- [Narrator] Imagine a world
where the most powerful country on earth in 2021 wasn't the United States, but rather Spain. (dramatic suspenseful music) And instead of setting up military bases just in their own country,
they also set up bases all around the world. Lots of those bases
are in former colonies, but also there's a bunch
in the United States, just imagine this. You zoom in to Fayetteville,
North Carolina, and you see a huge military base. But it's not a US military
base, it's a Spanish base on American soil, with lots of homes for the Spanish soldiers
and their families, powerful weapons systems, aircraft, all run by the Spanish military. Go inside of one of these bases and it's all Spanish restaurants. Americans can't come in
here unless they work for the Spanish government. And then imagine 100 more of these all throughout the United
States on American soil, and hundreds of more throughout the world. Or shift the scenario a little bit, what if it was a country
that wasn't our ally, a country like China? What if they had military
bases not in the US, but right up close to our border? Powerful weapon systems
right off our shores in islands in the Caribbean. If you're an American, you have to imagine what that would feel like. If you're not an American, it's likely you already kind of know what this feels like. The United States has an extensive network of military bases outside of our borders, hundreds of bases. I've been fascinated for a very long time about understanding these
US foreign bases abroad, but I've never actually taken the time to accurately map them, so let's do it. Let's map every single US
military base around the world. It turns out that's a huge task. - [Man] This is the story of the men of the United States Army who
made this project possible, and of man's never seizing
quest for knowledge. (offbeat dramatic music) - [Man 2] This is a full armored division. To give you an idea of size, each of those small dark squares includes more than 1,000 men. - The United States military is bigger than any of us can really fathom. It's so big that even the US military doesn't know how big the US military is. Back in 2018, 1200 independent accountants and analysts came in to try to audit the US Department of Defense, basically try to get a paper
trail of how big this thing is, how much money it spends, et cetera. And the Department of Defense
didn't pass the audit. They literally did not have the documents or the knowledge to really piece together a full scope of what this organization is, how big it is, how much money it spends. So we don't know, nobody knows how big the Pentagon is in all of its forms. All we do know is that objectively, it is one of the, if not the largest and most powerful
organization on the planet and in the history of humanity. I mean if you have an organization that's more powerful than
the Department of Defense in the history of humans, let me know, I want to know about it,
but as far as I can tell, there's nothing bigger and more powerful than the United States military in 2021. And much of the US military
is not actually in the US, but it's actually outside of our borders, all around the world. - [Man] This post is somewhere in Germany, overlooking a sector of the Iron Curtain. - One of the first things that Joe Biden and his administration did
when they came into power a couple of weeks ago down the road was ask for an assessment of, how big is our military
presence around the whole world? What is our strategy, and what actually does
this presence look like? - The Department will conduct
a global force posture review of US military footprint,
resources, and strategies. - Footprint, I like that,
that's a nice thing, what's our footprint,
how big is our footprint around the world? We don't really know, the Pentagon is gonna start to try to assess that. So, let's help the Pentagon out and try to map every
single United States base around the entire world. Let's do it. (offbeat dramatic music) It wasn't too long ago when I used to think that having military bases in other countries was totally normal. Doesn't every country have military bases in other countries? Yeah, anyway. This was sort of reinforced for me when I was in college. I didn't internship at
NATO with the headquarters of NATO, which was in Brussels. To get this job, I had to get
a secret security clearance from the US government in order
to enter the military base, which was NATO. This was really cool because there was always
people comin' through NATO that I got to meet. Like, my diplomacy hero Madeleine Albright who used to be the Secretary
of State, or this guy. - It's a great honor
representing my country abroad for the last 37 years. - Good old Joe. Hey Joe, I had no idea
you'd be President someday. Anyway, the big benefit of having this secret security clearance is that I could go into
any military base anywhere. And so on Saturdays, I would drive an hour from Brussels to a little village in the Belgian countryside
where a military base had been sort of plopped down in the middle of the Belgian countryside in between stone walls and quaint streets, and sheep, and farming plots. Yeah, it's a little blurry in this map because it's, you know, a military base and sometimes they blur
