“What is involved here is simply a desire for putting a little ‘gas station,’ if you will, down here in the center of the ocean... – Samuel S. Stratton, U.S. House of Representatives, April 4, 1974.
What the congressman referred to so deprecatingly – the construction of a U.S. naval base on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, about 1,000 miles south of India – appears to be going ahead. The Pentagon has requested $32.3 million to expand the present communications center there into a well-equipped naval base capable of handling aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines, and B-52 bombers.
More than 200 navy personnel are currently stationed at the communications facility on Diego Garcia. Roads have been constructed, the harbor has been improved, and an 8,000-foot runway has been built. According to the May 27 Far Eastern Economic Review, construction work on the expansion had already begun. Eight hundred U.S. Navy Seabees (civilian construction engineers attached to the navy) were engaged in a dredging operation in the lagoon of Diego Garcia, it reported.
The deepened harbor will allow aircraft carriers to enter and a sizable fleet to anchor there. The runway will be lengthened from 8,000 to 12,000 feet. Other construction includes hangars; a 750-foot pier for berthing tenders, tankers, carriers or nuclear submarines; oil storage tanks; and additional quarters to house 600 full-time military personnel.
The full cost of the expansion was estimated by the navy at $75 million. However, a report by Judith Miller in the May 19 Washington Post said that $65.3 million had already been spent on building and operating the current communications station, and that the navy would be asking for another $115.5 million for construction, equipment, Seabee pay, and support for the facility.
That’s a big price tag for a “little gas station.” Facts that emerged during the congressional debate on appropriations for the expansion revealed that the base’s operations will include more than fueling a few ships now and then.
Under questioning in the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 12, Admiral Thomas Moorer, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, admitted that the longer runway would permit the landing of the giant KC-135 tanker planes used to refuel B-52s. He also admitted that it would be possible to land B-52s themselves there.
The admissions caused a certain stir in the Pentagon and State Department, and Moorer returned that afternoon with a “clarifying statement.” He had misheard the question, he said, and although the stationing of B-52s on Diego Garcia had been discussed, the plan had been rejected. Diego Garcia would not be suitable for “continuous operations” of B-52s. Asked whether he thought it was desirable to station B-52s there, Moorer said he “would like to see that happen.”
In later testimony, Air Force Major General Loving admitted that he envisioned the possibility of stationing eight swing-wing F-llls on Diego Garcia. These planes have a range of 5,600 miles and can carry nuclear warheads.
Although the House of Representatives approved the navy’s request, the Senate voted to pare down the allocation and make it contingent upon the president’s certifying “in writing” that the project was “essential to the national interest of the United States.”
On August 28, at his first news conference after becoming president, Ford stated his support for the Diego Garcia buildup. The final details of the allocation are now up to a joint Senate-House conference committee.
Strategically located in the center of the Indian Ocean, Diego Garcia would provide an ideal command post for a U.S. military intervention anywhere in the vast area bordering the Indian Ocean. It sits astride vita seaways, especially the tanker routes from the Arab-Persian Gulf to Europe and the United States and Japan. Warships based at Diego Garcia would be only a few days’ sailing time away from any of the countries bordering the Indian Ocean.
Furthermore, the island is tucked away from the prying eyes of the rest of the world and has no local population that might agitate for the removal of the U.S. base. At least, there isn’t a local population now.
Britain bought the Chagos Archipelago (of which Diego Garcia is a part) from Mauritius in 1965 for $5.5 million as part of the deal for Mauritian independence. Once the deal was completed, the 500 local inhabitants were shipped more than 1,000 miles away to Mauritius.
Technically, Britain still owns the island. Agreements were signed with the U.S. in 1966 and 1972 to make it available as a base, and an understanding was reached with the Heath government earlier this year permitting the expansion. After the Labour party won the February elections, it announced that the Diego Garcia expansion was subject to the outcome of an overall review of British overseas military commitments. U.S. State Department officials are confident, however, that it will be approved.
In pressing its case for the Diego Garcia buildup, the Pentagon tried to downplay the importance of the base, referring to it as a “modest support facility,” a “gas pump” where U.S. ships could “occasionally, from time to time,” come in to fill up.
But this low-key assessment of the advantages of Diego Garcia was contradicted by some of the details that filtered out and by the persistence of the Pentagon’s attempts to expand the base. As far back as 1969 Pentagon planners were trying to get funds for the project – an “austere naval facility,” as it was referred to then. When Congress, which had already voted huge outlays for the Vietnam war, refused to appropriate the money. Admiral Moorer complained that the decision would have an “adverse strategic effect of major importance.” Diego Garcia, he said, was “the Navy’s number one priority of all items” in that year’s military construction program.
