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How Much of the U.S. Military Is Stationed Overseas
Active-duty members assigned outside the 50 states and DC, % of all active duty, quarterly
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Defense Manpower Data Center, quarterly. Members permanently assigned to duty stations in each country; troops on temporary duty, in contingency operations or afloat are not counted by country. Overseas includes U.S. territories such as Guam and Puerto Rico. The record breaks at the end of 2017, when the reports stopped listing personnel in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. The share is a Palanor calculation.
The share of U.S. active-duty forces permanently based outside the United States.
What this chart reads
- Share of U.S. Active-Duty Troops Stationed Overseas · %as “Share overseas”latest 2026-08-31
Sources
Share of U.S. Active-Duty Troops Stationed Overseas · %. Source: Palanor calculation (src/lib/dmdc/personnel.ts) from Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC), "Military and Civilian Personnel by Service/Agency by State/Country", quarterly: https://dwp.dmdc.osd.mil/dwp/app/dod-data-reports/workforce-reports. Public information (DMDC privacy and security notice). Read.
Charts are drawn from Palanor's signal library and recomputed from source data on every view. Transformations (changes, indexing, year-on-year rates) are Palanor's.