Why No Other Country Has An International Military Base On US Soil

If you’ve ever served in the United States military, odds are that you worked at one of the nation’s many foreign bases located throughout Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, and South America. The U.S. maintains between 750 and 800 facilities of various sizes and types in around 80 foreign countries, colonies, and territories. All told, that is between 70 and 85% of the world’s foreign military bases. They range in size from relatively small to extremely large in both land mass and population.

That makes the U.S. military the most expansive throughout the globe. Looking at so many foreign U.S. bases, many might wonder about the opposite: foreign-owned bases on U.S. soil. To put it simply, there aren’t any, and there hasn’t been a foreign base in the United States for a very long time. Technically, no foreign military base has been established or occupied since the War of 1812, when the United Kingdom established several during the conflict. On the surface, that doesn’t exactly seem fair to American allies who host U.S. personnel in their respective countries.

The main reason why there aren’t any foreign bases on U.S. soil is that they’re not needed to bolster U.S. defenses. Still, the U.S. isn’t entirely closed off to the militaries of its closest allies. Many maintain permanent and semi-permanent detachments within U.S. facilities, working alongside American personnel. 

The United States is home to eight permanent detachments of foreign personnel from Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Singapore, and the United Kingdom. They’re located in Virginia, Texas, Arizona, Idaho, Nevada, California, Georgia, and South Carolina. An additional facility will open to train Qatari troops at Mountain Home Air Base, Idaho. While these presences are permanent and see turnover of personnel throughout the year, they are not foreign-owned bases. Instead, they’re co-located on American bases. This is different from how the U.S. military operates in other nations’ territory.

American bases are not considered to be American soil, unlike embassies, which are small islands of their respective nations’ soil in other countries. For bases, the U.S. enters into a Status of Forces Agreement, or SOFA, with host nations, allowing for a back-and-forth between the U.S. and whichever nation it’s working with. At one of the largest bases, Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany, one of the terms of the SOFA agreement is that personnel are given ration cards for purchasing fuel, coffee. It’s similar in other countries.

For those personnel working within the United States on a permanent basis, the vast majority of them are pilots. This makes sense since the U.S. often sells its military aircraft to its allies. Selling something like an F-35 Lightning II to Belgium or Poland is good for American exports, but training pilots becomes a necessity. Instead of conducting training elsewhere, many foreign pilots come to the U.S. to learn how to operate U.S.-made aircraft alongside U.S. pilots. Intelligence personnel also train in the U.S. alongside American servicemembers, though this is a far more exclusive club.