Derek Gregory - Offshoring (late modern war, USA)
I’ve written about US military bases
overseas before – via David Vine‘s brilliant, painstaking work (see here and here) –
but a new study from The Intercept has revealed another, much less visible geography of
‘offshoring’ military violence: the training of foreign military, police and
security personnel by the United States.
I imagine most readers
will know of the infamous ‘School of
the Americas‘ at Fort Benning (since renamed the ‘Western Hemisphere
Institute for Security Cooperation’) – if you don’t, read Juanita
Sundberg in Antipode 39 (1) (2007) 144-66 or Sara
Koopman in Antipode 40 (5) (2008) 825-47 on
transnational protests against the School – but the network of global
military and paramilitary collaboration is much more extensive:
The data show
training at no fewer than 471 locations in 120 countries — on every continent
but Antarctica — involving, on the U.S. side, 150 defense agencies, civilian
agencies, armed forces colleges, defense training centers, military units,
private companies, and NGOs, as well as the National Guard forces of five
states. Despite the fact that the Department of Defense alone has poured some
$122 billion into such programs since 9/11, the breadth and content of this
training network remain virtually unknown to most Americans.
The contours of
this sprawling system were discovered by analyzing 6,176 diplomatic cables that
were released by WikiLeaks in 2010 and 2011. While the scope of the training
network may come as a surprise, the most astounding fact may be that it is even
larger than the available data show, because the WikiLeaks cables are not
comprehensive. They contain, for example, little information on training
efforts in Colombia, the single-largest recipient of U.S. training covered by
the human rights vetting process that produced these records. Other large
recipients of U.S. security assistance, such as Pakistan, are vastly
underrepresented in the cables for reasons that remain unclear
