Such lily-pad bases have become a critical part of an evolving Washington military strategy aimed at maintaining US global dominance by doing far more with less in an increasingly competitive, ever more multi-polar world. Central as it is becoming to the long-term US stance, this global-basing reset policy has, remarkably, received almost no public attention, nor significant congressional oversight. Meanwhile, as the arrival of the first casualties from Africa shows, the US military is getting involved in new areas of the world and new conflicts, with potentially disastrous consequences.

Transforming the base empire

You might think that the US military is in the process of shrinking, rather than expanding, its little noticed but enormous collection of bases abroad. After all, it was forced to close the full panoply of 505 bases, mega to micro, that it built in Iraq, and it is now beginning the process of drawing down forces in Afghanistan. In Europe, the Pentagon is continuing to close its massive bases in Germany and will soon remove two combat brigades from that country. Global troop numbers are set to shrink by around 100,000.

Yet Washington still easily maintains the largest collection of foreign bases in world history: more than 1,000 military installations outside the 50 states and Washington, DC. They include everything from decades-old bases in Germany and Japan to brand-new drone bases in Ethiopia and the Seychelles islands in the Indian Ocean and even resorts for military vacationers in Italy and South Korea.

In Afghanistan, the US-led international force still occupies more than 450 bases. In total, the US military has some form of troop presence in approximately 150 foreign countries, not to mention 11 aircraft carrier task forces - essentially floating bases - and a significant, and growing, military presence in space. The United States currently spends an estimated US$250 billion annually maintaining bases and troops overseas.

Some bases, like Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, date to the late 19th century. Most were built or occupied during or just after World War II on every continent, including Antarctica. Although the US military vacated around 60% of its foreign bases following the Soviet Union's collapse, the Cold War base infrastructure remained relatively intact, with 60,000 American troops remaining in Germany alone, despite the absence of a superpower adversary.

However, in the early months of 2001, even before the attacks of 9/11, the George W Bush administration launched a major global realignment of bases and troops that's continuing today with Obama's "Asia pivot". Bush's original plan was to close more than one-third of the nation's overseas bases and shift troops east and south, closer to predicted conflict zones in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

The Pentagon began to focus on creating smaller and more flexible "forward operating bases" and even smaller "cooperative security locations" or "lily pads". Major troop concentrations were to be restricted to a reduced number of "main operating bases" (MOBs) - like Ramstein, Guam in the Pacific, and Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean - which were to be expanded.

Despite the rhetoric of consolidation and closure that went with this plan, in the post-9/11 era the Pentagon has actually been expanding its base infrastructure dramatically, including dozens of major bases in every Persian Gulf country save Iran, and in several Central Asian countries critical to the war in Afghanistan.

Hitting the base reset button

Obama's recently announced "Asia pivot" signals that East Asia will be at the center of the explosion of lily-pad bases and related developments. Already in Australia, US marines are settling into a shared base in Darwin. Elsewhere, the Pentagon is pursuing plans for a drone and surveillance base in Australia's Cocos Islands and deployments to Brisbane and Perth. In Thailand, the Pentagon has negotiated rights for new Navy port visits and a "disaster-relief hub" at U-Tapao.

In the Philippines, whose government evicted the US from the massive Clark Air Base and Subic Bay Naval Base in the early 1990s, as many as 600 special forces troops have quietly been operating in the country's south since January 2002. Last month, the two governments reached an agreement on the future US use of Clark and Subic, as well as other repair and supply hubs from the Vietnam War era. In a sign of changing times, US officials even signed a 2011 defense agreement with former enemy Vietnam and have begun negotiations over the Navy's increased use of Vietnamese ports.

Elsewhere in Asia, the Pentagon has rebuilt a runway on tiny Tinian island near Guam, and it is considering future bases in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei, while pushing stronger military ties with India. Every year in the region, the military conducts around 170 military exercises and 250 port visits. On South Korea's Jeju island, the Korean military is building a base that will be part of the US missile defense system and to which US forces will have regular access.

"We just can't be in one place to do what we've got to do," Pacific Command commander Admiral Samuel Locklear III has said. For military planners, "what we've got to do" is clearly defined as isolating and (in the terminology of the Cold War) "containing" the new power in the region, China. This evidently means "peppering" new bases throughout the region, adding to the more than 200 US bases that have encircled China for decades in Japan, South Korea, Guam, and Hawaii.