For the really tiny ones, generally coordination, sometimes education. Example, air forces fly to everyone’s bases who isn’t an enemy. Who arranges for hotels for them, plus meals and transportation? These are aviators, we’re speaking of here; they’re much too privileged to stay in barracks!

Sometimes there are instruction cells, too. For example, at Fort Benning, where they’ve consolidated both the infantry and armor schools, there are usually instructors from Germany, the UK, Australia, France…even Switzerland, sometimes. We do the same with them.

The problems with this whole bases meme is that it is, in the first place, dishonest, an attempt to create the idea of a foreign American Empire where none such exists, in the second, it is undiscerning, in an insultingly childlike way, as if there’s no difference between a small signal site in, say, Germany, and the bulk of the 1st Marine Division in Okinawa. Then added to that is – I did mentioned insulting, did I not? – the attempt to multiply bases preposterously. Example, Diego Garcia. We keep a number of ships there with equipment on board for rapid intervention in the middle east. There’s not doubt that Diego Garcia is a base, leased by us from the Brits. But the left will try to claim that each individual ship is a base. See the problem there?

For example, we used to have some 28 distinct bases in Panama and the Canal Zone (Ft Sherman, Ft Davis, Ft Gulick, Coco Solo, France Field, Galeta Island, a place about midway across the Isthmus that calibrated naval compasses, Ft Clayton, Ft Amador, Quarry Heights, Arraijan Tank Farm, Gorgas Hospital, Gatun Tank Farm, Semaphore Hill, Summit, NavCom Balboa, Fort Grant, the TransIsthmian pipeline, Corozal, Curundu, Cocoli, Ft Randolph, Rio Hato, Rousseau, Albrook Field, Ft Kobbe, Farfan, and NS Rodman). To the proper lefty, these were, of course, 28 distinct, ever so wicked, American Imperial bases.

So ask yourself, if we’d consolidated all of these, and the 11k or so servicemen and women into just one, centered on the Clayton, Albrook, Corozal, Curundu complex, and called the whole assembly “Fort Chalmers Johnson,” would that mean our presence was then only 1/28th of what it had been previously? That our empire had been reduced by that much?

Conversely, since Cocoli* was nothing but a run down housing area, in what possible way did this count as an increment in the ever so wicked American Empire? Were the dozen or two Marines who manned the tiny signal site on Galeta Island a whole base in themselves? Or was it half a base, because it was shared with the Smithsonian?

The lefties pushing this line may or may not be idiots, but they are counting on idiocy, while the people who take the bait, without questioning the mix of lefty dishonesty and ignorance, certainly are idiots.

*Cocoli? Run down? You have no idea. We let junior enlisted men with families take them, if they wanted to – nobody was forced into it – for half their housing allowance, rather than all of it. The wife of one of my troops was taking a bath one day and the bathtub, with her in it, fell through the floor and into the parking space underneath. Yes, she was unhurt but she was also buck naked in an open spot, visible to the world.

Good point on Turkey hosting a base and it being useless.

You mention token bases with minimal capability and personnel. What would you say their purpose is?

That wasn’t a “base,” Robert, that was a country which felt it owed us, BIG, from the 1991 liberation.

So, then, you think that the four “bases” we maintain in Canada, with a grand total of 137 people, really count? Fuck, no, as with much of Europe, those are not OUR bases but foreign bases on which we have a small cell. For Jesus’ sake just think about the idiocy involved in equating, say, a ship in Diego Garcia – and yes, the lefty motherfuckers trying to pull this shit will try to count each ship as an individual base – equates to say, 3rd MARDIV on Okinawa and Hawaii.

And you’ve just shot your own argument to shit. We have a very large base at Incirlik, Turkey, and couldn’t use it because the Turks retain sovereignty over their airspace and territory, while the base has none.

How are the bases nonsense? I remember from the 2003 Iraq invasion a logistical buildup over 6 months to stage an invasion and conquest. Some of the surrounding nations haggled hard over using their space, and Turkey in particular was a mess for airspace use.

Having the base in the nation already means a lot of the pre-selling is out of the way. From a Russian perspective its months and years closer to facilitating offensive firepower then would be a nation absent a USA base presence.

Frankly, I’m surprised you fell for the bases nonsense.

That said, what I think Putin really wants – and it is not unreasonable – is probably not taking all of the Ukraine; more trouble than it’s worth, really. Instead, he needs those people of Russian heart, mind, spirit and soul back with Russia, along with the local industry, for the eventual and inevitable war with China. This means nothing more than rolling in to the existing (more or less) front line and stopping there. All the Javelins in the world are not going to be especially useful to combat this. In addition, it will put the Ukraine on notice concerning how ineffectual NATO is, hence, for whom they must put on the kneepads from here on out.