San Francisco Gives Marines’ War Games Plan the Boot

The U.S. Marine Corps thought it had found the ideal spot to practice an amphibious landing in a “hostile urban environment”: the city of San Francisco.

But the Corps soon learned just how hostile the environment can be here, when the National Park Service rejected its request to come ashore on a beach at the Presidio, the 222-year-old fort that became a national park in 1994.

“I’ll be very honest, I was shocked,” said Lt. Col Gary Schenkel, spokesman for the Marines’ War Fighting Laboratory in Quantico, Va., which prepares for 21st century battlefields, many of which are expected to be in urban areas. It has run similar, albeit smaller-scale exercises in Chicago, New York City, Charleston, S.C., and Jacksonville, Fla., without incident, Schenkel said.

“They loved us in Chicago,” he said. “They couldn’t do enough for us there.”

But the Windy City has an altogether different ethos from Baghdad by the Bay. Liberal San Franciscans cherish endangered species, natural landscapes and tourists. They feel somewhat less kindly toward large-scale military operations.

So, while the Marine Corps saw the Presidio as an ideal place to test high-tech communications and troop maneuvers in Operation Urban Warrior, San Franciscans envisioned a military invasion that would trigger ecological damage, a traffic nightmare, noise and mess.

Late last month, local newspapers began reporting that the Marines were about to unleash a “huge operation,” on a scale never before seen in an American city, in a 1,480-acre park visited by thousands of tourists and Bay Area residents every day.

“Just as the public gets used to the Presidio’s new role as a sanctuary of unique historical and natural values,” huffed the San Francisco Examiner in an editorial, “the U.S. Marines want to revive military exploitation of the site.”

The exercise would have included 6,000 to 7,000 troops and support staff on five ships offshore, but would have put no more than 700 troops on the ground at any one time.

But the publicity spooked the National Park Service. Fearful that the landings would draw huge crowds who might damage the Presidio’s fragile dunes and disturb wildlife, it pulled the plug on the operation Wednesday.

“I told the Marines they could not storm Baker Beach,” said B.J. Griffin, general manager of the Presidio.

In a letter to Schenkel dated Wednesday, Griffin said the proposed landing “is not in keeping with the overall mission of the National Park Service or the principles and concepts developed for management of the Presidio.”

Griffin said volunteers have spent 100,000 hours lovingly restoring Baker Beach’s dunes, where the Marines planned to come ashore.

“When we started looking at the Baker Beach portion, it looked like there were more potential impacts to resources than we thought we could manage,” Griffin said.

Newspaper articles and the Corps’ own environmental assessment described an operation that would land hundreds of troops on two consecutive days on the beach, then drive them up the Presidio’s slopes in Humvees and armored personnel carriers, Griffin said.

“They were going to be shooting,” she said. The Marines confirm they were going to carry weapons loaded with blanks. “We don’t have any parking or facilities to handle a large crowd that would want to come and observe this. It is a fairly sensitive coastal habitat area,” Griffin added.

She stressed that the Marines had been sensitive to the environmental concerns. It was the people who would come watch them maneuver, she said, who posed more of a threat.

“The scale is just too big for that site. We don’t want to undo any of the hard work we have done there to replant vegetation and grow seedlings,” she said. “Our first and foremost responsibility is for the preservation of the park.”

Bill McDonnell, co-chairman of a neighborhood group that represents 11 well-heeled communities around the Presidio, said some of his members had expressed concern about the Marine operation.

“The headlines were provocative,” McDonnell said. “People were concerned about disruption to traffic patterns, about cutting off roads temporarily. If we have a choice of having it or not having it, we would rather take the status quo.”

Schenkel said he was taken aback by Griffin’s decision not to allow the Marines to land at a site with more than 200 years of military history.

Wrapped around the southern side of the mouth of the San Francisco Bay, the Presidio was founded by the Spanish in 1776. It has flown the flags of Spain, Mexico, the Bear Flag Republic and the U.S. Army.

Many of its red-roofed buildings are historic, and its views of the bay are unparalleled. The base was home to the 6th Army until it was declared surplus property and designated a national park by Congress.

Schenkel puts the park service’s rejection down to a misunderstanding of what the Marines intended to do.

“We were not going to storm the Presidio,” he said. “This was just a place to land our troops from offshore ships.” The Marines, he said, had promised not to use any tanks or other vehicles with tracks and had even pledged that troops would keep off the grass.

“But I guess people were thinking this was something out of ‘Saving Private Ryan,’ ” he said.

Schenkel said he has not given up. His staff has been frantically reworking its environmental assessment, trying to address Griffin’s concerns.

Jurisdiction at the Presidio is divided between the park service, which controls the park’s beaches and many of its open spaces, and the Presidio Trust, a quasi-governmental board of directors that leases out its buildings in an effort to make the park self-sufficient. The bulk of the four-day Marine Corps exercise, Schenkel said, would be carried out in areas controlled by the Presidio Trust. But Thursday night he received a letter from the trust denying a permit for the exercise.

The troops, Schenkel said, can land at a Coast Guard facility south of the city, near San Francisco International Airport. Rather than dramatically storming from the beach up the forested slopes of the Presidio, they would board buses and ride the several miles to the Presidio to carry out the exercise in some of its abandoned buildings.

Why pick the picturesque fort as the site for a military operation that will involve about 6,000 soldiers in offshore ships backing up the 600 to 700 who will be on the ground?

“The Presidio offers us an opportunity to train in an environment embedded within an active city that has all the challenges of any city in the world we might have to be inserted into,” Schenkel explained.

The troops intended to come ashore in Hovercraft at Baker Beach, a 2,000-yard-long stretch of sand with a stunning view of Golden Gate Bridge. The bridge lies just a quarter-mile northeast of the popular sunbathing spot.

The Corps has been planning the multimillion-dollar exercise for a year. Schenkel held preliminary discussions with the park service in October and felt confident enough of getting the necessary permits that he opened offices at the Presidio more than a month ago to plan the final details. The exercise was scheduled to begin March 15.

“It is an exercise in command and control, a conceptual exercise that would train us how to know where our people are while they are in an urban canyon,” Schenkel said.

Because it is at the tip of a peninsula with limited access, he said, San Francisco also offered the opportunity for the Marines to practice command and control for a city that could be--and has been in the past--badly damaged and partially cut off by natural disasters such as earthquakes.

“A lot of what we do now is help out with natural disasters and humanitarian assistance,” Schenkel said.

“We have a great deal to offer the city,” Schenkel added. At the end of the operation, the Corps and the Navy plan to dock ships used in the exercise at San Francisco’s Embarcadero and hold public tours from March 19 through the 21.

Kandace Bender, spokeswoman for Mayor Willie Brown, said she believes the negotiations between the Corps and the Presidio will continue, although she declined to say whether the mayor is in favor of the exercise.

Griffin said she knows her decision may be controversial, but insisted she has done the right thing.

“They have lots of other sites where they can do this,” she said. “I don’t feel bad at all.”

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Marines Repelled

The National Park Service has rejected a request from the Marines to conduct military exercises at San Francisco’s famed Presidio. The Marines had hoped to land 600 to 700 troops on Baker Beach at the one-time Army fort, for four days of military exercises beginning March 15.