400 foreign bases in Afghanistan, 700 in total

A spokesman for the U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) tells TomDispatch that there are, at present, nearly 400 U.S. and coalition bases in Afghanistan, including camps, forward operating bases, and combat outposts. In addition, there are at least 300 Afghan National Army (ANA) and Afghan National Police (ANP) bases, most of them built, maintained, or supported by the U.S. A small number of the coalition sites are mega-bases like Kandahar Airfield, which boasts one of the busiest runways in the world, and Bagram Air Base, a former Soviet facility that received a makeover, complete with Burger King and Popeyes outlets, and now serves more than 20,000 U.S. troops, in addition to thousands of coalition forces and civilian contractors.

"Currently we have over $3 billion worth of work going on in Afghanistan," says Col. Wilson, "and probably by the summer, when the dust settles from all the uplift, we’ll have about $1.3 billion to $1.4 billion worth of that [in the South]." By comparison, between 2002 and 2008, the Army Corps of Engineers spent more than $4.5 billion on construction projects, most of it base-building, in Afghanistan.

As of August 2009 there were about 300 US bases in Iraq.

Counting the remaining bases in Iraq – as many as 50 are slated to be operating after President Barack Obama’s Aug. 31, 2010, deadline to remove all U.S. "combat troops" from the country – and those in Afghanistan, as well as black sites like al-Udeid, the total number of U.S. bases overseas now must significantly exceed 1,000. Just exactly how many U.S. military bases (and allied facilities used by U.S. forces) are scattered across the globe may never be publicly known. What we do know – from the experience of bases in Germany, Italy, Japan, and South Korea – is that, once built, they have a tendency toward permanency that a cessation of hostilities, or even outright peace, has a way of not altering.