Some affirmatives on this topic will hope to side-step the question of U.S. strategic military-economic interests and instead re-focus the question of U.S. military presence around the issue of the effect such deployments have on the regular people in the host country. One issue of great controversy is the role that the military has played in supporting and promoting prostitution in countries where there is a military base. A good affirmative approach might be to insist upon the necessity of narrowing the focus of the discussion over the advantages and disadvantages of U.S. military presence to issues of local concern, rather than questions of "grand strategy." With a claim that "the personal is international" affirmatives might try to reorient the way that judges evaluate the "impact" of U.S. military bases.
The New York Times recently documented the efforts of former sex workers to show that the South Korean and U.S. governments not only tolerated prostitution near U.S. military bases, but that they in fact coordinated and managed the sex trade for decades. "Our government was one big pimp for the U.S. military," one of the women, Kim Ae-Ran said in a recent interview.
Anti-base activists have long decried the situation and point to such calculated exploitation as evidence that U.S. bases have more to do with U.S. interests than those of the countries they are alleged to protect.
This book -Sex Among Allies- by Katherine HS Moon, looks to be of interest.
No doubt, Cynthia Enloe's book - Maneuvers - will be of great help to debaters interested in this kind of advocacy. The google books overview of the book is insightful:
"Maneuvers takes readers on a global tour of the sprawling process called "militarization." With her incisive verve and moxie, eminent feminist Cynthia Enloe shows that the people who become militarized are not just the obvious ones--executives and factory floor workers who make fighter planes, land mines, and intercontinental missiles. They are also the employees of food companies, toy companies, clothing companies, film studios, stock brokerages, and advertising agencies. Militarization is never gender-neutral, Enloe claims: It is a personal and political transformation that relies on ideas about femininity and masculinity. Films that equate action with war, condoms that are designed with a camouflage pattern, fashions that celebrate brass buttons and epaulettes, tomato soup that contains pasta shaped like Star Wars weapons--all of these contribute to militaristic values that mold our culture in both war and peace."
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