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
I remain unconvinced we will never have a need for a large ground troop invasion force again.
China has a five million man army. While the level of training for many of them is sub-par, we have no idea what types of battles our future with them might entail.
The promise has been that with less bases we could have a better prepared status, troops and equipment.
Has that played out? No. Now they want to close more bases.
It’s somewhat like stating we want a robust private sector aviation presence in our nation, then closing as many small airports around the nation as we can.
The private sector aviation situation is important, and so is an adequate number of bases.
We have shut down enough. Enough already.
Name five things we have up-sized in our military in the last 20 years.
Stupidest post of the day. That was a really dumb one Karnac.