This is being sold as a great way to save money.
You close up these bases and malls spring up. The next thing you know, you don’t have the infrastructure you used to.
Are we going to build up our military, or are we going to downsize more?
This is a tip-off moment IMO.
If you have troops, you need bases. If you have fewer troops you don’t need bases.
When we’re talking billions of dollars, that’s pocket change in the overall scheme of things.
I’d like to think we have a robust military but closing more bases every five years sure doesn’t impress me we’re moving in that direction.
Agreed. They need to do something about this. Many bases were closed in the SF Bay Area.
Ft. Ord, in Monterey, CA opened in 1917 and closed in 1994. In that time frame, it was a major training facility for the Army. Owing to the clean up of unexploded ordinance, a large part of it still isn’t available for civilian use, but there is a shopping center there and a state college, and Laguna Seca Raceway has been turned over to the county and expanded as a recreation area ( camping and a shooting range).
The fact of the matter is that we will never fight wars with hundreds of thousands of troops as we did in the World Wars again. Modern technology has changed the requirements and we don’t need a massive troop training facility like Ft Ord any longer. But it was a bitch to get it closed even though it just sat there with little or nothing going on there after Vietnam. Hamilton AFB and NAS Alameda are long gone too, because the kinds of A/C we use need different kinds of facilities. I see no correlation between the number of base we have scattered around and either the size or the readiness of our military. If Mattis can save $10 billion and make our military better, good for him!
7II, Korea and Vietnam, Ft. Ord was a major training base. It’s been closed since 1994