the satellite imagery. Nothin' I can do about it, sorry. And as soon as I entered into the base, went through all the security
and I was in the base, I felt like I had left Belgium and was suddenly entering
suburban American. - Welcome to the United States. - There was a Taco Bell and movie theaters with American movies,
and all sorts of shops, and yoga studios, and a grocery store that had all of the products
that I was very used to, all at the same prices I could get them in the United States, even
though they had been flown across the Atlantic and
brought to this place, which is a very expensive thing to do. It was a dream for me
as a poor college kid living in Brussels and
feeling a little bit homesick, to be honest, and really figured out culture shock at this point, so yeah, I kind of loved it. And I was again, sort of, doesn't everyone have military bases in other countries and
they can sort of just go to their military base, and it was just, I was so naive. Mmm, alas, I've learned the truth. (offbeat suspenseful music) Luckily, I was able to talk to somebody who literally wrote the book
on US military bases abroad. - Most US bases abroad look
like not-so-small US towns. - Over the years, David
has been researching and compiling a database of all the US bases around the world. The result is a very detailed audit that hasn't really ever
been done to this degree. In fact, a few years ago, the
Pentagon's own research arm, the RAND Corp, was doing some research
on military bases abroad, and instead of using the Pentagon's list of US military bases abroad, these guys used David's
list, like they used David, it was like he was a professor, he's like an anthropologist,
he's not like a part of DoD. And yet they're like,
this list that he made is actually more authoritative
than the Pentagon's own list. - I mean I'm sort of honored, but it's not a good sign if
the Pentagon research arm is using my list and not
the Pentagon's own list. - So I got a hold of David's list and started wrestling with the data and finding a way to display it on a map so that I could get every single base to show somehow. After a few weeks of doing this, I finally have a map, and
that map looks like this. Every dot on this map
is a US military base or installation of some
sort in a different country. Many of these dots are not placed exactly where the base is,
because many of these bases are clustered in areas. And if I try to map them
all in the exact spot where they really are,
they would all just sort of stack on top of each other, and you wouldn't really
be able to see them. But these dots represent
every single base outside of the United States from huge complexes the size of Rhode Island
to small air strips, little facilities that
only house American drones or radar, or supplies. This is all of them, and at
least all that we know of. If you look at this map and you see a base that you know of that is not here, or one that is there that
doesn't belong there, tell me about it, I want to know because this is sort of hard
information to ascertain. The Pentagon is not very transparent, and neither are host countries about where certain bases are, and why they exist. - Many of the bases around the world are, their existence
is due to an agreement between the two countries that is often not open to the public, that is a secret. Any errors here are mine and not David's. All in all, the number here is about 750. 750 US military bases big and small outside of the United States. By outside of the United States, I'm including US territories
that are not equal to the United States. Like Guam, Puerto Rico, et cetera. But in reality, we probably
don't know the real number because that data just simply is not transparently available to us. There are a couple of major clusters here where the most bases exist. One major one is Germany,
and the others are Japan and South Korea. These are basically
holdovers from World War II and the subsequent Korean War when the US, who won the war, came in and occupied these countries in order to set up a new government, write a new constitution, and
to help the post-war transfer to the government. But, what's most interesting
to me aren't these clusters that came about because of World War II, but instead the far-flung,
sort of unexpected or little-known places that the US military
has a little footprint. All the dots in Africa, which have popped up in recent years, as the US has expanded its presence there. These are usually small installations that hold maybe a few soldiers, or mainly private citizens who
are government contractors. And they mainly house things like drones, or radar, or weapons systems. You also have this cluster of dots deep in the Indian Ocean, which is the island of Diego Garcia, which I've talked about at length of the US military's role
in displacing hundreds of local people to set up a base there. Some of these dots are just air strips, a runway in the middle of nowhere, and these runways usually
belong to the host country, and the US just rents
them for a period of time. Like this facility in the
