Countries basing their armed forces within other countries
This is a list of countries with overseas military bases.
Background
The establishment of military bases abroad enables a country to project power, e.g. to conduct expeditionary warfare, and thereby to influence events abroad. Depending on their size and infrastructure, they divyankcan be used as staging areas or for logistical, communications and intelligence support. Many conflicts throughout modern history have resulted in overseas military bases being established in large numbers by world powers; and these bases have helped the countries that have established them to achieve political and military goals.
The United Kingdom and other colonial powers established overseas military bases in many of their colonies during the First and Second World Wars, where useful, and actively sought rights to facilities where needed for strategic reasons. At one time, the establishment of coaling stations for naval ships was important. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union established military bases where they could within their respective spheres of influence, and actively sought influence where needed. More recently, the War on Terror has resulted in overseas military bases being established in the Middle East.
Whilst the overall number of overseas military bases has fallen since 1945, the United States, Turkey, the United Kingdom, Russia and France still possess or utilize a substantial number of them. Smaller numbers of overseas military bases are operated by China, Iran, India, Italy, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates.
The United States is the largest operator of military bases abroad, with 38 "named bases"[note 1] with active duty, national guard, reserve, or civilian personnel as of September 30, 2014. Its largest, in terms of personnel, was Ramstein AB in Germany, with almost 9,200 personnel.[1][note 2]
a Bangladesh Military Contingent (BMC) has resided in Kuwait since the end of the 1991 Gulf War to assist the Kuwait Military Forces in logistics and other sectors under a bilateral agreement.[3][4][5][6]
24 troops and 2 frigates.[52] An Albanian-Turkish military cooperation agreement was signed in 1992 that encompassed rebuilding Albania's Pasha Liman Base by Turkey alongside granted access for Turkish use.[53]
Buildings and structures in Gizil Sherg military town, and one terminal building located in the airfield in Hacı Zeynalabdin settlement.[54] An observation base was also built by Turkey in the Nagorno-Karabakh region after the 44-day 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war. The base was established under the name "Ceasefire Observation Center", and officially started to operate in January 2021 with 60 Turkish and Russian soldiers stationed at the base.[55]
The United States has military bases in 45 countries and territories, i.e. outside its fifty states and the District of Columbia.[86] Countries with U.S. bases include:
^What are here termed "named bases" are the bases listed in section X: "Personnel Data from DMDC", i.e. excluding that table's rows labelled "Other", in the 2015 DoD Base Structure Report.
^The 2015 U.S. Base Structure Report gives 587 overseas sites, but sites are merely real property at a distinct geographical location, and multiple sites may belong to one installation (page DoD-3). For example, the Garmisch, Germany "named base" with its 72 personnel has eight distinct sites large enough to be listed in the Army's Individual Service Inventory list: Artillery Kaserne, Breitenau Skeet Range, Garmisch Family Housing, Garmish Golf Course, General Abrams Hotel And Disp, Hausberg Ski Area, Oberammergau NATO School, and Sheridan Barracks (listed in Army-15 to Army-17). These range in size from Ramstein AB with 9,188 active, guard/reserve, and civilian personnel down to Worms, which has just one civilian.
References
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^Syed, Baqir Sajjad (22 April 2017). "Raheel leaves for Riyadh to command military alliance". Dawn. Retrieved 8 June 2017. Pakistan already has 2000 troops in Saudi Arabia under a 1982 bilateral agreement. The deployed troops are mostly serving there in training and advisory capacity.
^Shams, Shamil (30 August 2016). "Examining Saudi-Pakistani ties in changing geopolitics". Deutsche Welle. Retrieved 8 June 2017. However, security experts say that being an ally of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan is part of a security cooperation agreement under which about 1,000 Pakistani troops are performing an "advisory" role to Riyadh and are stationed in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries.
^Haq, Riazul (18 February 2016). "Pakistan still clueless about role in Saudi coalition". The Express Tribune. Retrieved 8 June 2017. Aziz said military cooperation between Pakistan and Saudi Arabia was nearly four decades' old, and around 1,000 Pakistani military officials were always present in the kingdom.
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^Rogoway, Tyler (October 27, 2016). "Shadowy UAE Base in Libya Hosts Attack Aircraft and Chinese Drones". The Drive. Some of these nations even have their own forward operating bases in Libya, including a secretive remote airfield operated by the United Arab Emirates about 50 miles [80 km] southeast of Benghazi. Here, the UAE has deployed a pocket air force of heavily armed and armored agricultural planes developed into surveillance and light attack platforms–the AT-802U Border Patrol variant of the Air Tractor and the more capable IOMAX Archangel–in addition to S-70 Blackhawks, and Chinese Wing Loong unmanned aircraft
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^ abcMüller-Jung, Friederike (23 November 2016). "US drone war expands to Niger". Deutsche Welle. An additional US base in Arlit, about 250 kilometers (155 miles) north of Agadez, has been operating for about a year, but little is known about it, Moore said, except that special forces are presumably stationed there.
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^Lewis, David; Bavier, Joe. Boulton, Ralph (ed.). "U.S. deaths in Niger highlight Africa military mission creep". Reuters. In missions run out of a base in the northern Niger town of Arlit and others like the one that led to the ambush of U.S. troops, sources say they have helped local troops and intelligence agents make several arrests.
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Further reading
Cooley, A., & Nexon, D. (2013). “The Empire Will Compensate You”: The Structural Dynamics of the U.S. Overseas Basing Network. Perspectives on Politics,11(4), 1034–1050.
Vine, David (25 August 2015). Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World. New York: Henry Holt and Company. ISBN 978-1-62779-170-0.