With America's version of a colony being a military base, one can, however, have an idea about her all encompassing imperial foot prints, and the militarism that grows with it, by following up the changing politics of acquiring and establishing bases across the world. Still, it is not easy to assess the exact size and value of this empire of bases, which has always been obscured by non-transparency, and remains a closely guarded secret till date. In a special secret world of their own none would ever know the true size of the US base world.

The official records available to the public on the subject are often misleading, although instructive. According to the Defense Department's annual inventories, from 2002 to 2005, of the properties it owns around the world there has been an immense increase in the number of US installations abroad.

As a result, the total of America's military bases in other people's countries stood at 737 as per official sources. The massive US deployment, and the pursuit of President Bush's strategy of pre-emptive wars suggest that the number of the country's overseas bases is much higher, and will continue to go up.

Coincidentally, the thirty eight large and medium sized American facilities spread around the world in 2005 -- mostly air and naval bases for the US bombers and the fleets -- almost equals Britain's thirty six naval bases and garrisons at its zenith at the close of the nineteenth century.

Interestingly enough, the Roman empire at its peak in 117 AD required more or less thirty seven bases to enforce its writ over a realm that extended from Britannia to Egypt and from Hispania to America. Perhaps the optimum number of major citadels required to have imperial sway lies somewhere between thirty five and forty -- a number the US imperialist designs conform to.

Using the data from fiscal year 2005, the Pentagon bureaucrats calculated that its overseas bases were worth $127bn -- surely far too small a figure by any conventional wisdom because, in the same year, the US military high command deployed to its overseas bases some 196,675 uniformed personnel as well as an equal number of dependants and Department of Defense officials. It also employed an additional 81,425 locally hired foreigners.

The world-wide total of US military personnel in 2005, including those based domestically, was 840,062, supported by Defense Department civil service employees and 203,328 locals. Yet the figure given by Pentagon is indeed mind-boggling, and larger than the GDP of most other countries.

Its over-seas bases, according to the Pentagon, contained 32,327 barracks, hangers, hospitals and other buildings which it owned and 16,527 more that it leased. The size of these holdings was recorded in the inventories as covering 687,347 acres overseas and 29,819,492 acres worldwide -- making the Pentagon easily one of the world's largest landlords.

These figures, although staggeringly big, do not cover all the actual bases the US occupies globally. The 2005 Base Structure Report fails, for example, to mention the garrison in Kosovo, although it is the site of the huge Carip Bond steel mill built in 1999 and maintained ever since by Kellog Brown & Root (KBR), a subsidiary of the infamous Halliburton Corporation. The report similarly omits bases in Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Kyrghystan, Qatar and Uzbekistan, even though the US military has established bases in central Asian areas since 9/11.

The Pentagon continues to omit from its accounts most of the $5bn worth of military and espionage installations in Britain, which have long been conveniently disguised as Royal Air Force bases. If there was an honest count, and the actual size of US military empire calculated, it would top the category, but no one -- possibly not even the Pentagon -- knows the exact numbers of its bases and allied facilities.

In some cases, the host countries themselves have kept the US bases on their soil secret, fearing adverse repercussion or embarrassment if their collusion with US imperialism was revealed. In other instances, the Pentagon itself seems willing to play down the building of facilities aimed at dominating energy sources or, in a related situation, retaining a network of bases that could keep Iraq under US hegemony regardless of the wishes of the future Iraqi government. The US government does not divulge any information about the bases it uses to eavesdrop on global communications or to deploy its nuclear arms, which, in many cases, violated treaty obligations.

In fact, the US has been lying to many of its closest allies, even in Nato, about its nuclear designs. Tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, hundreds of bases, and dozens of ships and submarines exist in a special secret world of their own, with no rational military, or even "deterrence," justification. In Jordan, for example, the US has secretly deployed upto five thousand troops in bases on the Iraqi and Syrian borders.

Yet Jordan continues to stress that it has no special arrangements with the United States, no bases and no American military presence. But the fact of the matter is this that the country is formally sovereign, but has actually been a satellite of the US for at least the last ten years. Similarly, before the US withdrawal from Saudi Arabia in 2003, when the former left behind a fleet of enormous B-52 bombers in Jeddah, the US justified it by saying that it was so demanded by Saudi government.

In the same way, the US military bases have spawned a global empire which is already stretched to the limit. This is quite in consonance with the neo-conservative world-view. At the core of it is the resolve to obstruct the rise of any "near-peer," and block the country that might one day challenge US military supremacy.

Brig ( retd) Hafiz is former DG of BIISS.