US military bases abroad: they're in a lot of places (and there are a lot of domestic ones, too)

The military budget has essentially for decades now not received anything like the kind of scrutiny in US politics that it deserves.

One of many aspects that rarely come up in US media as a serious issue is US military bases on foreign soil. The current Wikipedia List of United States military bases includes the following countries with at least one US base:

1. Afghanistan
2. Australia
3. Bahamas
4. Bahrain
5. Belgium
6. Bosnia-Herzegovina
7. Brazil
8. Bulgaria
9. Cameroon
10. Cuba (Guantanamo)
11. Diego Garcia (British)
12. Djibouti
13. Germany
14. Greece
15. Greenland (Danish territory)
16. Iceland
17. Iraq
18. Israel
19. Italy
20. Iraq
21. Japan
22. Kosovo
23. Kuwait
24. Niger
25. North Macedonia
26. Portugal (Azores islands)
27. Qatar
28. Quwait
29. South Korea
30. Spain
31. Syria
32. Somalia
33. Romania
34. United Kingdom

This is a list of countries and a couple of more-or-less colonial possessions, not the number of bases, which is much larger.

The Department of Defense issues an annual fiscal year, the most recent being that for FY 2018.

Miriam Pemberton of the Institute for Policy Studies writes (Something We Can Agree On: Close Some Overseas Bases Defense One 11/28/2018):

The strategy of maintaining U.S. military dominance with a network of about 800 military bases spread across the globe has left us seriously overstretched. It has diverted our resources from our domestic needs, as well as from constructive, non-military forms of global engagement.

This strategy has created nationalistic resentments, and even spurs to terrorism, in places where U.S. bases sit. Nobody likes to be occupied. The bases near Muslim holy sites in Saudi Arabia, for example, were a major recruiting tool for al-Qaeda. More recently, the governor of Okinawa came to Washington, D.C., this month to tell U.S. officials about the burdens his constituents feel from this American occupation. They want the United States out, and they have like-minded allies around the world.

Über-Realist Stephen Walt was writing almost ten years ago (Why Defense spending won't go down much Foreign Policy 10/06/2010)), warning that "to make substantial cuts in defense spending, even in period of budgetary stringency, without simultaneously rethinking America’s overall grand strategy." Part of the reason is that the Pentagon is careful to spead out its domestic military bases to give Member of Congress a home-district incentive to keep the military budget high:

To start with, any serious attempt to cut defense spending would face opposition from Congressional representatives who want to keep defense contractors busy and military bases open in their states or districts. Thus, when Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ proposed that DoD save some bucks by closing the Joint Forces Command, the suggestion drew howls of protest from Virginia’s entire Congressional delegation. Was this because a separate Joint Forces Command was so essential to our national security? Of course not. It was because its headquarters was located in Virginia. When you consider how carefully the Pentagon scatters bases or sprinkles defense dollars in every Congressional district, you can see how hard it is going to be to make a significant dent in our current defense expenditures.

And he noted, "although U.S. forces are smaller than they were during the Cold War, we are still trying to patrol the same amount of real estate and the social engineering we’ve been trying to do in places like Afghanistan is very expensive, especially when compared to the strategic benefits it brings."

And he also noted in this piece from a decade ago:

Although it is mind-boggling to realize that five percent of the world’s population (the United States) now spends more on defense than the other 95 percent put together, this situation is hard to avoid when you see threats emerging virtually everywhere and when you think all of them are best met by an ambitious and highly interventionst foreign policy. If Americans want to be able to go anywhere and do anything, then they are going to have keep spending lots of money, even if all that activity merely reinforces anti-American extremism and makes more people want to come after us. [my emphasis]

There have been so many novels written about Americans in Britain during the Second World War that they long ago became a clichee. They helped to popularize a saying: "The one thing everyone [in Britain] knows about GIs during World War II is that they were 'overpaid, oversexed and over here'." (Tony Gould Rich, Oversexed and over here Independent 04/23/1995)

In NATO countries, American bases being "over here" is not so unwelcome as in many other places, even though there has long since been no Soviet Red Army ready to pour through the Fulda Gap. That's not always the case in other places. As we're seeing in Iraq now, one effect of having US bases and troops present in areas that are fairly marginal to substantive US security interests is that they become inviting targets for those who have an incentive to promote popular movements or generate national solidarity against the US.