Hello to everyone at ATS!

I have a question for you all that has been worring me for sometime.

Next week our favorite National Government will make the announcements on which military bases will be closed in CONUS and around the world.

This announcement will bring both hardship and joy to communities around the country and world.

Next week this will be big news and I am trying to get a feel on what people are thinking and their feelings on the impact forthcoming.

My question to ATS membership is this, using your best guess and and or inside information or just your superior intellect, which military bases will be closed and why.

Thanks SIRR1

Well, of course military bases are good financially for the community, since they pump a lot of money into the local economy; for that reason, most folks want to see base closures somehwere else.

We had two large Air Force bases in the Phoenix area: Williams AFB and Luke AFB. "Willie" was closed twelve years ago and has morphed into Williams Gateway Airport, and has drawn almost as much money as the AFB did, with an Arizona State University and Boeing presence there, along with a host of smaller contactors. In retrospect, closing Willie was not the catastrophe people in Mesa thought it would be.

Luke AFB, on the other side of town, is facing encroachment from West-side development, and is fighting to keep empty land around it. It brings in a huge amount of income to the West Valley and is also the largest fighter training base in the US; my guess is that it's pretty safe from this round of base closures.

But a more basic consideration about base closures is this: our military seems to be transitioning from large masses of people and infrastructure overseas in places like Japan, the Philippines, and Germany towards smaller, quick-reaction forces based primarily here in the CONUS and mobile enough to react to a 'hot spot' elsewhere within a few days.

I guess the reason for this is that we're not going to fight a massive Soviet armored strike through the Fulda Gap or PRC attacks via DPRK to either ROK or Japan; why pre-position military assets where the Bad Guys aren't going to come?

If this trend continues (and it seems like that's the case) I'd think that we'd need to maintain our existing bases here in the US, not as defense against a Soviet-style attack, but to maintain training for a more mobile and flexible 21st-Century force.

Good reply from Off-the Street.

The changing military needs means we no longer need all the bases we currently maintain. As a taxpayer I don't want to see money wasted or a base kept open solely because it is essential to a local economy -- that's nothing more than welfare. I doubt we need all the bases currently in CONUS, but I'll defer to the panel on the choices. There will of course be winners and losers regardless of the choices made. I don't think there is a way prevent a win-lose battle over the final list.

Complicating my feelings on the whole issue is my county will be directly affected, with a town whose sole economy is the base. If the base is closed the entire community will be boarded up and become a ghost town.