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?
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 The US has permanently withdrawn ground troops from Taiwan, for example.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).
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.
The colors are also selected to make it look like there is a significant "presence" even when there are only 10 guys who work in the embassy, like here in Austria.
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.
