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petezilla's review
3.0
The most useful part of this book for me was a reminder of our sins of the past in (not so nominally) colonial acquisitions of foreign bases and land. While I found the historical context of some of our military bases interesting and educational, this book generally annoyed me with it over generalizations about US service members and conclusions based loosely on cherry picked quotes, anecdotes, innuendo, and incredibly irrelevant facts. You will be shocked (shocked!) that the US military operates on a budget and pays as little for goods and services as the market will support, and that defense relationships are complicated by local politics. The author only addresses straw man arguments for the usefulness and positive effects of overseas bases and his arguments later devolve into running descriptions of every bad thing the military as an institution or various military individuals have ever done. By the end of the book it felt like the author had been given a glimpse into a world he didn’t understand wrote down everything he saw, and then strung it together into a book whose conclusion was preordained before he began his research. His description of military family life and what happens when a service member is killed was especially heinous. Ultimately, there is a reasonable argument to be made about the cost/benefits of overseas bases, but by the end of the book I was too annoyed by the authors wandering diatribe against the military to care.
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