Air Force Magazine | March 2018 | Jenn Rowell
Although there is general agreement that the US military has far more bases than it actually needs—by a recent Pentagon count, the Air Force has 22 percent excess base capacity—for more than a decade Congress has refused to even consider closing any more defense facilities. The Air Force says it wastes billions in overhead costs by not consolidating at fewer locations.
Members of Congress fear a loss of jobs, economic activity, and property values in their districts, and have compelled the services to keep open installations that just don’t have enough people, equipment, or missions to make them militarily effective.
Grand Forks, N.D., has proved this fear doesn’t have to come true. Its commercial aircraft center, which makes use of former Air Force facilities in partnership with the service, has been hailed by many as a model for the base of the future.
The concept was born after the 2005 iteration of the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process. Under BRAC, the Pentagon submits a list of realignments and closures to Congress, which can either vote the whole package up or down—without tweaking—thus providing members with political cover. Many communities have put together local task forces looking for ways to make their bases “BRAC-proof.”
In the 2005 BRAC, Grand Forks Air Force Base lost a tanker mission. The base didn’t close, but there was a large reduction in the number of airmen stationed there. This delivered a hit to the economy of Grand Forks County, with a population of about 100,000 people, county government relations manager Tom Ford explained.
That’s when local officials got together and asked, “What can we do to offset that negative impact, and how do we make our community less dependent on the base if we were to ever lose the base?” Ford said.
Around the same time, the RQ-4 Global Hawk intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance mission came to Grand Forks Air Force Base, which is also home to the John D. Odegard School of Aerospace Sciences. The local team thought that coming up with a plan to support the emerging drone business might be a good idea for Grand Forks, Ford said.
The thinking was, “what if we use some of the excess capacity on base, since we lost tankers, to make a flight center?” for unmanned aerial systems (UAS), he explained.
The county hired Jeff Donohoe as a consultant. Donohoe brought on Tom Swoyer, who now leads the development of Grand Sky, a business park and flight center for commercial unmanned aerial systems on 217 acres of Air Force land. A feasibility study showed an enhanced-use lease (EUL) could work, and a deal was signed in 2015, Swoyer said.
The Air Force has used EULs at other bases, but few have been as successful as Grand Forks in developing synergies with an Air Force mission while spurring industry, education, and economic development in the local community.
The anchor tenants at Grand Sky are Northrop Grumman and General Atomics. Both hold various military contracts, but their work at Grand Sky is focused on commercial UAS development. They use a separate security entrance from the base, but can launch and recover aircraft from the base’s runway. There’s schedule availability that’s attractive to tenants and compatible with the base’s Global Hawk mission.
Like many northern-tier bases, Grand Forks is cold in the winter and can be quite windy, but Swoyer said it averages 320 flying days annually. The private entities can also use Air Force radar, under a new agreement, and have their own dedicated access to the feed, which allows them to eliminate use of chase planes. These are ways the Air Force brings value to the partnership by creating training opportunities and reduced costs, Swoyer said.
Since the EUL was signed in 2015, Grand Sky has expanded quickly, but there’s plenty of room for growth. Only about 20 acres are under contract out of the 217 acres available.
“We offer schedule certainty and the ability to use an Air Force runway. We provide a lot of value to companies that are in the DOD space,” Swoyer said.
He said the organization touts Grand Forks as the “base of the future. There’s a lot of value-added in terms of employment, engagement, and the raw exchange of support to each other.”
While economic development was a desired by-product of the effort, the initial focus was how can the community and the base forge a tighter bond, Swoyer said. The relationship between the base and the community was always good, but has strengthened in recent years because both sides are really getting something from it, he said.
“They’re the epicenter of commercial UAS,” Swoyer said. “This is the only place where you can set up shop and start flying and working. Right now, the UAS focus is small unmanned aircraft, but the clear migration is toward larger, more capable aircraft like the military uses. It’s happening, so we’re positioning ourselves to support that activity.”
Grand Forks is a unique case, but the key players agree that there are lessons to be learned from it that can be applied in other Air Force communities.
“It always works better when there’s an idea,” Swoyer said. “You can’t really just put a piece of land out there and say ‘oh, come develop this for us.’ There has to be a reason to develop it.”
Retired Lt. Gen. William J. Rew was the vice commander at Air Combat Command from 2009 to 2013 and got involved in the Grand Forks team around that time. Grand Forks had been an Air Force Materiel Command base until it transferred to ACC this year.
Rew grew up as the son of a bomber airman on old Strategic Air Command bases, many now closed. He said the northern-tier bases such as Grand Forks need to be looked at now from a strategic perspective, considering the global interest in the Arctic region.
“If we look at the Arctic, wouldn’t it be nice to have Active Duty bases that we can do missions from, being closer to the challenge, closer to the threat?” Rew said. “That has always been beneficial. How do we look at these northern-tier bases … differently than we have in the past?” The base now has a leading role in unmanned systems, and in pioneer programs creating associations with “the National Guard, Customs and Border Protection, UND [the University of North Dakota], and now Grand Sky.” Although “it does get cold in the winter,” the low-population region offers “unique opportunities” in available airspace.
“When you put that all together, it makes a very compelling case for retaining a base like Grand Forks in the future and keeping our strategic options open,” he asserted.
Terry A. Yonkers was the assistant secretary of the Air Force for installations, environment, and logistics when the Grand Forks EUL was being developed.
“Grand Forks is really turning into a model—if not the model—for the enhanced-use lease approach,” he said. “What’s unique about Grand Forks is the EUL is oriented toward the mission.”
A number of enhanced-use leases have been used over the last decade, but aren’t militarily connected, leading to businesses such as hotels, strip malls, or other retail space.
Grand Forks was the model for an EUL that was recently approved at Kirtland AFB, N.M., where about 107 acres of nonexcess property on the base perimeter was made available. Thunderbird Kirtland Development Ltd., Co. proposed a research park with office, industrial, laboratory, retail, and hospitality facilities targeting Defense Department business and contractors wanting to relocate operations close to DOD, Air Force, and other federal partners.
“The research park will revitalize the area while remaining compatible with the missions, plans, and programs at Kirtland,” according to a USAF press release. “The close proximity of public and private sector partners is expected to increase communications and potentially compress research and development life-cycle times,” it said.
During his first visit to Grand Forks, Yonkers said, civic leaders said they were nervous about being on the BRAC candidate list again and wanted to see if there was anything they could do to secure the base’s future in their community.
One of the ideas that came out of the trip was the EUL and in Grand Forks, local leaders ran with it.
“These things are not easy, or everybody would be doing them,” Yonkers observed. “There probably is opportunity on almost every installation. I do think there’s mission synergy to be had at almost every installation.”
Some of the key elements, Yonkers said, are retail and an element of financial return, since developers won’t be able to generate enough revenue to sustain the lease without it.
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