Total overseas base costs reached $170 billion for fiscal year 2012.

Evidence

To err again on the conservative side, I have not included these unacknowledged expenses in my calculation. However, my 80.6 billion figure is also incomplete in another way: war funding only pays for “incremental” costs, above those found in the normal Pentagon budget. So I also had to account for war zone troops’ basic salaries and other personnel costs, which I calculated at around 14.3 billion (employing a widely used 125,000 per troop per year cost estimate). I also found another 74.9 million in “Wounded Warrior Care” health costs tucked away in the Pentagon budget. Finally, I calculated almost 2 billion in “rental” costs—in the form of military and economic aid—for bases in Afghanistan and Iraq, using the previously detailed methodology from James Blaker. … With those additions, my estimate of war zone costs for 2012—including appropriations for military construction and maintenance, troop salaries, and so on—was 97 billion. My estimate for the total costs to maintain U.S. bases and troops around the globe—both within war zones and outside them—thus reached some $170 billion for fiscal year 2012. — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 646

Categorization

• XREF: The James Blaker methodology and Wounded Warrior Care figure connect to Vine’s account of how official base cost figures systematically understate true spending.