Should We Pull the Military Out… of New England?
By Montag | Related entries in General Politics, MilitaryThe BRAC (Base Realignment and Closure) Commission may veto some of the Pentagon’s proposed base closures, and may mark others — that weren’t on the list to begin with — for closure.
One commissioner wonders if pulling out of New England is the greatest idea.
The hardest-hit region is New England, which stands to see the closure of the New London Submarine Base in Connecticut, the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Maine and Otis Air National Guard Base in Massachusetts. Maine’s Brunswick Naval Air station also would lose all of its maritime patrol aircraft and 2,420 jobs.
Commission Chairman Anthony Principi, former Secretary of Veterans Affairs, has repeatedly expressed concern that the military is pulling out of New England entirely and questioned the strategic wisdom of leaving no presence in the region.
Reuters: U.S. base panel seen refusing some Pentagon closings
This entry was posted on Monday, August 22nd, 2005 and is filed under General Politics, Military. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
August 22nd, 2005 at 8:58 am
It just occurred to me to wonder what a map of how people voted in the last election compared to where the bases are might look.
As I currently live in Blue State New England, I have been hearing quite a bit about the proposed base closings. There’s no way that the upper East Coast can be adequately protected from an attack if the nearest planes are in Florida. If 9-11 were to happen again, the planes wouldn’t even be near the area before all of the terrorist-controlled planes hit their targets.
August 22nd, 2005 at 10:32 am
The core issue in the AF closings has to do with the role of and control over the Guard assets. The states are saying that they need their air units for state missions quite irrespective of federal calculations for combat requirements in foreseeable overseas scenarios. Thestates need these units to forest fires and that sort of thing.
Actually this fight is symptomatic of a very good development – the federal and the state interests are inextricably tangled in the Air National Guard. People on the active side have a hard time dealing with National Guard over this central issue. The way the National Guard is constitiuted, the states appon the officers, build the armories, and pay for the troops when they are doing state missions, and the federal government pays for everything else. The active side doesn’t like this kind of coalition arrangement. Too bad.