Chalmers Johnson ( Sorrows of American Empire , and author of Blowback ) describes the American empire as an “empire of military bases”: “As of September 2001, the Department of Defense acknowledged at least 725 American military bases existed outside the United States. Actually, there are many more, since some bases exist under leaseholds, informal agreements, or disguises of various kinds. And more have been created since the announcement was made . . . . Among its recent additions are the al-Udeid air base in the desert of Qatar, where several thousand American military men and women live in air-conditioned tents, and the al-Masirah Island naval air station in the Gulf of Oman, where the only diversion is ‘wadi ball,’ a cross between volleyball and football.” The armed forces run a “ski and vacation center at Garmisch in the Bavarian Alps,” a “resort hotel in downtown Tokyo,” and “234 military golf courses.” It owns “seventy-one Learjets, thirteen Gulfstream IIIs, and seventeen Cessna Citation luxury jets used to fly admirals and generals to such spots. At a cost of $50 million apiece, each Gulfstream accommodates twelve passengers plus two pilots, one fight engineer, a communications systems operator, and a flight attendant.”

The global spread of American military power makes Johnson worry about the militarization of foreign policy: “slowly but surely the Department of Defense is obscuring and displacing the Department of State as the primary agency for making and administering foreign policy. We now station innumerably more uniformed military officers than civilian diplomats, aid workers, or environmental specialists in foreign countries . . . . Our garrisons send a daily message that the United States prefers to deal with other nations through the use or threat of force rather than negotiations, commerce, or cultural interaction and through military-to-military, not civilian-to-civilian, relations.”

And he worries about the entanglements of military and industry: “Our globe-girding military and intelligence installations bring profits to civilian industries, which design and manufacture weapons for the armed forces or undertake contract serves to build and maintain our far-flung outposts . . . . Whole sectors of the American economy have come to rely on the military for sales. On the eve of our second war in Iraq, for example, the Defense Department ordered 273,000 bottles of Native Tan sunblock (SPF 15), almost triple its 1999 order and undoubtedly a boon to the supplier, Control Supply Company of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and its subcontractor, Sun Fun Products of Daytona Beach, Florida.”