Picking Up a $170 Billion Tab

Posted on Dec 12, 2012

The U.S. Army (CC BY 2.0)

By David Vine, TomDispatch

(Page 5)

“Who pays? Who pays?” he asked. “Noi,” he said. We do.

Indeed, from that $170 billion to the costs we can’t quantify, we all do.

David Vine, a Tom Dispatch regular, is assistant professor of anthropology at American University, in Washington, DC. He is the author of Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia (Princeton University Press, 2009). He has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and Mother Jones, among other places. He is currently completing a book about the more than 1,000 U.S. military bases located outside the United States. To read a detailed description of the calculations described in this article and view a chart of the costs of the U.S. military presence abroad, visit www.davidvine.net.

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Copyright 2012 David Vine

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