Don't Hate San Francisco!

[unhappycamper]

Don't Hate San Francisco!
Proceedings | Craig Hooper, Ph.D. | October 09, 2007


In October 1981, the Blue Angels Naval Flight Demonstration Team soared over a region dotted with active military facilities. It was the first official Fleet Week since 1935. Recalling the glory years of World War II, many locals pinned high hopes on President Ronald Reagan’s aggressive Secretary of the Navy, John Lehman.

Those days of promise are long gone. This month, at the 26th annual San Francisco Fleet Week, the Blue Angels will streak over a thoroughly demilitarized Bay Area. With the Cold War won, the Navy abandoned the entire region -- to the point that the Angels now fly from San Francisco International, a civilian airport.

Fleet Week celebrates the Navy’s longstanding, mutually beneficial relationship with the Bay Area. But today, a decade after the region’s final active Navy installation closed, that grand cooperative legacy is under serious stress.

Everybody is to blame. After four decades of hurt feelings, misunderstandings, highly publicized slights, and, more recently, frustration with a poorly led war, the city that Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger once called “a very good Navy town” is now deemed unworthy of hosting the commissioning ceremony for PCU Makin Island (LHD-8).(1)

Zooming In for a Closer Look

The Navy’s relationship with San Francisco deserves greater scrutiny. Aside from a few highly publicized exceptions, the Navy still has a lot of friends in the area. In fall 2006 at the height of Fleet Week, the Bay Area Rapid Transit system was swarmed by a record number of people intent on seeing the U.S. warships sail under the Golden Gate Bridge. At a single vantage point for the traditional Blue Angels spectacle, an estimated 150,000 showed up. By Fleet Week’s end, more than a million people had directly participated.(2)

Relations might be rocky, but it’s time for the Navy to begin re-engaging residents of what is, in essence, a strategically important city, perched on an increasingly contested Pacific Ocean.


Rest of article at: http://www.military.com/forums/0,15240,152118,00.html?wh=wh



uhc comment: This is a pretty good read why SF is pissed at the military: Treasure Island fires, Hunter’s Point radiation problems, chemical warfare on the residents, and Presidio to name a few.

[Captain Hilts]

1. GREAT article! nt

[Jackeen]

2. It's not SF the military hates, it's the leadership.

I think most everyone knows that the military has no particular problem with the average San Franciscan. The Marines and Navy in particular get a lot of their recruits from the Bay Area. The problem is these principled stands by the Board of Supervisors who were probably more elected to sort out the city's problems than to try to make national headlines on a counter-military crusade. Even if the Blue Angels vote was heavily defeated, why was it even voted on in the first place? When was the last time anything military-related was welcomed with open arms by the city leadership?

My understanding is that the reason BRAC was so disastrous to the Bay Area (And Sacramento and Monterey) was due to some drug deal between California's politicians and the military: Close down the bases, give us the land, and we'll fund you whatever. This went down to the level that even the PX/Commissary in Presidio was eventually kicked out. Why? All those old WWII navy veterans that San Franisco area is so proud of have lost their entitlements and now have to haul to Travis AFB or Moffett Field (Not the greatest). I used to shop the Presidio PX, it was never short of clients. Whose interest was that in, except for the City administration's?

And that's beside the nuclear issue. What -is- the issue with a nuclear warhead on a ship? It's not going to blow up on its own. I was up in Marin one day, touring the Nike site. The tour guide, a grizzled old vet, was explaining how the missile was designed with a nuclear warhead to shoot down entire formations of Soviet bombers. Some chap in his mid-20s then asked, aghast... "My God. What a horrible idea. How about the nuclear fallout from the warhead. Wouldn't that land on San Francisco?" The vet just looked at him equally flummoxed: "How much fallout would have occurred if a Soviet nuclear bomb landed -on- San Francisco?" Fortunately, dolts like this are in the minority around here, the problem is that they're such a vocal minority that the military's perception of the SF area is understandable.