alone in the United States.

From the United States’ earliest days, bases abroad have played key roles in launching and maintaining U.S. wars and other military actions. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, hundreds of Army forts beyond U.S. borders launched dozens of wars against Native American peoples, resulting in the conquest of lands across North America and the deaths of millions. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the military built bases farther from the North American mainland, in Alaska, Hawaiʻi, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, Panama, and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. During World War II U.S. forces built and occupied two thousand base sites and a total of thirty thousand installations touching every continent.

 Holding on to hundreds of those bases and building new ones after World War II made it easier to wage war in Korea, Vietnam, and elsewhere in Southeast Asia, as well as to support proxy armies from Central America to the Middle East. The wars the U.S. government launched after October 7, 2001, would have been significantly more difficult to wage without a collection of bases of unprecedented breadth around the globe.

Bases in the Middle East, central and southern Asia, the Indian Ocean, and as far as Thailand, Djibouti, Italy, and Germany have played critical roles in allowing U.S. troops to fight in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, and far beyond.

This book looks at the bases that have enabled U.S. leaders to launch and sustain wars as well as the bases that the U.S. military occupied and retained after the wars ended. Research funded by none other than the U.S. Army indicates that since the 1950s a U.S. military presence abroad is correlated with U.S. forces initiating military conflicts.

 In other words, there appears to be a relationship between establishing bases outside the United States and the incidence of wars. Notably, the historical record also shows that U.S. wars have often led U.S. leaders to establish more bases abroad. The establishment of more bases abroad, in turn, has often led to more wars, which has often led to more bases, in a repeating pattern over time.

Put another way, bases frequently beget wars, which can beget more bases, which can beget more wars, and so on.

By this I don’t just mean that the construction of bases abroad has enabled more war. I mean that the construction of bases abroad has actually made aggressive, offensive war more likely.Since the revolution that won independence from Britain, the construction and maintenance of extraterritorial bases has increased the likelihood that these bases would be used. They have increased the likelihood that the United States would wage wars of aggression.

-CONTENTS

List of Illustrations
Preface
A Note on Language and Terminology
Introduction: “If We Build Them, Wars Will Come”
PART I IMPERIAL SUCCESSION
         1.Conquest
         2.Occupied
PART II EXPANDING EMPIRE
          3.Why Are So Many Places Named Fort?
          4.Invading Your Neighbors
          5.The Permanent Indian Frontier
          6.Going Global
PART III IMPERIAL TRANSITIONS
          7.The Military Opens Doors
          8.Reopening the Frontier
PART IV GLOBAL EMPIRE
         9.Empire of Bases
       10.The Spoils of War
       11.Normalizing Occupation
       12.Islands of Imperialism
       13.The Colonial Present
       14.Building Blowback
PART V HYPER IMPERIALISM
         15.Did the “Cold War” End?
         16.Out-of-Control War
          17.War Is the Mission
Conclusion: Ending “Endless Wars”
       Gratitude and Thanks
        Appendix: U.S. Wars, Combat, and Other Combat Actions Abroad
Notes
Suggested Resources
Index

–caractéristiques

Date de parution :13 Octobre, 2020

N.de page : 464 pages

ISBN-10 : 0520300874

ISBN-13 : 978-0520300873

Éditeur : University of California Press; First Edition

Langue : English