I keep the Federation of American Scientists blog Secrecy News in my RSS because they republish handy dandy Congressional Research Service reports, usually to see what they write on China. Today I checked out “Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-2007,”, which looks suspiciously like something I think I saw in something Howard Zinn wrote. I thought it’d be handy to put it all on a map, but as I realized it didn’t include all the countries U.S. forces entered in World War II, or some of the more recent bases and “lily pads” the U.S. has established (Pakistan, for example).
So I slapped this together with some stuff from Global Security, Military.com, what WW2 history I could remember (I know I’m missing something), and some Googling. To be fair, some of the older events in the CRS report are things like “a dozen Marines deployed to protect Consul-General in Abyssinia”, but if CRS includes it, so do I. I’m still wondering about post-Soviet Eastern Europe, which is changing everyday (missile defense in Azerbaijan?), Southern Africa considering U.S. support for South Africa, and whether or not anymore countries would be included if I went through peacekeeping operations, humanitarian missions or U.S. military aid. But hey, it’s pretty much the whole world anyway.
We also conduct military exercises in Mongolia, and joint training with the Baltic republics (new NATO members).