To try to justify the planned buildup, the Pentagon resurrected the “Soviet menace” theme during the congressional debate this year. There had been a massive Soviet buildup in the Indian Ocean, it claimed, with permanent Soviet naval bases established in the area.
However, testimony by retired Rear Admiral Gene LaRocque before a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee had previously exposed the falsity of this argument. LaRocque, now director of the Center for Defense Information, told Congress that the U.S. already had a substantial advantage over the Soviet Union in terms of “capability to support and deploy naval forces overseas without extensive base support”; and that, unlike the U.S., the Soviet Union had no nuclear-powered ships in the region.
The main purpose Washington has in mind for Diego Garcia is clear. It is intended as a base for quick intervention against any unfavorable developments that may occur in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.
In testimony before a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt revealed what the Pentagon really thought were the key issues.
“... the rationale for Diego Garcia,” he said, “... would exist independently of anything the Soviets are doing. We have very important interests in the area. It has become a focal point of our foreign and economic policies and has a growing impact on our security.” (Congressional Record, April 4, p. H2620.)
Zumwalt stressed the impact of “recent events such as the Arab-Israeli war, the oil embargo, and the worldwide economic dislocations which flowed from that embargo and ensuing price rises....” These events “served to focus attention on the Indian Ocean area.”
“In the judgment of many observers,” he continued, “the Indian Ocean has become the area with the potential to produce major shifts in the global power balance over the next decade. It follows that we must have the ability to influence events in that area; and the capability to deploy our military power in the region is an essential element of such influence. That, in my judgment, is the crux of the rationale for what we are planning to do at Diego Garcia.”
Ford and Kissinger have already pinpointed what they consider to be a particularly inviting target for U.S. military intervention the oil-producing countries of the Arab East. In addition, the impetus given to the African revolution by the ending of direct colonial rule in some of the former Portuguese colonies gives the strategic location of the Diego Garcia base an added importance in the eyes of Pentagon planners.
Diego Garcia also has an important part to play in the Pentagon strategy of “limited” nuclear war that has been unveiled by Defense Secretary James Schlesinger. Schlesinger revealed the existence of Pentagon plans to target its nuclear missiles at enemy missile sites, airfields, and antimissile defenses as an alternative to massive retaliation against cities. The idea is to give Washington the option of a first strike in a nuclear war it intends to “win.”
To launch a first-strike attack on the Soviet Union, the Pentagon has developed missiles with a high enough degree of accuracy to hit Soviet missile silos. These weapons include MARVs (maneuverable reentry vehicles) and MIRVs (multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles). To deliver these bombs more accurately, the nuclear force needs to operate further from the U.S. but closer to Soviet missile silos than before. Under this scheme, the U.S. Navy will play a greater role in any nuclear confrontation.
The Diego Garcia base becomes of importance in plans to bomb the Soviet Union or China. From the Indian Ocean, U.S. submarines can release missiles at targets in either the Soviet Union or China. Whether the Pentagon ends up stationing B-52s or F-llls on Diego Garcia remains to be seen, but the installation will certainly be vital for the operation of their submarine- and carrier-based nuclear strike force.
Rather than the Soviet Union, it has been Washington and its allies that have escalated their military forces in the Indian Ocean and have woven a formidable network of bases in the region.
Iran is emerging as one of the strongest local military powers. In 1973 the shah spent $4 billion for arms from Washington and this year has ordered eighty Grumman F-14 jets, 209 Phantom jets, 500 attack helicopters, 700 tanks, and six destroyers. Iran has built up the world’s largest Hovercraft fleet, capable of landing a battalion of troops on the Arab side of the Arab-Persian Gulf in twenty-five minutes.
U.S. planes use Iranian airfields, and the shah has allowed the U.S. to set up an important electronic listening post on the island of Abu Musa, strategically located at the mouth of the Gulf. He is currently building a string of military bases along Iran’s coast. The largest is a $600 million naval-air complex being constructed under a shroud of secrecy by U.S. contractors at Chah Bahar, near the Pakistani border.
Washington is also extending the agreement for its base on the Gulf island state of Bahrein. Two destroyers and a converted amphibious landing craft, equipped with sophisticated communications gear that monitors military traffic throughout the area, are currently stationed there. During the October 1973 Arab-Israeli war, Bahrein ordered the U.S. to quit the base within a year. This decision was rescinded following a visit to the area in September by two top U.S. officials. Pressure from Iran and Saudi Arabia also apparently helped persuade the Bahreini government to change its mind.
