What the World Needs Is More US Military Bases

As American intelligence agencies grapple with the expansion of the Islamic State beyond its headquarters in Syria, the Pentagon has proposed a new plan to the White House to build up a string of military bases in Africa, Southwest Asia and the Middle East.

  NYTimes

You'd think it would be an easy matter to find out how many bases the US military currently has anywhere in the world, wouldn't you? Give it a try.

Apparently, we don't have enough, though.

 This is the best I could find about our current bases in Africa:

Research by TomDispatch indicates that in recent years the U.S. military has, in fact, developed a remarkably extensive network of more than 60 outposts and access points in Africa. Some are currently being utilized, some are held in reserve, and some may be shuttered. These bases, camps, compounds, port facilities, fuel bunkers, and other sites can be found in at least 34 countries -- more than 60% of the nations on the continent -- many of them corrupt, repressive states with poor human rights records. The U.S. also operates “Offices of Security Cooperation and Defense Attaché Offices in approximately 38 [African] nations,” according to Falvo, and has struck close to 30 agreements to use international airports in Africa as refueling centers.

There is no reason to believe that even this represents a complete accounting of America’s growing archipelago of African outposts.

  Common Dreams

Southwest Asia and the Middle East are not clearly differentiated in my mind:

So I tried to combine them for an answer to how many bases we have in that region. And finally gave up.

The main sources of information on these military installations (e.g. C. Johnson, the NATO Watch Committee, the International Network for the Abolition of Foreign Military Bases) reveal that the US operates and/or controls between 700 and 800 military bases Worldwide.

[...]

The US Military has bases in 63 countries. Brand new military bases have been built since September 11, 2001 in seven countries.

[...]

These facilities include a total of 845,441 different buildings and equipments. The underlying land surface is of the order of 30 million acres. According to Gelman, who examined 2005 official Pentagon data, the US is thought to own a total of 737 bases in foreign lands.

  Global Research

From the article above, here's somebody's stab at mapping Middle East and Central Asian bases in 2006:



And here's a map of bases and other military presence/agreements worldwide from a 2008 article.

When we get the planet totally covered, can we declare the whole world our empire?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.