get_troopdata() function to allow for more flexible data retrieval. The new data are based on a fresh scraping of the DMDC reports from 1950 through 2024.get_troopdata() function to retrieve the original DMDC reports on which the aggregate data is based.get_troopdata() returns a data frame of country-year observations with options to return total troop deployment values or service branch-specific deployment values.get_basedata() returns a data frame containing David Vine's US basing data with options to return site-specific data or country-level base count data.September 2021 Counts for Total Troops, Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps added
Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan include estimated totals from news reports due to DMDC not providing estimates.
Afghanistan estimated at 0 for all categories due to withdrawal finishing on August 31st.
Syria estimated at 900, no estimates for branches: https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/27/troops-to-stay-in-syria-biden-500848
Iraq estimated at 2500, no estimates for branches: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/20/us/troops-deploy-iraq.html
Updated numbers:
British Virigin Islands 2016
Uruguay 2014-2016, 2020
Uzbekistan 2014-2016, 2020
Venezuela 2015-2017
Vietnam 2012, 2014-2017, 2020
US Virgin Islands 2012-2017, 2020
Wake Island 2011-2017, 2020
Yemen 2009, 2011-2017, 2019-2020
Zambia 2009, 2012-2017, 2019-2020
Zimbabwe 2009, 2011-2017, 2019-2020
Unknown 2009, 2011-2020
United States counts updated for Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps, 2006-2021
United States total no longer counts Coast Guard deployments for 2008-2020 to be consistent with other countries
Note: We plan to include Coast Guard counts for all countries from 2008-2020 in a future update and a second total count
2014 UK values were missing from data.
Fixes error with get_troopdata() Kuwait 2006 troop values showing up as 0. Replaced with estimate derived from supplementary sources. See notes below.
Provides updated estimated for Iraq (2006, 2007), Kuwait (2006, 2007), and Syria (2018, 2019, 2020)
Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria data for 2018-2020 were estimated from reports and we continue to update those numbers based on information we can get. Just Security has engaged in a legal process and sued the DOD to get precise counts of troops in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, but the DOD has obfuscated the total counts by classifying the majority of deployments as temporary. Read through the whole saga here: https://www.justsecurity.org/75124/just-security-obtains-overseas-troop-counts-that-the-pentagon-concealed-from-the-public/. Thanks to Thomas Campbell at Boise State for pointing out this data. To reflect new public data, we have updated the estimates as follows:
Changes:
Afghanistan 2020: Updated to 8600 from 4500.
Afghanistan 2019: Updated to 13000 from 14500
Syria 2018: Updated to 1700 from 2000
Syria 2019: Updated to 1000 from 400
Syria 2020: Updated to 900 from 600
Kuwait 2006 and 2007 numbers didn’t make sense as it goes from 42600 troops in 2005 to 0 for two years and then back up to 42285 in 2008. For 2006 and 2007, these numbers were rolled into a total “Operation Iraqi Freedom” count that included all nearby countries. We have reverse-engineered this a bit and have new numbers for Kuwait. Kuwait 2006 updated to 44,400 from 0. We got this number from 185,500 total OIF and subtracting the average from 2006 reported in the above document. Kuwait 2007 updated to 48500 from 0.
Iraq 2006: Updated to 141100 from 185500, using 2006 average from here: https://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R40682.pdf
Iraq 2007: Updated to 170000 from 218500, source for the first number is: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iraq-usa-pullout/timeline-invasion-surge-withdrawal-u-s-forces-in-iraq-idUSTRE7BE0EL20111215
Iraq 2006 and 2007: Individual force counts changed to NA.
These numbers continue to be estimates in a few cases, so we will continue to update these numbers as we get more reliable figures.
get_troopdata() function was always returning branch data.NEWS.md file to track changes to the package.