Former military installations can be success stories for the local community and small businesses.
Former military installations can be success stories for the local community and small businesses. The former Brunswick Naval Air Station, Maine, has become Brunswick Landing, a “busy hub of tech businesses, some manufacturers, call centers, and service businesses,” in the words of News Center Maine. The former Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, now an office park home to many different industries, “supports more jobs than it did during its life as a military base,” Dr. Miriam Pemberton details in her book Six Stops on the National Security Tour (p. 109). Existing federal shipyards, from Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Virginia to Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard in Hawai‘i, could also adjust overnight to start maintaining and upgrading commercial ships, hospital ships, river barges, and scientific vessels, instead of warships. Former military bases in France have been converted into solar energy hubs, a plan proposed by some in the U.S. for the replacement of existing bases.
Converting military training ranges and military arsenals also generates community health and small business opportunity. Military training ranges, such Dare County Range in North Carolina and Southern California Offshore Range, can become National Wilderness Areas, National Parks, or Marine Sanctuaries with little effort, providing recreation and beauty for humans and much relief for overtaxed ecosystems. Military arsenals and ammunition plants, such as Watervliet Arsenal in New York and Rock Island Arsenal in Illinois, could instead revitalize U.S. infrastructure. Arsenals and plants have sizable additive and subtractive manufacturing, brilliant and industrious workers, and space to start producing materials and components for bridges, roads, housing, water pipes, high-speed rail, electric grids, and more.
Corporations manufacture most of the technology used by the U.S. military. Corporations regularly change what products they manufacture and where they manufacture them. Examples of war corporations currently producing beneficial technology include General Dynamics cloud computing for the National Cancer Institute, Oshkosh Defense mail trucks, and L3Harris communications gear for public transportation. During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, General Dynamics Bath Iron Works made swabs for testing, SNC made “ear savers” and protective gear for nurses, and RTX made face shields. Economic conversion is absolutely possible. Good news: Most technologies produced by war corporations have an immediate peaceful civilian use. Examples include satellites for monitoring Earth’s climate instead of spying, aircraft for firefighting instead of bombing, rocketry launching instruments that study the cosmos instead of militarizing space, land vehicles for public transportation instead of conveying armed forces, and computer software for resource allocation instead of war logistics. The good news continues: Numerous public goods stand to benefit from the workers (e.g., engineer, physicist, computer programmer, machinist, electrician) currently employed in the war industry. U.S. infrastructure, international scientific cooperation, coastal fortification against sea level rise, energy generation & storage, and more can benefit from the workers’ brilliance and diligence.
The sky is the limit.