Each year since 1950, the U.S. Department of Defense has provided on its web site detailed information about the deployment of American troops around the world. A study of this data shows how the U.S. military's size and scope has changed over the past 35 years: from its peak in 1969 as a conscripted force of 2.4 million troops, heavily dispersed around the globe, to today's all-volunteer force of only 1.4 million, concentrated in a handful of countries.

Broken down by administration, this data reveals how different administrations have approached geopolitical conflict. For instance, almost 750,000 U.S. troops were present in the East Asia and Pacific theater at the height of the Vietnam War, but when America declared war on Iraq twenty years later, only about 70,000 troops were deployed. When the U.S. participated in the NATO-lead war in Kosovo in 1999, air strikes were substituted for large numbers of ground forces and no more than 13,500 troops were in the immediate area-that is a fraction of the more than 200,000 troops deployed in the Middle East as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

1969-1974 1975-1976 1977-1980 1981-1984

1985-1988 1989-1992 1993-1996 1997-2000 2001-2004

Ronald R. Reagan Administration (1981-1984)

Note: Except where noted, troop deployments for each region are calculated as the mean of all years in a presidential administration.

The Reagan administration brings about the largest peacetime defense build-up in U.S. history ; however, it is concentrated in arms transfers abroad and defense spending at home and is not reflected in worldwide troop deployments . For the first time since 1969, the number of active-duty U.S. troops begins to rise and increases until 1987, adding a total of almost 100,000 troops to the military's rolls. In 1983, U.S. troops are sent into Grenada, marking the first time since Vietnam that the U.S. military has seen combat . In response to this and other tensions in Russo-American relations, the U.S. increases its troop levels in West Germany to an average of 250,000 per year (an increase of 25,000 troops since the Carter administration).

A Note about the Data:
The Defense Department reports troop deployments at the end of each fiscal year on Sept. 30th. In the following maps, troop deployments are listed as the average, by region, for the four years of each presidential administration. The exceptions to this rule are the maps representing the Nixon and Ford administrations. Where a region's average does not adequately reflect the troop deployments over an entire administration (such as the average for East Asia and the Pacific during the Nixon administration), annual troop levels are listed instead. Whenever possible, the caption at the bottom of each map has tried to explain fluctuations in data that might skew the averages. Finally, when viewing these maps, it is important to keep in mind that the Defense Department regularly changes the names of it's geographical regions and the countries included in them. A color-coded system is used for national makeup of each region to help clarify this.