More than 190,000 soldiers and 115,000 civilian employees inhabit 900 military bases around the world, according to official government statistics. The real numbers, including top-secret facilities, are significantly larger.

The Pentagon also outsources work on those bases to private military contractors such as DynCorp and Blackwater, now called Xe Services.

Under the new Obama administration, those bases continue to expand, despite rising criticism of U.S. foreign policy at home and around the world.

U.S. military bases do provide jobs to local people across the planet.

But those bases routinely seize land from native peoples and wreak environmental havoc along beautiful coasts, on islands and in ocean waters.

Hundreds of little communities have lost their farmlands. Military jet fuels and poisonous residues from exploded bombs have damaged local children.

And in many places, local people have been imprisoned and tortured by despotic regimes propped up by U.S. political and military support.

Few academics and news reporters write about the extent of these bases, hiding them from public view.

Catherine Lutz, a Brown University professor, does so in her engaging collection of essays, The Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle against U.S. Military Posts.

Local movements challenging U.S. military bases - such as those in Okinawa, Hawaii, Turkey, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Diego Garcia - are growing, especially among women, sometimes the target of sexual abuses.

Most of our bases are not temporary outposts set up to fight a particular conflict, but part of an enduring U.S. effort to dominate the world.

American ambitions for global domination expanded dramatically in three different eras - in 1898 after the Spanish-American War, in 1945 after World War II and in 2001 after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

"The bases bristle with weapons whose worth is measured in the trillions and whose killing power could wipe out all life on earth several times over," Lutz recently wrote in "The New Statesman."

Major U.S. missile defense systems are located in countries including Greenland, Poland, the Czech Republic, Israel, Korea and Japan.

But since 1990, some U.S. bases have been forced to close down in some areas, including the Philippines, Panama, Saudi Arabia, Vieques and Uzbekistan.  

The Environment and self-determination

Military bases have been used to launch an array of foreign military interventions. They are also designed to protect natural resources, such as oil and natural gas pipelines in the Middle East, Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Joseph Gerson, from the American Friends Service Committee, writes: "Bases bring insecurity: the loss of self-determination, human rights and sovereignty. They degrade the culture, values, health, and environment of host nations - and of the United States."

Environmental damage is an increasingly important issue.

The Pentagon also outsources work on those bases to private military contractors such as DynCorp and Blackwater, now called Xe Services.

Under the new Obama administration, those bases continue to expand, despite rising criticism of U.S. foreign policy at home and around the world.

U.S. military bases do provide jobs to local people across the planet.

But those bases routinely seize land from native peoples and wreak environmental havoc along beautiful coasts, on islands and in ocean waters.

Hundreds of little communities have lost their farmlands. Military jet fuels and poisonous residues from exploded bombs have damaged local children.

And in many places, local people have been imprisoned and tortured by despotic regimes propped up by U.S. political and military support.

Few academics and news reporters write about the extent of these bases, hiding them from public view.

Catherine Lutz, a Brown University professor, does so in her engaging collection of essays, The Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle against U.S. Military Posts.

Local movements challenging U.S. military bases - such as those in Okinawa, Hawaii, Turkey, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Diego Garcia - are growing, especially among women, sometimes the target of sexual abuses.

Most of our bases are not temporary outposts set up to fight a particular conflict, but part of an enduring U.S. effort to dominate the world.

American ambitions for global domination expanded dramatically in three different eras - in 1898 after the Spanish-American War, in 1945 after World War II and in 2001 after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

"The bases bristle with weapons whose worth is measured in the trillions and whose killing power could wipe out all life on earth several times over," Lutz recently wrote in "The New Statesman."

Major U.S. missile defense systems are located in countries including Greenland, Poland, the Czech Republic, Israel, Korea and Japan.

But since 1990, some U.S. bases have been forced to close down in some areas, including the Philippines, Panama, Saudi Arabia, Vieques and Uzbekistan.  

The Environment and self-determination

Military bases have been used to launch an array of foreign military interventions. They are also designed to protect natural resources, such as oil and natural gas pipelines in the Middle East, Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Joseph Gerson, from the American Friends Service Committee, writes: "Bases bring insecurity: the loss of self-determination, human rights and sovereignty. They degrade the culture, values, health, and environment of host nations - and of the United States."

Environmental damage is an increasingly important issue.

Even at home inside the United States, the military has single-handedly created 27,000 toxic waste sites. Yet the military has never been held responsible to clean up its "toxic legacy" - unlike private companies.

As a result, 29 million Americans today live within 10 miles of a military site on the Superfund's hazardous-waste cleanup list.

Some of the worst environmental problems haunt people living on Vieques, a small island six miles off the coast of Puerto Rico. After the Navy conducted live-bombing practices there for decades, the base closed in 2003.

Katherine T. McCaffrey, a Montclair State University professor, documents how heavy metals and uranium contaminate former practice-bombing sites in Vieques, especially beaches and sea grass beds which are home to turtles, manatees, lobsters and a wide variety of fish.

"Okinawa: Women's Struggle for Demilitarization" by Kozue Akibayashi and Suzuyo Takazato is one of the book's most powerful chapters.

Okinawa, an area including 160 islands in the East China Sea long colonized by Japan, saw a fourth of its people killed during World War II battles. Now heavily occupied by U.S. military forces, Okinawa is still the poorest area in Japan.

Soldiers stationed in Okinawa were deployed to the Persian Gulf War in 1991 and, more recently, to tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.

During periods of deployment to war zones, Akibayashi and Takazato write, "military violence against [local] women in various forms ... increased in its intensity."

After the 1979 Iran revolution, the United States expanded its bases in Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean. Those bases grew again after the 9/11 attacks, becoming the launching site for more bombing raids on Afghanistan than anywhere else.

Diego Garcia is also home to a secret CIA detention center for terrorist suspects.

In Turkey, the Incirlik Air Base became the most important launching point for U.S. patrol planes during the 10 years after Operation Desert Storm in 1991, making it perhaps the most overseas base in the world during those years.

U.S. planes also took off from Incirlik and other bases in Turkey to bomb Afghanistan after 9/11.

But Turkish politics changed after a newly-elected national assembly voted in March 2003 not to allow the U.S. to deploy military forces from its bases to Iraq. At the time, a political survey showed 83 percent of Turkish people opposed helping the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Chalmers Johnson, a retired University of California professor who recently wrote Blowback and The Sorrows of Empire, wrote:

"The American public ... is almost totally innocent of the huge costs involved, the crimes committed by our soldiers against women and children in the occupied territories, the environmental pollution, and the deep and abiding suspicions generated among people forced to live close to thousands of heavily armed, culturally myopic and dangerously indoctrinated American soldiers. This book is an antidote to such parochialism."

Using powerful case studies from nations around the globe, The Bases of Empire documents the dangers of believing military violence can guarantee world peace and security.

It is a lesson the architects of current efforts to send more U.S. troops to Afghanistan - an area that has repelled foreign invaders for centuries - should learn.

Reach Paul J. Nyden at pjny...@wvgazette.com or 304-348-5164.