China is not the largest military power in the world. Simply put, there is only one superpower left in the world today: USA. Things had been like this since the fall of communism and the Soviet Union in 1991. The most powerful nation on earth today is the USA. It has more aircraft carriers (13 of them nuclear) than any other nation, each of them capable of carrying various air squadrons and up to 80 combat aircraft. Russia has only 2 aircraft carriers, none of them nuclear. China is just building their first one.

In terms of armed men China´s army is the biggest in the world with 2.3 million soldiers, but that´s as far as it will go in the race to become number one. USA has 700 military bases all over the world. A fact that no other country can match. The biggest American military base overseas is Camp Bondsteel, in Kosovo, which is reputed to have the best hospital in all Europe.

US military is the most powerful, flexible, trained, versatile and experienced of them all. Enough is to say that right now USA is involved in two wars at the same time, Irak and Afghanistan. No other country today is capable of sustaining such a feat half a distance around the world.

Let see what "www.commondreams.org" has to say about America´s Empire of Bases:

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As distinct from other peoples, most Americans do not recognize -- or do not want to recognize -- that the United States dominates the world through its military power. Due to government secrecy, our citizens are often ignorant of the fact that our garrisons encircle the planet. This vast network of American bases on every continent except Antarctica actually constitutes a new form of empire -- an empire of bases with its own geography not likely to be taught in any high school geography class. Without grasping the dimensions of this globe-girdling Baseworld, one can't begin to understand the size and nature of our imperial aspirations or the degree to which a new kind of militarism is undermining our constitutional order.

Our military deploys well over half a million soldiers, spies, technicians, teachers, dependents, and civilian contractors in other nations. To dominate the oceans and seas of the world, we are creating some thirteen naval task forces built around aircraft carriers. We operate numerous secret bases outside our territory to monitor what the people of the world, including our own citizens, are saying, faxing, or e-mailing to one another.

According to the Defense Department's annual "Base Structure Report" for fiscal year 2003, which itemizes foreign and domestic U.S. military real estate, the Pentagon currently owns or rents 702 overseas bases in about 130 countries and HAS another 6,000 bases in the United States and its territories. Pentagon bureaucrats calculate that it would require at least $113.2 billion to replace just the foreign bases -- surely far too low a figure but still larger than the gross domestic product of most countries -- and an estimated $591,519.8 million to replace all of them. The military high command deploys to our overseas bases some 253,288 uniformed personnel, plus an equal number of dependents and Department of Defense civilian officials, and employs an additional 44,446 locally hired foreigners. The Pentagon claims that these bases contain 44,870 barracks, hangars, hospitals, and other buildings, which it owns, and that it leases 4,844 more.

These numbers, although staggeringly large, do not begin to cover all the actual bases we occupy globally. The 2003 Base Status Report fails to mention, for instance, any garrisons in Kosovo -- even though it is the site of the huge Camp Bondsteel, built in 1999 and maintained ever since by Kellogg, Brown & Root. The Report similarly omits bases in Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Qatar, and Uzbekistan, although the U.S. military has established colossal base structures throughout the so-called arc of instability in the two-and-a-half years since 9/11.
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http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3f/Camp_bondsteel_kosovo.jpg/800px-Camp_bondsteel_kosovo.jpg
Camp Bondsteel, the biggest US military base abroad.
Source(s):
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0115-08.htm


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