1. Where did the Cold War garrisons go?
Open: Germany, Japan, South Korea and the UK compared →
- In what years did the U.S. presence in Germany fall fastest? Which events on the chart line up with those drops?
- Switch “Show” to Share of all U.S. personnel abroad. Which country’s share grew after 1990, even though its numbers fell?
- Why might the U.S. keep large forces in Japan and South Korea but not in Germany? Use one IR theory to explain the pattern.
2. Vietnam on the map
Open: the map in 1968, South Vietnam selected →
- Press play from 1960 to 1975. How quickly did the deployment build up, and how quickly did it end?
- In the Regional Trends chart, what happened to East Asia & Pacific compared with Europe in the same years?
- Compare 1968 with 2005 (Iraq). What is different about the size and the geography of the two wars?
3. Does contact change minds?
Open: opinion of the U.S. presence, by personal contact →
- Do people who have had personal contact with U.S. personnel view the presence more or less favorably?
- Change the country to Japan, Germany and Turkey. Is the gap the same everywhere?
- Methods: can we conclude that contact causes more favorable views? Name one other explanation (who gets contact in the first place?).
4. Following the money
Open the dashboard, then scroll to Construction Spending →
- Which places received the most construction money since 2000? Switch between constant and current dollars: does the ranking change?
- Pick Guam, then Germany. What kinds of facilities does each get, and what does that suggest about U.S. plans?
- Compare construction with troop numbers for the same place. Does spending follow troops, or lead them?
5. Frontline allies
Open: Poland, Romania and the Baltics, per 100,000 residents →
- The DMDC reports count personnel permanently assigned to a country, not units there on rotation. What does that mean for how we read the numbers on NATO’s eastern flank after 2017?
- In the opinion section, compare Poland in 2018–2020 with 2023. How did views change after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine?
- Read the Poland 2023 experiment table. Does framing a new installation around security or the economy change support? Does distance matter more?
6. Where do the numbers come from?
- In Iraq’s history chart, some bars are lighter. Hover over them: where do those figures come from, and why?
- Read “How the numbers are built” on the Data page. Why might two published sources give different totals for the same year?
- Download
country_year.csvand find every year in which a country’s figure is an estimate rather than a report.
Putting a chart in your course site
Every section of the dashboard has an Embed button. It gives you a short piece of code that shows that one chart, set up the way you left it (country, year, comparison, survey question). Paste the code into Canvas, Blackboard, Moodle, a WordPress page or any site that accepts HTML. Students can still hover and click, and a link takes them to the full dashboard.
Data and citation
The Data & downloads page has every table as CSV, with column descriptions, and citations in APA, Chicago and BibTeX. For assignments that use the survey data, the book is Beyond the Wire: US Military Deployments and Host Country Public Opinion (Oxford University Press, 2023).
Using the dashboard in a class? I would like to hear how: michaelaallen@boisestate.edu.