The 10 places with the biggest U.S. troop presence: Japan (39,623), Germany (34,399), South Korea (23,297), Italy (11,806), Afghanistan (10,107), United Kingdom (8,126) , Kuwait (7,097), Iraq (6,137), Bahrain (5,894) and Guam (4,299).
Why it matters: Tens of thousands of troops remain in the Middle East and Afghanistan, and the U.S. has a huge deployment well within missile range of the next potential flashpoint, North Korea.
- See all the small dots in the map? Those represent a small number of active duty personnel in a country or territory. Usually, they are attached to a U.S. embassy in a security or advisory role.
- The DMPC data we used for this map lists about 26 thousand troops whose location is unaccounted for. According to the Department of Defense: "Some records do not include location information for operational security reasons. There is also the possibility that a small number of records have data errors that do not correspond to a particular location."
