A machine gun range: Clear cut 170 acres for national security?

The governor has the power to stop this. Why he should.

This decades-old aerial photo is of the military base’s landfill site, which was used for all manner of waste disposal for generations. It created a massive underground plume of toxics, one of many that seeped out of the base and threatened public and private drinking wells. This area (not shown in its entirety) was roughly 100 clear cut acres; the proposal now is to clear cut 170 acres farther north.

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What is it going to take for Governor Charlie Baker to stop this machine gun range proposed for Cape Cod’s military base?

Clear cut 170 acres of the biggest remaining forest on Cape Cod so National Guard troops can fire at targets thousands of feet away?

Denude more of the largest watershed for public and private drinking water on this side of the bridges?

Do that in defiance of decades-old, carefully crafted agreements in the name of environmental protection reached at local, state and federal levels that set this area aside for boots on the ground and not much more?

Start bulldozing even though another machine gun range in Massachusetts, at Fort Devens, has just been approved and funded by the Department of Defense at $9 million, with none of the Cape’s environmental or historical concerns -- and by the way, with little emphasis or mention of its alternative in public documents or hearings, a violation of good faith at least and maybe law?

Governor Baker should honor the memory of a fellow Republican, former Governor Paul Cellucci, who insisted that the northern part of the Cape’s huge military base, once one of the nation’s largest military Superfund sites, be protected as compensation for groundwater damage so profound it has cost billions of dollars over decades to try to remediate.

If the governor needs more reasons:

The retired brigadier general who has helped run Joint Base Cape Cod, Christopher Faux, threatened Cape Cod businesses with a military personnel boycott if they didn’t support a machine gun range. So much for things he is sworn to protect; freedom of speech, freedom of dissent.

This same military leader accused our elected representatives in Washington, notably but not only Congressman Bill Keating, of duplicity and deception because they called for stronger environmental review.

Then he asserted that less than “0.05 percent” of people in this community have serious concerns about the range, referring to them as “anti-military,” barely this side of unpatriotic, describing them with a word he apparently considers pejorative; “activists.”

Presumably that includes all three of the Cape’s county commissioners, who sent the governor well-reasoned arguments against building a machine gun range. All three got a helluva lot more votes than 0.05 percent.

That must also include many more elected officials, as well as friends and members of the Association to Preserve Cape Cod, the Cape’s premier environmental group, which has doggedly engaged in environmental cleanup efforts at the base for more than 30 years.

None of this even begins to address the deeper, fundamental questions:

How does a bigger machine gun range for the National Guard improve our national security? Do we expect the Guard to be firing machine guns as they help people after a hurricane or fire? The governor invokes the Guard to drive school buses — machine guns? Supporting communities that have lost power – machine guns?

I must be missing a lot, because Christopher Faux told our Congressional office that further environmental review would “set a precedent and a deadly blow to the U.S. Military and the safety and security of this great nation ….”

In that case, good thing the Fort Devens range is going forward, with multiple firing lanes 800 meters long.

Why both?

We’re told what we really need on the Cape is another couple of lanes 1500 meters long (nearly a mile) for yet bigger firepower.

But this would be “phase two” of Cape plans. Phase one doesn’t include lanes that long; they would be added in another process. Phase one would clear 100 acres, but that’s not enough; phase two would add another 70 acres.

Fort Devens was never addressed in detail when formal questions were asked about whether alternative sites exist. That, coupled with changing plans and rationale, has destroyed Guard credibility as surely as machine guns destroy targets.

Once elected, Governor Charlie Baker automatically assumed another title; commander in chief of the Massachusetts National Guard. That means he has the power and authority to stop this.

So far he has voiced concerns, said there should be further review. Those can be political phrases that set the stage for harder action; they certainly don’t amount to unconditional support. But the governor doesn’t need the Environmental Protection Agency or anyone else to give him cover:

Just do the right thing.

NEXT: THE NATIONAL GUARD DISAGREES, AND OFFERED A TOUR TO HELP MAKE THEIR CASE. I TOOK IT.

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