Well, I don’t know. But we have military bases all over our coasts and they are all guarding against something. Don’t mind me, as a historian I spend a lot of time poring over aerial photos looking for odd things.
As I look over Key West on Google and read the various place names that are shown, looks like there are military areas all over the key. So a few more questions.
The Special Forces underwater school is on the tip of Fleming Key and Fleming Key Rd runs right across the large Coast Guard station. Is the entire Fleming Key military property?
Just south of the Special Forces school is a large building on Mustin Street. Off to the side are two oval “race tracks”, they seem to have banked turns. Hmmm.
Further south on Mustin St are the remains of some old roads and 15 debris fields, an old installation I guess.
There are 4 or 5 areas referred to as “Batteries” on Key West. Are they military or just historical markers?
Dredger’s Key - the Navy Commissary is there and several other things have Navy in the name, is the whole key just military housing?
All of Boca Chica Key seems to be for the NAS except for the Post Office. The perimeter road around the Navy’s air field on Boca Chica has a clothing optional beach. Cool.
The current Google view of Fleming Key shows that 8 high speed craft have just swept the entire left side (southwest?) of the Key - their wakes are captured perfectly. Scramble the fighters!
Let me stop you right there. “We have military bases all over our coasts and they are guarding against” nothing.
By and large, there is no threat to the continental United States, and there really hasn’t been one since about 100 years ago from Mexico. If you could call it that.
Units in the United states are in the “man, train and equip” mode. They are getting ready to deploy somewhere and do their jobs overseas. Or they are support units stationed in the US supporting the warfighter getting ready to go overseas. There is no current threat to the continental United States. And if for some 1 in a trillion chance Mexico decided to invade the US, we do our level best to send active troops there as fast a possible and stop it, and they deal with Mexico on our own timeline.
Our troops are stationed where they are because there is already a base there. And training infrastructure has grown there to support it. If the US military started from scratch today, it would probably be located in different spots. There are some cold war relics as well, especially with the Air Force and the Navy might be in similar locations because it needs seaports.
The only exception to this is defense against terrorism. And that largely is done by small units around major airports and seaports.
Totally right - for some reason, a lot of Americans have this bizarre notion that an invasion of the continental U.S. by some foreign power is practical and feasible - it isn’t. Movies like Red Dawn might contribute to this misconception. I even had a conversation with someone back in 2003 or 2004 who believed that the U.S. invaded Iraq to keep Iraq from invading the U.S! :smack:
The U.S. gets to do its fighting abroad. Due to the huge oceans, the U.S. Navy being the most powerful in the world, and other major powers like Russia and China completely lacking the sea or air transport capability to land sufficient forces in North America to contend for the continent, all the wars the U.S. fights are in other places, and the only things we need to worry about for military defense of the continent are a nuclear-Cold-War-gone-hot type of aerial/missile attack or terrorism.
Those “racetracks” look to be about 40 feet wide and 80 feet long. IMO those are partially concreted water retention / recharge basins. We see grass and water and mud in the infield = bottom of the basin where the water is expected to pool and soak into the ground.
Most military bases have been in use since WWII or before and there’s a lot of half-abandoned structures left lying around. They’ll be cleaned up if that spot of land is ever re-used for something else. But not before.
Did you happen to notice the light airplane about to overly the Fleming Key from east to west a few hundred feet south of your reference point?
South Florida in general is a good spot for those missions. Key West is not the best choice though.
Take a gander at mixdenny’s google maps link, but zoom out a bit to see both the island of Key West and the adjacent island of Boca Chica Key where the military airfield is.
NAS Key West is a small facility at the extreme tip of an island chain. You can save a few *minutes *of flying time by staging from there versus up on the mainland. In exchange for needing to bring in all your fuel & munitions by boat or truck instead of by railroad and/or pipeline. In addition to the units based there normally, there is ramp space for only a handful of large airplanes or a couple dozen more fighters or helos. So not a lot of surge capacity. The runways are long enough for most ordinary ops by most ordinary types, but I would not want to be trying to launch fully loaded KC-135s or B-52s from it.
It makes an excellent training base because it’s remote from most noise sensitive civilization and adjacent to lots of open water where USN can restrict the training airspace out to a hundred miles or more with only a couple of narrow corridors cut through for civil traffic. It makes a weak base for combat or long haul heavy logistics ops by being too small and too disconnected from the continental transportation network.
It is well-suited for the JIATF mission: using fairly slow and short-range aircraft & small ships to interdict drugs before they can make landfall on US territory and then disappear into the US road network. The radar horizon being what it is, there’s advantage to setting up aerostats as close to the edge of land as possible. See Tethered Aerostat Radar System - Wikipedia which has an installation on Cudjoe Key a few miles up-chain from NAS KW.
Bottom line: On the thousand+ mile scales of the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean, and US long range aviation, Key West isn’t materially closer to the action than bigger, better-connected bases. On the 50-200 mile scale of US mainland drug interdiction it’s in the heart of the action.
Good eye. We may need you on the team. And yes, I checked it out and it was intercepted and shot down. It was the lead aircraft of an attacking wave of Sandinista rebels who had swung wide west to attack from the north side, attempting to confuse the JIATF. The trainers from Key West were already airborne and handled it easily. It was called a “live fire intercept simulation” in the local papers.
Some historical information for those interested. A Google search for NASKW historic photos turns up a few photos. Some of the best are on the Florida memory site:
One of my favorite sites, Historic Aerials.com goes back to 1970. You can’t save a URL to a specific location, just go to the “viewer” and put in Key West FL and it takes you there (or anywhere you want to go).
Looking at the “ruins” on Fleming Key shows small rectangular buildings separated by wide spaces and each encircled by dirt (mounds?). They could be ammunition magazines, I have visited those in other abandoned sites before.
This Twitter page has a small photo labeled 1918, although that might just be the founding date since it shows a blimp and large airship hangar.
That building used to be an animal quarantine facility which held cattle imports. Now, it is just an abandoned building. As LSLGuy mentions, those are retention pools, not race tracks. They’re just giant concrete tubs.