Gates Sites In OLF Bulls-eye

by Cal Bryant - September 22nd, 2007 - Roanoke-Chowan News-Herald

GATESVILLE - Two sites in Gates County are among those being studied to possibly site the U.S. Navy’s Outlying Landing Field (OLF).

In regards to that issue, the Gates County Board of Commissioners have scheduled a special called meeting at 7 p.m. on Monday in the courtroom of the Gates County Courthouse.

Interim Gates County Manager Melinda Hoggard said Monday’s meeting is open to the public.

This is an important issue. The problem is that the Navy has allowed this to become a political issue because they are so dependent on politics to prepare to fight the current war against Islamofascism, a war that is expected to go on for a generation or two.

World War III, the cold war, was won when one man, Ronald Reagan, recognized the weakness of communism (its socialist economic system) and predicted that we could bring down the Soviet Union by making them spend themselves into bankruptcy. It worked.

I am not sure that anyone has yet seen the vision of how to defeat Islamofascism and win the current war, World War IV, in which we find ourselves, so it is difficult to know what is important.

This OLF issue is not a huge issue for our pilots at this point. That is part of the problem. The reality is our pilots are currently being trained and getting the practice this field is intended to provide at other fields. There is no real urgency to the issue. The concern of the Navy is way out in the future. The fields at which pilots are getting the practice they need are close in to towns and allow our enemies to watch the strategies the pilots practice. In addition the town's citizens are hostile to the training runs that are being done. We could lose the current fields or have practice curtailed or expose tactics we don't want exposed.

If the Islamofascists win control of another two or three Muslim countries, tactics could become a key issue in defeating the nuclear attacks that will become their standard methods of that future time.

Those who are opposed to building the OLF anywhere are enemies of our nation. Some of those who claim to be against a particular site are really against any OLF anywhere. That does not mean that opponents of a particular site are not justified.

Other issues are at stake too. Both Virginia and North Carolina have bases that provide huge economic benefit they do not want to lose. Neither wants this base built in a location that could encourage movement of these bases at some future time. So they want the OLF built convenient to their current bases. That constrains the choices the Navy has as well.

This political component makes it difficult to criticize those who are opposed to most of the sites since it is easy to portray them as political choices, not logical choices.

It is going to be interesting to see how this battle plays out.