Flattening The World

Mother Jones spent a year gathering, grouping, and evaluating our military activity around the globe for their massive (and ongoing) dossier, “Mission Creep.” The project is full of knowledgeable, take-no-prisoner articles, but it’s their interactive map of America’s global military presence over the years that really caught our attention. The fascinating map distills how many soldiers we had in which countries since the Eisenhower administration with a camo-inspired color scale. If you move the year scrubber really quickly, you can see our peacekeeping missions, proxy wars, and other (mis)adventures in fast-forward. For additional intelligence, the 2007 map also provides a military profile of each country.