Like most baby boomers, I came of age during the 1960s. I entered college in 1967 and graduated in 1971, whereupon I entered the United States Army as a second lieutenant. For the next 23 years, I lived and traveled all over the world, spending my youth at dozens of army, marine and air force bases on five continents.
I returned to the States from my final European tour in the summer of 1989, missing by just months the fall of the Berlin Wall. Life as I knew it was changing forever, as were the lives of countless communities throughout the United States and the rest of the world.
It’s been almost a decade since I hung up my uniform for the last time, and during that time our armed forces have been reduced in size to a mere fraction of what they were when I entered adulthood.
Gone, too, are a significant number of the military installations that formerly housed our much larger armed forces.
For the past decade, the “peace dividend” has meant the closure of bases from Maine to California and from North Dakota to Texas.
Some, like the former Fort Ord overlooking Monterey Bay in California, are situated in breathtakingly scenic locales. Most are simply functional, boasting amenities like long runways, rail spurs and interstate (or at least dual-access) highway access. Some, like old naval bases, even offer port facilities. Some are rather large installations, while others are fairly small. Most are somewhere in between.
However, one element common to military bases is transportation access. Another is land ... and plenty of it. Almost all bases are suited for various industrial applications.
So if transportation access and abundant land are important features for your impending facility, perhaps you ought to take a look at some of our former military installations. Most have been turned over to local development agencies that are prepared to offer generous inducements in order to get you to open up your next facility on their installation.
Most of these old bases have a proud history of service to this country. Now, like much of the industry that once fueled our much larger military, they have been converted over to civilian use.
That’s the way it’s been in this country for many years, as our economy transitions between making swords and making plowshares.
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