

Interactive map on US troop levels around the world since 1950 - robg
http://www.motherjones.com/military-maps/

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uuilly
Man, we need to start hyping our stuff more. <http://www.uuorld.com>

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weegee
nice!

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hugh
Not that impressive, as a visualization. The zooming in and zooming out
doesn't work that well.

Nor does it, at a glance, seem to much support the political point which I
assume they're trying to make -- that US troop levels around the world have
been significantly increasing. I assume the sudden appearance of a drop shadow
around everything in the last frame is some kind of semi-deliberate attempt to
make it look more menacing?

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gaius
_that US troop levels around the world have been significantly increasing_

But that's simply not true; in 1969 the US had 2.4M service personnel, now
it's 1.4M. 750,000 in East Asia then, how many now? The US has permanently
withdrawn ground troops from Taiwan, for example.

What the figures show is that the military has been getting smaller and also
that troop deployments have been getting smaller too (compare number of
personnel in Vietnam then to number in Iraq today).

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hugh
Ah, once again a couple of sentences with actual numbers tells the story far
better than a fancy visualisation.

And yes, the fact that a half-million-man army deployed to South Vietnam
looks, on the map, less significant than twenty embassy guards deployed to
China is a problem.

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ckinnan
Yeah, its one thing to conduct a joint-training exercise and its another to
enter with force.

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gills
This would be more informative if it were layered with some other data; some
metric for geopolitical instability, trade deficit, local currency valued in
$, oil production in barrels, similarity of votes in the U.N....etc.

You know, anything to see if the troop placements were good investments.

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gdee
I sure hope you chick is firmly stuck in your tongue.

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drawkbox
Our tour schedule is exhaustive, not one country has been without a show.

