Avedon Carol: Um... Should I be worried about this?

Remember after the election when all those people were talking about seceding from the slave states? The first thing I said to them was, "Which states are the centers of military production?"

Now I'm hearing about all these closings of military bases for no apparent reason, and I can't help but feel nervous. And I thought maybe I was just being twitchy and paranoid, because no one else was even talking about it. Only now Ken McLeod sends me this link - which isn't from one of my preferred news sources, I admit - but I'm thinking, um, maybe it's not me:

The most salient aspect of the latest Pentagon restructuring plan is the continuing geographic shift in military resources from the Northeast and Midwest (and to some extent, from the West Coast) to the South and Southwest. Of the 30,000 net loss in military-related jobs, half comes from just three closings in New England: Portsmouth Navy Yard in Maine, Otis Air Force Base in Massachusetts, and the Groton, Connecticut, submarine command. Thousands more personnel are being moved out of the Northeast with the closure of Brunswick Naval Air Station in Maine, Niagara Falls Air Reserve station in New York, Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, and the Willowgrove Naval Air Station and Pittsburgh Air Reserve Base in Pennsylvania.

There are, to be sure, some base closings in the South, including the Naval Air Station in Pascagoula, Mississippi, Ft. McPherson in Georgia, and three in Texas: Ingleside Naval Air Station, the Red Rock Army Depot and Brooks City Depot in San Antonio. But these are more than offset by shifting of additional military resources from the North and East and an influx of 70,000 Army troops from overseas, especially Germany. Fort Bliss, Texas, for instance, will gain 11,354 soldiers as the 1st Armored Division returns from Germany.

The Army is being concentrated within the borders of the continental United States, building up from 26 to 40 brigades. The additional forces will all be located in the South and West, with the biggest increases at Fort Benning, Georgia, Fort Carson, Colorado, and Fort Riley, Kansas, as well as Fort Bliss.

The majority of US nuclear assets are being redeployed to the deep South as well: all B1-B long-range bombers are being consolidated into Texas, with the closure of Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota. Construction, servicing and deployment of nuclear submarines are also being shifted to the South. After the closure of the Groton submarine command, Navy personnel will be moved to Virginia, Georgia and Florida.

There have been a few cautious references in the press to the geographic imbalance in the US military structure. The Los Angeles Times reported that the cuts "hammered many Northern and Midwestern states and gave the military an increasingly Southern accent." Newsweek magazine spoke of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's planning for "a broad shift of bases away from the North and the East-the epicenter of defense through the 19th and 20th centuries-and out to the South and, to a lesser extent, the West."

Think about how little sense this makes in terms of national defense against potential foreign invaders.But then, think about how much sense this would make if the principle focus of our military was not defense at all, but something else entirely