Washington – A map of U.S. military bases is a chronicle of perils now gone, often long gone.
The forts protected British settlers in what was then the deep interior – central Pennsylvania. They helped fend off Indians along the Oregon Trail. They guarded against pesky smugglers from Canada, shipped troops across the ocean in two world wars and stared down Russians over the polar ice cap.
The lesson, as the government prepares a new round of base closings, is that the posts that have adapted have survived.
As the country’s military needs have changed, many of the country’s 425 bases and several thousand smaller outposts have reinvented themselves and today fulfill far different roles.
Those that haven’t adjusted could find themselves on the new base-closing hit list.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is to submit his recommendations to the independent Base Realignment and Closure Commission on Friday, and that panel is required to submit its final report to President Bush by Sept. 8. About 20 percent of domestic base capacity has been cut in previous rounds.
Some military property still in use dates to the nation’s founding or earlier.
The military presence at Carlisle, Pa., dates to 1757, when British settlers needed protection from attacks by the French and Indians. President Washington later put down the “whiskey rebellion” there. Now, this small Pennsylvania post is home to the Army’s Carlisle Barracks and the Army War College, but it is still considered vulnerable to cuts.
Fort Sill in Oklahoma was staked out in 1869 during a military campaign to stop Indians from raiding border settlements in Texas and Kansas.
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base got its start in the early 1900s as Wright Field near Dayton, Ohio, where the Wright brothers did pioneering aviation work.
And the Strategic Air Command headquarters at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska takes its heritage – and still has the guard house – from old Fort Crook, which protected western expansion in the 1800s.
Many such bases have found a new mission, even as others lose their purpose – or the political clout to keep them open – and melt back into the scrub grass.
“The threat is different, the danger is different, but other dangers continue and military installations can be readapted to meet current and future needs, as has been done over the decades and the centuries,” said Richard J. Sommers of the Army Military History Institute.
