The Eye-Opening Aerial Geography of U.S. Military Might

We first came across Josh Begley's clever approach at comprehending vast but often inaccessible infrastructure in 2012, when as an NYU graduate student he built a breathtaking database of aerial images of every correctional facility in the United States. That web project was an attempt to quantify the impact of incarceration on the American landscape, and the resulting visual was in many ways more powerful than any set of statistics showing the rise of the U.S. prison population or the proliferation of cell blocks needed to house it.

More recently, Begley has now applied the same idea to another difficult-to-measure subject: the American military's footprint. This website – empire.is – draws on Bing and Google Maps satellite images of the military installations identified in media reports and the Department of Defense's property inventory. Unlike the previous project, this geography extends well beyond the U.S. And it reveals more varied aerial patterns, from crisscrossing runways: