Urban Sprawl : A New Foe Surrounds the Military

Marine Lt. Col. William J. Fox was still angry about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor as he flew over the wide open farmlands of Orange County. It was 1942 and Fox was searching for “just the right place” for a mainland airfield where Marine Corps aviators could be trained for the campaign to regain the Pacific.

As he swept over a tiny railroad whistle-stop called El Toro, Fox spotted a sprawling plot of land covered with bean fields and orange groves.

It was perfect: few and far-away neighbors; close to the ocean so pilots could practice carrier landings; within range of desert bombing ranges, and near Camp Pendleton, the Corps’ then-new 125,000-acre troop-training base in northern San Diego County.

“Orange County was an ideal place for military bases,” Fox, now 92 and a retired brigadier general, recalled in a telephone interview from his Fillmore home in Ventura County. “It was all open country. . . . There was hardly anyone living there.”

Under Siege

Today, that Orange County airfield--the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station--is under a siege Fox could not have imagined 46 years ago. Tightly packed housing tracts have brought tens of thousands of neighbors creeping closer and closer to the base fences. High-rise buildings, shopping centers and industrial parks are popping up around the airfield. A stone’s throw from the base, long lines of automobiles, motorcycles and trucks stream through the “El Toro Y”--the southern intersection of two of Southern California’s busiest freeways, Interstates 5 and 405.

With the advance of urban development have come volleys of complaints about the thunderous screams of low flying Marine Corps jets.

The peacetime assault on El Toro is not unique.

Defending Their Ground

Base commanders from Boston to San Diego and Seattle to Jacksonville, Fla., are defending their ground against well-organized community groups, environmental activists, land-hungry developers and demanding local political leaders.

In recent years, outcries from surrounding communities have forced bans on training flights or outright closures at Air Force bases in Texas, Colorado and Illinois. And complaints are on the rise just about everywhere else. The Navy now reports that base neighbors have affected some kind of training or maneuvers at every one of its 65 air stations in the United States.

Even the Marines’ massive and relatively isolated 600,000-acre Twentynine Palms Air Ground Combat Center in the desert east of San Bernardino is under fire. Neighbors in a growing residential area along the base’s southern flank are complaining about artillery fire, as well as K-130 transport planes and F-18 fighters that fly in and out of the training area.

“We see this happening before our very eyes,” said William Cox, a civilian who is responsible for the Air Force’s nationwide program to keep incompatible development away from its installations. “The Air Force liked to locate its bases about 15 miles or so outside of small towns, where they wouldn’t bother anyone. Well, in some cases those small towns have grown up.”

“I’ve watched the value of my home actually decrease,” said Roscoe Hatch, a retired Army engineer who lives near a Navy training airstrip on Whidbey Island near Seattle. “There is more than the incredible noise that goes on late into the night, there is an actual safety problem because we are living where even the Navy says there should be no humans.”

Although the military could not provide exact figures on how much it spends annually in its battle against what it terms encroachment by civilians, the amount runs well into millions of dollars. The Air Force, for example, Cox said in a telephone interview from Washington, has more than 100 people nationwide who deal with the problem daily. In addition, the Air Force has spent $65 million for land alone to increase buffer areas around air bases.

Vital Facility

At Camp Pendleton, one of the Marine Corps’ largest and most vital training facilities, base officials are battling state and local governments that see base land as solutions to their growth-induced problems. Various proposals have called for a new freeway, a landfill, a public golf course and a regional airport on the Pendleton grounds. Oil companies want to set up drilling platforms off the base’s coastline, which corps officers say could interfere with large-scale troop landing drills.

In addition, Pendleton, located almost midway between the fastest-growing areas of Orange and San Diego counties, has, like many bases in urbanizing areas, become the last sanctuary for many endangered species. Pendleton troops engaged in field warfare training must be careful to avoid the nesting areas of the lightfooted clapper rail, the Belding’s Savannah sparrow or the California least tern.

Budget Cut Proposal

Meanwhile, a consensus is building in Congress to close some of the more than 700 military bases and installations scattered across the country. Hoping to cut as much as $5 billion a year from the Defense Department budget, Congress has ordered a bipartisan commission to come up by the end of the year with a list of up to 50 facilities that could be closed or reduced in size.

Whether any base closures actually occur remains to be seen. In the past, pork-barrel congressional politics and turf-guarding Pentagon lobbying have beaten back efforts to close unneeded bases.

At least in terms of military preparedness, however, the real issue may not be how many bases the country operates. Far more significant, some military officials believe, will be the extent of development permitted around truly needed bases, whether they can grow and what types of training will be politically and environmentally acceptable.

Congressmen and military experts agree it would be impossible to shut down the larger, important bases and installations, which include Pendleton.

‘Dramatic Changes’

A recent top-level study prepared by the office of Marine Corps Commandant Alfred M. Gray Jr. notes that “military operations have been undergoing dramatic changes with new and more sophisticated weapons systems. Many of these systems are larger, louder and require isolation from civilian communities.”

The “combination of population growth, environmental and natural resource restrictions and new military hardware has often placed Marine Corps installations at cross-purposes with their surrounding civilian neighbors,” the study says. “Unabated encroachment from residential, commercial, industrial or public development could cause curtailment of (warfare) training activities.”

A curtailment of military activities is just what residents on Whidbey Island want. They are in near-revolt over a 250% increase in flights in and out of the Navy airstrip outside the town of Coupeville.

‘A Real Problem’

“It’s like the old bull in the china closet story,” said Jeff Eustis, an attorney representing a group of 300 Coupeville homeowners. “In this case there was a calf in the china closet, but it has grown into a bull. Now there is a real problem.”

Eustis demanded that the Navy prepare a study of the effects the increased jet noise is having on his Coupeville clients. The Pentagon recently agreed.

At Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, Marines cannot practice with a new-generation M 198 Howitzer at its full range of 25 miles because the shells would fly off the base. Instead, the gunners train with shells that are not fully loaded with powder. And armored units on maneuvers at the camp must steer around the endangered red cockaded woodpeckers, whose nesting areas dot the training fields.

‘Unrealistic Training’

Marine Col. Neil J. Bross, who heads the Marine’s land use and construction branch, complained that it is somewhat “unrealistic training when tanks have to detour around the (woodpecker) sites.”

“We spend so much time deploying away from Camp Lejeune because we are not able to do the things we have to do,” Bross said.

Some of the conflicts between military bases and the urbanizing area around them are potentially deadly.

At Camp Pendleton, a chain reaction wreck three years ago on busy Interstate 5 occurred after a cloud of dust from maneuvering tanks blanketed the highway, cutting visibility to near zero.

Just to the north, Irvine community leaders became alarmed in 1986 over safety when a CH-53E Super Stallion transport helicopter based in Tustin came down for an emergency landing near a residential area.

Jet Crash

And earlier this year, an out-of-control Navy F-14 returning to Miramar Naval Air Station in San Diego crashed at a suburban airport near the base, killing one and injuring four others seriously. The pilot had ejected after he lost control of the aircraft.

Long-term population and development shifts are contributing to the problem.

Generally, the worst problems, particularly in terms of the urban development squeeze, are in the West. Military officials say rapidly sprawling Sun Belt suburbs like those in Orange County and the Yuma and Phoenix areas of Arizona are beginning to encircle once-remote military outposts. A recent Marine Corps study concludes: “Developers recognize what military planners saw years ago: good weather is a highly desirable asset.”

‘In the Lead’

“The West Coast is right now in the lead as far as these encroachment problems go,” Bross said.

Maj. Lyn L. Creswell, a Washington based-attorney who represents the Marine Corps in land-use disputes, said much of his time is consumed defending El Toro and Camp Pendleton--the Corps’ two hot spots in terms of complaints about operations and demands for land.

And the Corps is resolutely defending its ground. “We need all the land at Camp Pendleton to practice coordinating live artillery shoots and bombing runs with our infantry units,” one recent study says. “We don’t want to do that for the first time in combat.”

The growing political and environmental pressures on bases have forced commanders into new roles. They have had to become public relations specialists, wooing community support and managing their installation’s image.

Operations Changed

Maj. Gen. Donald E. P. Miller, commander of the Marine 3rd Aircraft Wing, headquartered at El Toro, said there was a time when Marines trained and flew jet fighters with little concern about the outside community. But that has changed.

“Look, we have to get out and talk to the people who live in the communities surrounding the air station. We have to face them eye to eye,” Miller said. “I hear the jet noise at night and see the interference on my television when a plane goes over and you can’t just sit out here and say they don’t know what they are talking about. We owe this to our neighbors.”

The armed services are trying a variety of tactics to defend their bases.

They have become much more active in trying to influence local zoning and land-use decisions affecting the land around them. The Marines, for example, have appointed special liaison officers at some bases, who, like preachers, take their messages out into the community. The Corps has also established a national office in Washington to track and resist potential encroachment problems.

‘Varying Degrees of Noise’

“The Navy is not against development, just incompatible development,” said Alan F. Zusman, manager of the Navy’s land-use trouble-shooting unit in Washington. “Our mission is to fly airplanes (and) those airplanes make varying degrees of noise.”

In San Diego, the Navy requires pilots using Miramar Naval Air Station--home of the elite fighter pilots portrayed in the movie “Top Gun”--to undergo special training so they can reduce the noise their high-performance jets make over nearby residential areas. The Navy has also heavily publicized a hot line residents can call to complain about jet noise.

As a result of such efforts, said Capt. Gary Hughes, commanding officer at Miramar, relations with the community have improved.

Some bases are taking more direct steps to insulate themselves and meet the requirements of new weaponry. In Quantico, Va., where the President’s Marine helicopter fleet is based, Marines are planting softwood conifers around the installation to absorb noise. Complaints have been on the rise as nearby development comes closer and bulldozers knock down hills and trees, officials said.

Land Purchase Sought

At Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, the base where troops cannot fire their fully charged new Howitzers, the Marines are seeking to purchase an additional 38,000 acres of land--the largest acquisition since World War II.

Commanders at many bases have also been advised to make more visible use of the land they do have to show the public it is needed.

“There’s no pat solution to encroachment around bases,” said Rep. Robert E. Badham, a Newport Beach Republican who serves on the House Armed Services Committee.

Badham has been fighting the problem since the 1960s when, as an assemblyman, he carried legislation that created the State Airport Land Use Commission, which dealt with noise and air space problems around military, public and private airports.

“If we are going to have a ready fighting force in the future we are going to have to keep in operation many of the important training facilities,” Badham said.

Noting that there are only two major Marine air stations in the United States, one at El Toro and the other at Cherry Point, N.C., he said: “I can’t see them closing those bases. It would cost too much to move them.”