US Troops

I was reading the article "The Strategist" in the current issue (Monday, Jan. 30, 2012) of Time Magazine and found some information that I would like to share. As it is a small amount of data hidden inside a figure, I am confident I am not violating any copyright law (one cannot ever be careful enough these days...)

I find it interesting because it answers the question: in which country are US troop present and how many?

Here is the list of troops presence (with the countries listed in no particular order):

> 50,000 U.S. (not surprisingly), Afghanistan (again, a well known fact), and Germany.

1,000 .. 50,000 Spain, UK, Belgium, Italy, Turkey, Iraq, South Korea, Japan, Bahrain.

100 .. 1,000 Australia, The Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, Djibouti, Egypt, Greece, Portugal, Panama, Cuba (of course: Guantanamo), and Canada.

None (at least, not officially ;-) North Korea, Papua New Guinea, Malaysia, Iran, Albania, Belarus, Iceland, Eritrea, Somalia, Malawi, Swaziland, Lesotho, Namibia, Equatorial Guinea, Central African Republic, Benin, Burkina Faso, Guinea Bissau, Gambia, Western Sahara.

All other countries have a presence of between 1 and 100 U.S. troops.

I thought: perhaps Time counted as troops the few marines attached to U.S. embassies. But this is not the case because, according to Wikipedia, sixteen of the twenty countries that Time lists as not having any military presence do have a U.S. embassy (excluded are "the usual suspects": North Korea, Iran, Somalia, and Western Sahara).

This means that U.S. soldiers are present almost everywhere (101,000 further troops are at sea).

I find this amazing. Don't you?