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It's Time for a Trillion-Dollar Tag Sale at the Pentagon by Nick Turse, Tomdispatch.com www.alternet.org, October 29, 2008 http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/American_Empire/TrillionDollarPentagonSale.htmlTag Sales and Savings If the Pentagon sold off just the buildings and structures on its officially acknowledged overseas bases at their current estimated replacement value, the country would stand to gain more than $119 billion. Think of this as but a down payment on a full-scale Pentagon bailout package.
In addition, while it leases the property on which most of its bases abroad are built, the Pentagon does own some lucrative lands that could be sold off. For instance, it is the proud owner of more than 11,000 acres in Abu Dhabi, "the richest and most powerful of the seven kingdoms of the United Arab Emirates." With land values there averaging $1,100 per square meter last year, this property alone is worth an estimated $48.9 billion. The Pentagon also owns several thousand acres spread across Oman, Japan, South Korea, Germany, and Belgium. Selling off these lands as well would net a sizeable sum. Without those bases, billions of dollars in other Pentagon expenses would immediately disappear. For instance, during the years of the Global War on Terror, the Overseas Cost of Living Allowance, which equalizes the "purchasing power between members overseas and their U.S.-based counterparts," has reached about $12 billion. Over the same period, the price tag for educating the children of U.S. military personnel abroad has clocked in at around $3.5 billion. By shutting down the 127 Department of Defense schools in Europe and the Pacific (as well as the 65 scattered across the U.S. mainland, Puerto Rico, and Cuba) and sending the children to public schools, the U.S. would realize modest long-term savings. Once no longer garrisoning the globe, the Pentagon would also be able to cease paying out the $1 billion or so that goes into the routine construction of housing and other base facilities each year, not to mention the multi-billions that have gone into the construction, and continual upgrading, of bases in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And that's not the end of it either. Back in the 1990s, the Pentagon estimated that it was spending $30 billion each year on "base support activities" -- though the exact meaning of this phrase remains vague. Just take, for example, five bases being handed back to Germany: Buedingen, Gelnhausen, Darmstadt, Hanau and Turley Barracks in Mannheim. The annual cost of "operating" them is approximately $176 million. Imagine, then, what it has cost to run those 750+ bases during the Global War on Terror years.
Some recent Pentagon contracts for general operations and support functions overseas are instructive. In March, for instance, Bahrain Maritime and Mercantile International was awarded a one-year contract worth $2.8 billion to supply and distribute "food and non-food products" to "Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps and other approved customers located in the Middle East countries of Bahrain, Qatar and Saudi Arabia."
In July, the French foodservices giant Sodexo received a one-year contract worth $180 million for "maintenance, repair and operations for the Korea Zone of the Pacific Region." These and other pricey support contracts for food, fuel, maintenance, transport, and other non-military expenses, paid to foreign firms, would disappear along with those U.S. garrisons, as would enormous sums spent on all sorts of military projects overseas. In 2007, for instance, the Army, Navy, and Air Force spent $2.5 billion in Germany, $1 billion in Japan, and $164 million in Qatar. And this year, the Pentagon paid a jaw-dropping $1 billion-plus for contracts carried out in South Korea alone.
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