Recent revelations about Washington’s plans for military links with the racist South African regime, part of a plan conceived several years ago and code-named “Tar Baby,” show that South Africa also plays an important role in the Pentagon’s military strategy for the Indian Ocean. Washington already cooperates with South Africa in the operation of a supersecret communications station there.
In other parts of the Indian Ocean, the Pentagon has built a giant naval base at Sattahip for Thailand; the Australian government has allowed Washington to set up on Australian territory secret communication facilities that guide U.S. nuclear submarines in the Indian Ocean; France has agreed to a U.S. base on the island of Reunion; and the U.S. Navy has been quietly putting secret funds into refurbishing Indonesia’s harbors and extending covert aid for the rebuilding of its navy.
According to the November 12, 1973, Far Eastern Economic Review, Washington has “been planning a coordinated reconnaissance network linking South Africa with Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia and Britain.” Washington also has sophisticated equipment stationed in the Seychelles for military communications and the processing of intelligence reports, as well as a communications facility in Asmara in Ethiopia. In addition, other bases available to Washington include the French installation at Djibouti, at the mouth of the Red Sea, and the British base on the Cocos Islands.
Governments of many states in the Indian Ocean area have protested Washington’s plans for Diego Garcia. Australia’s minister for foreign affairs, Donald Willesee, criticized the buildup on February 7 and said that Australia favored “neutrality” in the Southeast Asian area. Norman Kirk, then New Zealand’s prime minister, said that his country supported the concept of the Indian Ocean as “a zone of peace, free from great-power rivalry, tensions, and military escalation.”
The United Nations General Assembly in three resolutions since 1971 declared the Indian Ocean a “zone of peace.” It called for a halt to military escalation in the area and demanded that the area be kept free from nuclear weapons. (Admiral Zumwalt attacked the “zone of peace” idea as “a very dangerous concept.”)
Indonesian President Suharto said on February 9 that the U.S. plan was “clearly negative to our wish and will not be favorable to peace in this region.” A joint Indian-Maldives communique on March 14 expressed “full support for the concept of the Indian Ocean as a zone of peace....” Protests also came from Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Tanzania, Madagascar, Kenya, and Mauritius.
A storm of public indignation over the Diego Garcia base erupted in India after some particularly crass remarks by U.S. Ambassador Daniel Moynihan. He told journalists on March 4 that U.S. interests in Diego Garcia were “more important” than those of India, which had no “fundamental concern” in the island. “Why call it the Indian Ocean?” he asked. “One may call it the Madagascar Sea.”
The blowup came just a few weeks before Henry Kissinger was scheduled to visit India, and it severely embarrassed the Indian government. But the event did serve to point up the hollow nature of the protests from the bourgeois regimes around the Indian Ocean. For public consumption they might sound off and protest, but in private they gave assurances to Washington that they welcomed the U.S. military presence.
“Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and her government are anxiously trying to let the United States know in advance of Kissinger’s trip that while they are opposed to a major power buildup in the Indian Ocean, they are not overly upset with the Pentagon’s plans for Diego Garcia,” reported the March 8 Washington Post.
“Senior Indian government officials make the point privately that they are prepared to live with an increased number of U.S. Navy ships, submarines and aircraft moving in and out of Diego Garcia.”
The same private assurances have been given to Washington by the Australian Labor government. Representative Edward Derwinski told the House of Representatives on April 4 that “out of curiosity,” he had called the Australian Embassy. “I was told that although it was official policy of the new government to state their reluctance and unhappiness with the U.S. investments in Diego Garcia, that it is not their policy to oppose any U.S. entree; that what they are opposed to is superpower escalation. They are not opposed to U.S. investment per se.”
Derwinski pointed out that Labor governments like the ones in Britain and Australia “cater to left-of-center constituents. It is far better for them to take a polite public posture against the United States hoping however and keeping their fingers crossed that our Congress in its wisdom will support our investment in Diego Garcia. Officially they are saying, ‘We have some doubts,’ but unofficially they are saying, ‘Please move in there because we cannot.’“
Representative Robert Sikes told the House August 9 that he had “been informed in recent days by highest U.S. authority that some foreign governments say they have to object publicly to some extent to military buildups in order to appease the more liberal elements in their country, but in reality they expect the United States to go ahead on Diego Garcia.”
The same might also be said for some of the protests from certain liberal members of the U.S. Congress. In this light, any limitations imposed by Congress on the expansion can be seen as just a little camouflage for a buildup that is steadily forging ahead.
Source: https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1974/IP1242.pdf#page=13&view=FitV,35