There were about 1.3 million active duty military personnel at the end of June this year, according to the Department of Defense's Defense Manpower Data Center. About 200,000 of those were stationed around the world.
Data: Defense Manpower Data Center; Map: Lazaro Gamio / Axios
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."