middle of the desert in Oman. Places like this exist to hold supplies in case a war breaks. So the US maintains these
stockpiles of war supplies all around the globe
so that they can strike at any point without having to ramp up a war economy at home. It takes away a lot of the
friction from going to war. - It made it easier for the US military to
launch offensive force, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
were easier to launch because US has maintained a
huge infrastructure of bases. - Some of these dots
don't represent a place where US soldiers are actually stationed, but instead it represents
where money from the Pentagon has gone to influence or
build up infrastructure. For example, in Iceland,
the US is spending a lot of money, tens
of millions of dollars, to upgrade this airport, the
airport that we all go through when we're going to Iceland, but doing it for military purposes so that the US can use it,
can land there if needed. So next time you land in Iceland on your way to the Blue Lagoon, just know that you're passing
by one of these little dots. Over here in the Azores, these islands that are owned by Portugal, nearly 2,000 kilometers
away from any land mass, there is a group of US
military installations mainly used for refueling
and weapon storage. And up here to Greenland, and you'll see a little base way up high, the most northern base in the world where 140 Americans live. Kinda looks interesting, would love to go there someday. Way out here in the
Pacific, you've got loads of remote military bases
owned by the United States. They're mainly small air strips, like this base on the southern tip of this huge atoll of
the Marshall Islands. All right listen, I'm not gonna
explain every single base. There are 750, maybe 800. There's a bunch of bases,
I just wanted to give you a flavor of what some of these look like. They're diverse, they're
all over the place, and they're fascinating to me. I have been compiling
accounts of people who live next to US military bases. I have over 100 accounts from people that, for Instagram, I want more. I wanna make an entire video
about life next to a base. And that is why I'm
calling it upon all of you. I'm gonna put a link in the
description to a survey, it's a form, what it's like to live next to a US military base. I have it right here, and
I'm gonna be checking it. You can fill out this form and then I will get your response, and I will read through your response, and I will use that to
construct an understanding of what life is like next
to a US military base. I talked to David a bunch about this too. He's done a bunch of research,
done a bunch of interviews, and I wanna keep talking about this. So, if you don't live
next to a military base, I wanna hear from you, what
are your thoughts about this? Whether you're an American
or not an American, does this seem right? Does this seem like the right choice, the right thing for our taxpayer money to be going towards? I'm still making up my mind
on a lot of this stuff, and I want to start a discussion. My goal in this video is to just map it, was to just look at it, be
able to see it on a map, and I've finally done that. By the way, there will
be a high res version of this map on my Patreon for patrons who sign up for
the map background tier, that will be there. So I will be in the comments more than normal for this video, and I wanna hear from you. Before you go, I want to say thank you to the people who gave me a lot of footage for this piece. I didn't go out into
the desert and the ocean to film for this video, I got
a lot of it from Storyblocks, who is the sponsor to this video. Storyblocks has supported
this channel for a long time, and I'm very grateful, because Storyblocks is a place where you can get
loads of amazing footage, like this video would be
half as visually interesting if I didn't have a lot of this footage. But it's not just stock footage, Storyblocks is full of
literally over a million assets from sound design assets,
like sound effects, or After Effects
templates that you can use to make animations, and then
loads of beautiful high res 4K footage that you can
download, wait for it, unlimited amounts if you're a subscriber. Like you just subscribe,
you pay one price a month, and you can download as much as you want of this really good stuff. I've been using Storyblocks as long as I've been
making professional video, well before they ever came to
sponsor my YouTube channel, well before I had a YouTube channel. I will continue to use them
because it makes so much sense. If you're interested in using Storyblocks, there's a link in my description where you can learn how to sign up and get in on this amazing service. Clicking that link helps
support this channel, but it also gives you access
to this amazing library of assets. Thank you Storyblocks for
supporting this channel, for supporting my work, and
thank you all for being here. I will see you all in the next video. Bye-bye. (casual inspiring music)
800 bases in 160 foreign countries
i like how in the end hes like " I still have mixed feelings about it" fuckin liberals. its a informative video though
"Popular youtuber disappeared, all his video deleted"