American’s Largest Military Base Is Bigger Than New York City

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Sep 22, 6:17AM EDT

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American’s Largest Military Base Is Bigger Than New York City — © Mario Tama / Getty Images

The American military operates hundreds of bases around the world and dozens more in the United States. One overseas base is vastly larger than others outside U.S. borders. It is so large that its footprint is bigger than the entire city of New York, including the five boroughs set in place in 1898: the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens and Staten Island. Together they cover 303 square miles.

To maintain its global presence, the United States operates more than 500 military bases on foreign sites across every continent except for Antarctica.

These facilities are used for training and troop deployments, for maintaining and testing weapons systems, for research and education and for aircraft testing. Given the space these exercises often require, the physical size of these installations can be considerable.

24/7 Wall St. has compiled a list of America’s 50 largest military bases overseas. The facilities are listed in order of physical size, according to data from the Department of Defense’s Base Structure Report — Fiscal Year 2018 Baseline. The report provides characteristics of bases overseas as of Sept. 30, 2017, including base size by acreage and the cost of replacing the base in terms of today’s construction costs and standards.
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Many of the bases on the list were initially established as a practical wartime necessity. Of the 50 installations on the list, 18 are in Japan, and many of those are on the island of Okinawa, a legacy of the intense fighting there during World War II. Nine bases are in South Korea, as the United States and South Korea partnered to defend against an attack from communist North Korea following the Korean War. Here is a look at the costliest wars in U.S. history.

Thule Air Base in Greenland covers 233,034 acres, which is about 364 square miles. The base cost $4.7 billion to establish. This base is not only the largest military base overseas by physical size. It also enjoys another superlative: the northernmost base of any U.S. installation, 750 miles from the Arctic Circle.

Thule Air Base, headquarters of the 821st Air Base Group, is one of the most isolated bases in the world. It originally was built for defense purposes during the Cold War. Because of saber-rattling from North Korea and renewed concerns over Russian territorial ambitions, the United States recently completed an overhaul of missile defense systems there. Its radar system got a $40 million software upgrade.

These are the other 50 largest military bases outside the United States.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.