"Early in the history of warfare, man learned that the best formula for victory
was compounded in striking power, mobility,
and self-protection."
The US is easily the most powerful country to have ever existed.
And it certainly spends more on its military budget and any other country
does today.
That's all pretty well-known,
but less well-known is the fact that the US has around 800 military bases around the globe.
This map can't even show that many dots.
These are just 200 or so dots to give you an idea of where these bases are clustered.
These bases are everything from massive military compounds to small airstrips in the middle of the ocean.
If you combined all the foreign bases that every other nation has outside of its own borders,
you get a total of about thirty.
There's never been a country with such a
massive global presence.
And the big question is: how did these bases get there the first place?
And how much is it costing US taxpayers to keep them open?
Most to these bases cropped up after WWII, when the US set up in places like
Germany and Japan to help maintain peace, after an era of intense global war.
"But we cannot expect these people to discard Nazi ideas
with the casual air with which they abandoned their uniform.
Slowly, steadily. they must be taught the fundamentals of democracy.
Our task is to supervise this training in democracy."
Even though these countries are now stable, robust democracies,
and allies, US still has 50,000 troops in Japan
and 54,000 in Germany.
The Korean War brought an influx of American military
infrastructure to the Korean Peninsula,
where we now have 28,500 troops stationed.
The Cold War made the US expansion to every corner of the globe
imperative to US strategic goals.
"Here, in Russia, you see the reason why we are spending billions of dollars in military production
and why your family is paying the highest taxes in our history."
But even now that the Cold War's over
there's not a place on Earth that's not still covered by US military influence.
This includes everything from naval compounds like
those in Guantanamo Bay, to small drone bases like those in the Horn of Africa,
to little-known posts in the middle and the Indian Ocean like that of Diego Garcia.
And it's not cheap. Keeping the US foreign bases
open, costs taxpayers between 70 and 100 billion dollars per year.
That's more than any other government agency receives
in taxpayer money, besides of course the Department of Defense itself.
Taxpayers pay between ten and forty thousand dollars more per soldier stationed abroad
than they do for those stationed here domestically. But this cost seems to be
worth it to most lawmakers.
The idea that US military leadership provides an indispensable stability to the globe
is now a fixture of our global strategy and our foreign policy.
"In an uncertain world full of breathtaking change,
the one constant is American leadership."
"You can't have stability without American leadership there's only one nation in
the world capable
of rallying the freedom-loving people of this planet to confront evil."
"American leadership is not just respected it is required."
So over the past seven years the US has set up bases
all over the world in response to threats and then they just never left.
These eight hundred bases around the world represent a massive system of
military power that isn't often talked about, and it's us,
the American taxpayers, that are financially supporting this.
We've all decided that it's worth it to pump a hundred billion dollars out of
our economy, to keep these bases open on the far corners of our globe.