Retrenchment Is Order of the Day...

The American military, the third-largest landowner in the United States, is looking for a few more good acres--and a few less bases.

It is no simple contradiction. As they prepare to close or scale back some 70 military bases, Pentagon officials also say more open land is needed for realistic training with weapons that travel faster and see farther.

The net result? Little change in the number of military acres, but a subtle shift away from population centers to large military reservations tucked away from the rest of America.

“It’s going to be a small, professional military largely based in the South and West, where there’s plenty of good weather and lots of area,” said Lawrence Korb, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former assistant secretary of defense.

All of this maneuvering has brought attention to a hidden colossus in our midst--the American military land holdings of 27 million acres, a combined area larger than Ohio. Only the Departments of the Interior and Agriculture control more land.

There are some 890 military installations in the United States, ranging from the 3-million-acre Nellis Air Force Base weapons range in Nevada to sites of less than an acre, like the small Navy weather station on Santa Barbara Island off the California coast.

The real estate catalogue goes beyond air base or Army post: an oceanographic research center in San Diego, an Alabama phosphate works, a Georgia aircraft plant, ammunition factories in Tennessee, a Brooklyn hospital.

The holdings are concentrated along the nation’s southern and western rim: Alaska, Hawaii, Washington, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Alabama and Florida account for more than a third of all installations and more than half the acreage.

California has the largest military presence: 108 installations on 3.7 million acres--nearly 6,000 square miles of land. Arizona has the most military lands: 6.5 million acres, or 10,000 square miles, largely Army and Air Force weapons ranges.

The Air Force has the most land: 12.3 million acres spread over 387 different facilities, mostly large weapons ranges in the West. The Army controls 11.2 million acres on 208 installations. The Navy has 257 facilities on 2.3 million acres. Twenty-five Marine Corps bases total 1.1 million acres.

The military’s stewardship of its land is as varied as the land itself. There are 11,000 toxic waste sites on military installations that will cost $2 billion this year alone to clean.

But many bases abound with rare wildlife, such as Camp Pendleton in northern San Diego County, an island of open space surrounded by Southern California sprawl, where endangered terns, turtles and eagles make their home.

“Because these lands have been isolated since 1940, they’ve been able to preserve the natural features and wildlife is migrating there,” said Tom Baca, deputy assistant secretary of defense for environment.

Some of these lands have been out of civilian hands since before the nation’s founding. Carlisle Barracks, Pa., home of the Army War College, was a Colonial armory. The military academy at West Point grew out of a strategic British fort on the Hudson River.

Surviving posts mark the nation’s westward expansion. The 165-year-old Fort Leavenworth, Kan., site of the General Staff College and infamous military prison, once guarded the Oregon and Santa Fe trails. Arizona’s Fort Huachuca, built in 1877 as a base for Indian fighters, is now home of the computerized Army Information Systems Command.

Many frontier outposts still existed in the 1920s. “We had an Army dispersed in small battalion- and squadron-size units throughout the West,” said Col. Tom Sweeney, director of the U.S. Army Military History Institute at Carlisle Barracks.

Then came World War II, what Sweeney calls “the greatest single influence in our base structure today.”

Nearly half the nation’s major Army posts and nearly all its Air Force bases were established between 1940 and 1945. Many went up seemingly overnight to handle the wartime expansion.

“They had to create training sites in obscure places because of the large numbers of trainees,” Sweeney said.

Retrenchment began after the Korean War; some 200 bases were closed by the 1970s. But Congress set hurdles that essentially froze the politically painful shutdowns in 1977.

The winnowing resumed in 1988 when Congress established a nonpartisan commission to decide which bases should close. The result was mostly a modest trimming of World War II leftovers.

The major cuts are in airfields. Twenty-three Air Force and Navy air bases are closing, reflecting a move away from the bomber and fighter squadrons that were once the nation’s first line of defense.

“The Air Force drawdown is dramatic because it is simple to disband a wing and close a base,” said Douglas Hansen, the Pentagon’s director of base closure and utilization. “It’s much more complicated to close an Army post or a Navy port.”

Eleven Army posts are being closed or scaled down to consolidate forces. The 5th Infantry Division is leaving Fort Polk, La., to join the 1st Cavalry Division at Fort Hood, Texas. Fort Ord, Calif. will shut down when the 7th Infantry Division moves to larger facilities at Fort Lewis, Wash.

The Navy is closing bases and yards in Philadelphia, New York, California and Washington, along with a handful of research sites.

Korb thinks the military could do its job with 300 major installations. “Thirty of those bases would be new,” he said. “You need larger training areas because of the new weapons.”

But Hansen doesn’t believe the public will permit new bases.

“We’re not going to go out and build something new,” he said. “If there is an opportunity, we’ll try to make a great base out of an average base.”

To do so, more land will be required. The various services have proposals to add between 3 million and 4 million acres to existing bases and ranges.

In the past, there would be no problem getting the land. The different services took what they wanted. Sometimes, as in the case of Fort Lewis, the land was donated by the public. But a more skeptical Congress and public has forced the Pentagon to take a sterner hand in weighing land requests.

“Some of these remote areas are beginning to fill in with small communities where they have the noise from the aircraft. There is now a greater sensitivity to land expansion,” said Rep. Bruce Vento (D-Minn.), who heads a House subcommittee on public lands.

Even if no new lands are added, the scheduled base closings will have little effect on the Pentagon’s overall holdings. About 335,000 acres will be given up over the next five years, little more than 1% of the total.

What the closings do reflect is a further shift westward for the military. More than 40% of Defense Department lands are being cut in the New England states of Maine, New Hampshire and Rhode Island; Massachusetts is losing 15%.