Jon A. Gallinetti, commanding general, Marine Corps Air Station Miramar.

On Sept. 30, 2003, the posturing over the merits of possibly using a military base for a civilian airport heated up with a letter sent to the San Diego County Regional Airport Authority by the region’s entire congressional delegation. The communique slammed the authority for a narrowed list of airport sites that was heavy on defense installations.

“We find it remarkable that so few of the sites on your list fall within the jurisdiction of your agency,” declared the letter signed by Darrell Issa, Randy Cunningham, Ken Calvert, Duncan Hunter, Susan Davis and Bob Filner. On Oct. 1, U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer joined in, expressing her concerns about a study that looks at active bases.

The airport authority responded promptly, on Oct. 2, with a letter that informed Boxer that on that very day the board had voted unanimously to proceed with looking at NAS North Island, MCAS Miramar, MCAS Miramar (East), MCB Camp Pendleton, AFB March, the desert and San Diego International Airport.

But it wasn’t over. On Nov. 24 the authority’s strategic planning committee pulled back on its examination of the bases, agreeing to look only at long-term environmental issues until after the BRAC list is published. If, as expected, the list comes out in summer or late fall of 2005 and a base is available, the authority would begin studies in earnest since it must place a choice before voters in November of 2006.

While the authority’s list included multiple bases, it is most often the 24,000-acre Marine Corps Air Station Miramar that is lusted after by the pro-airport crowd.

The odds of the military closing the base seem high. An analysis of San Diego’s military infrastructure by William Cassidy, a Navy deputy assistant secretary turned consultant, spells out in detail Miramar’s many significant attributes, and concludes by placing it as “unlikely” to close or see significant reduction.

The Cassidy report does include some conditions not favorable to Miramar. For example, BRAC takes into consideration degradation caused by community resistance to routine military operations. Complaints about the noise from base helicopters continue. On the other hand, communities that work cooperatively to resolve those differences, as San Diego has, are more likely to retain the bases in their cities and towns.

A new twist to the BRAC statute directs the secretary of defense to consider any notice received from a local government in the vicinity of a military installation that the local government would approve of a closure or realignment. The military mission would take priority in the decision making, but if the base stayed open a reason would have to be given for why the community’s desires were overlooked.

San Diego has given no such indication and, quite the opposite, insists it is critical to national defense. Yet perhaps by putting a detailed airport study of all military bases into near-idle, San Diego is sparing itself the possibility that the BRAC would consider closing Miramar or North Island.

Miramar became a Marine base in 1997. That took place following the 1993 BRAC when the Navy left, sending its F/A-18 fighters and attack aircraft to NAS Lemoore, its Top Gun training program to NAS Fallon, its E-2C electronic surveillance aircraft to NAS Point Mugu and its F-14 fighters to NAS Oceana.

Today the base is home to 10,500 Marines, sailors and civilians and more than 250 aircraft. The primary resident is the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing that is the air combat element of Camp Pendleton’s 1st Marine Expeditionary Force. The base is the seventh largest employer in San Diego County, with a payroll of $356 million. Since the Marines moved in, the Navy has spent nearly $600 million on improvements and housing.

The Cassidy report describes Miramar as “the hub of a wheel on whose rim are located the most valuable and unique training resources in the United States.” In the report, and an interview, Cassidy uses charts to detail how interwoven the base is with the region’s military. Aircraft from the base are never more than a tankful of fuel from more than a half dozen training grounds in the desert, sea and mountains. The report also notes Marine aviators are ideally located to train with Navy aircraft carriers. (A similar argument was advanced in the early 1990s for why the Navy base should not close.)

With the high cost of housing in San Diego, the base’s ample open space is attractive to the military, especially with planning in the works to stop housing sailors on in-port ships in 2008.

In its conclusion on Miramar, the Cassidy report states: “No other military complex in the United States serves so many of the nation’s combat training requirements and readiness demands as effectively and efficiently as the Miramar-centered network of bases and ranges in the Eastern Pacific, Southern California and Southwestern Arizona.”

— Tim McClain