Name: The US' Overseas Military Base Strategy
Uploaded: 2021-06-10T16:09:47.000Z
Duration: 14 min 6 s
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If you ask the US military how many bases they have overseas, you won't really get

They don't make it all too hard to find out about the larger ones—Ramstein Air Base

in Germany, Thule Air Base in Greenland, Camp Hansen in Japan.

These all show up on the closest thing to an official catalogue of the US military's

real estate there is—the annual Department of Defence Base Structure Report.

According to this document the American military has some 514 sites outside of its borders,

but, there are some noticeable omissions to this list.

For example, the US has a rather secretive drone base in central Niger, however, according

The US has more than ten sites in Syria, however, according to this list, they don't exist.

The US has a satellite surveillance facility in Australia's Northern Territory so well

known, in fact, that it has a whole fictional TV show based on it, but, according to this

In fact, according to this list, there are just four defense department installations

in Africa—a base in Djibouti, a joint British-American base on Ascension Island, an NSA site in Kenya,

and a Naval Medical Research facility in Egypt.

Of course, if you dig a little deeper into the vast archive of unclassified military

documents, you find this—a slide from a presentation clearly showing 34 US military

With omissions such as these, one can assume that that total 514 number is far from the

real count of how many facilities the US military maintains abroad.

Part of this could be attributed to the fact that it's sometimes tough to define what

Again looking at the African continent, the only site that looks like what most would

traditionally think of as an overseas military base is Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti.

It is the only permanent, exclusive US military site, at least according to their own definition,

on the continent, hosts about 4,000 members of the US military at a time, and is the primary

base of operations for the US Africa Command.

You see, the US military splits the world into six regions each with their own infrastructure

The highest, in the case of Africa Command, are those permanent, full-blown bases—the

one in Djibouti and the one on Ascension Island.

One step below that are what are called Cooperative Security Locations.

These are, according to the US military's definition, “host-nation [facilities] with

little or no permanent U.S. personnel presence, which may contain pre-positioned equipment

and/or logistical arrangements and serve both for security cooperation activities and contingency

CSL's are useful to the US military because they are much less flashy and less permanent—they

don't require the same kind of political capital as to set up as a full-size base like

Bases are often unpopular and receive press scrutiny, both in the US and the host country,

so small, few-hundred person CSL's have the advantage of being able to be set up with,

You can think of them as smaller versions of the kind of bases you find in Djibouti

or Ascension island which can, rather quickly, become bigger bases should the need arise.

The remaining twenty known sites on the continent are what are called contingency locations.

Now, this terminology can be used for a lot of different types of facilities, but, in

essence, what it means is that these are temporary sites established as part of ongoing missions.

For example, the contingency location in Garoua, Cameroon was set up for the Americans to provide

logistics and intelligence support in the Cameroonian's fight against Boko Haram.

What that actually means, though, when you break through the military's PR language,

Unlike other American drone bases, it's relatively easy to find info about the one

in Garoua perhaps because it's primarily home to surveillance drones, rather than strike

For other contingency locations, though, it is much less clear what exactly their purposes

are and for some, they aren't even publicly acknowledged.

For many, the US military just has small agreements with foreign governments and the general public

So, the final, real answer for how many US bases there are abroad is that we don't

If you define every military installation as a base, compiling all publicly available

information, one set of research reached a number of 800.

Of course, the real number could be something far different from that but as the general

public, there's just no real way to know.

But the next question that arises about the US' overseas presence is why?

In the era of nuclear weapons that can obliterate any city on earth in an hour, aircraft carriers

sailing worldwide with more aircraft than some country's air forces, and airplanes

that could land troops in any country on earth in a day, why does the US bother spending

so much money maintaining bases in allied countries during peacetime?

The primary reason has to do with a military concept known as the loss of strength gradient.

This concept essentially theorizes that, the further a conflict is away from a military's

home country, the less military power that nation is able to bring to the fight.

This is largely because it is, of course, complicated and expensive to bring troops

The book that originally defined this loss of strength gradient proposed that the way

to counteract this effect was to establish bases outside of a country's home territory

since these can help reduce the effective distances to conflict and, therefore, it's

The US has certainly taken this concept to heart and has put quite a lot of work into

trying to flatten out their loss of strength gradient.

That is to say, they want to make it just as likely that the US would win a war in east

As an example of how these bases aid that mission, much of the operations of the US'

wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were conducted here—at Ramstein Air Base in Germany.

This base and the other surrounding US military facilities in the Rhineland-Palatinate state

make up the largest grouping of American service members in the world and one of the largest

groupings of Americans anywhere outside the US.

The city that Ramstein and many of the other facilities are in is home to only about 100,000

full time residents, however, the American bases are staffed by more than 50,000 personnel

This makes Ramstein Air Base like a small American city in Europe.

It has outposts of plenty of American restaurant chains that you won't find anywhere else

in Germany—Johnny Rockets, Chili's, PF Chang's—in addition to an American-style

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The US' Overseas Military Base Strategy

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