By Steve Dear
Oregon is often viewed as relatively untouched by the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex. Only Vermont is thought to have had less investment in the permanent war economy. That view can be misleading. Oregonians are deep in the works of planning to bring about an end to life on Earth as we know it.
The people at Kingsley Field Air National Guard Station in Klamath Falls are training to drop nuclear weapons around the world. Just five miles north of the California border in that high desert community of 20,000, Kingsley Field has been a training base for the Air Force’s F-15 fighter jet. Located halfway between Portland and San Francisco, it is considered an important link for west coast military bases. In upcoming months, the base will begin training operations for the F-15EX “Silent Eagle,” the latest version of the plane—all with the word “Oregon” sprawled across its tail fin.
Like its earlier versions, the F-15EX Eagle II can be fitted with nuclear weapons, including the newly modified B61, a so-called tactical atomic bomb. Earlier this year an F-15 Strike Eagle “successfully” dropped an inert B61 Mod 12 at Sandia National Laboratories’ test range in Tonopah, Nevada. The B61-12 bomb delivers up to a 50-kiloton yield, over twice the power of the Fat Man bomb used against the people of Nagasaki. And they call that “tactical.”
Apparently, the Air Force did not initially request this fourth generation of the warplane, whose costs begin at $88 million apiece. But General Electric and Boeing sure wanted it. The Air Force is giving Boeing $23 billion for new F-15 EXs. **(see editor’s note below article)
Why do we need these planes? The truth is we don’t need them for “defense” purposes. They are all about profit instead. To the large degree that the U.S. economy relies on high-tech war machinery, we need to keep constructing these waste products, all the while lying about it being patriotic. Pentagon spending has totaled $14 trillion dollars since the start of the war in Afghanistan. Up to half of that money went to military contractors, according to Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.
The war economy represents the “very structure of our society,” Dwight Eisenhower warned. It’s “total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government” and is “gravely to be regarded.” While the US paid for past wars by raising taxes and selling war bonds, the current military spending relies almost entirely on borrowed money, on which interest has to be paid.
Though the real numbers of our military spending are staggering, the Watson Institute says the full costs of our wars and war economy are undercounted, uncounted, and even suppressed. Present costs, future costs, financial costs, human costs, opportunity costs, social costs—we will never know them all. We are, to quote Eisenhower, “plundering the precious resources of tomorrow” with democracy itself an “insolvent phantom.”
Even without the growing threat of thermonuclear war thanks to an expanding arms race and the mis-allocation of our precious resources, planes like the F-15 at Kingsley Field represent the other existential threat to humanity: global climate collapse. The US military remains the world’s single largest consumer of oil – and as a result, one of the world’s top greenhouse gas emitters.
The F-15EXs down I-5 could last until the 2050s. By then, the forests of southern Oregon as we have known them are likely to have disappeared. We need a moral about face or organized society may not make it past then.
Eisenhower called for “an alert and knowledgeable citizenry” to “compel the proper meshing of huge industrial and military machinery.” Towards that end we can divest from the bomb and the F-15s in Oregon. We can join credit unions or alternative banks that do not invest in militarism. We can amend our stock portfolios, challenge our alma maters to divest, and our state and local governments to divest.
We can engage with community organizations of intersectional action to work to abolish nuclear weapons, ending MLK’s triplets of evil (war, poverty, racism) and environmental devastation.
The mission of the 173rd Fighter Wing at Kingsley Field is “Train F-15 pilots, support combat operations, and serve Oregon… America’s Air Superiority starts here!”
Concerned Oregonians need to proclaim that resistance to the ravenous war industry and its ever-expanding claims over life on Earth starts here as well.
Steve Dear, MA in International Studies, is an activist based in Elmira, OR.
**Editor’s Note: on Oct 28 General Electric secured a $1.58 billion contract to produce 324 engines for the new F-15s.
