Many locations were already known, such as Dakar (I mapped the Dakar logistical node myself in Openstreetmap quite a while ago - and I stumbled upon US special forces in uniform lounging in a Dakar hotel) or Ouagadougou (where an intelligence processing center worked with what the grey ISR flights gathered in the region) but some are very surprising such as Al-Wigh in southern Libya or Faya Largeau in Chad, which for all practical purposes is a French airstrip and isn’t permanently occupied as far as I know. And while they cooperate with the French in Mali (thanks for the aerial refueling !) and therefore obviously had to have people there to coordinate with them, I had never heard about that and I haven’t seen any Americans while I was a couple of weeks in Bamako a year ago.