The "Gateway to the Air Force" — doesn't seem like much of one

© 2017 Peter Free

 

20 July 2017

 

 

Is Joint Base San Antonio a symbol of the United States' self-defeating values?

 

Lackland Air Force Base (the core of JBSA) announces itself as the "Gateway to the Air Force" and then promptly squashes the respect that one would expect the phrase to engender.

 

Drive onto the Base and you will be greeted one of roughest large complex of supposedly civilized streets in the United States. From what I can tell, these "avenues" have received no significant attention whatsoever in the 19 years I have been away.

 

I can imagine the negative impression this dilapidated place makes upon the thousands of proud parent civilians, who come here on a regular basis to see family members graduate from one training regimen or another.

 

Adding to the air of silliness is the Base's curiously inane layout. Important buildings are (apparently deliberately) scattered furlongs apart, as if the "architect" intended trainees to walk miles upon miles just to get their basics met. Worse, entities that logic would have placed side-by-side or within the same building — like two varieties of the Post Office and BX — are separated, often by many more furlongs, as if the planner had had a convulsive conniption, while putting pen to drafting paper.

 

Indeed, two of the Base maps that we were given didn't even agree on where the main Post Office is. Perhaps the mapmakers needed some Army or Marine navigational assistance.

 

Significantly, the Temporary Lodging Facility (where visiting military and families stay) is a quasi-atrocity of lapsed attention. It is attended by a crew that seems to have better things to do than their jobs. Housekeeping manages to screw up some part of its supposedly regular room chores every day. Attention to detail is absent.

 

For example, our lodging's bedroom door would not close because some idiot decided that a too-long dresser needed to span the wall it was on. Scars on that piece of furniture testify to the permanence of its interfering location.

 

The blanket-comforter on the bed is both too short and too narrow to fit properly. That's obvious at a glance. And the bedspread is made of a very slick material. It slips off, metaphorically speaking, if one just looks at it. Thus, staying covered through the night is a challenge.

 

Similarly, the bathroom showed significant years-long, incompetently "repaired" water damage. Its shower curtain is too short and too permeable to do its job.

 

Outside, facility authorities covered a long, upwardly cracked bulge in the concrete walk with outdoor carpet, apparently in an effort to avoid actually fixing the trip hazard. The carpet contributes nothing to safety.

 

This manyana attitude spans the whole "Gateway" operation. If you are looking for noticeable military precision and discipline outside the training units themselves, you won't find it here. Indicatively, the new hospital reportedly was built with elevators and rooms too small to accommodate the gurneys that are in everyday use. And so it goes. The monkey brain faucet continues to flow.

 

 

The moral? — Lackland's appearance is an embarrassment to the Air Force

 

And I haven't even addressed its next-door neighbor, Kelly-Lackland, which boasts (a) rotted and unoccupied housing at one entrance and (b) a maze of decomposing streets and parking lots that almost require a group of Navy vessels to cross after a downpour.

 

Someone of influential rank should take a look at these places and ask him and herself exactly what message the "Gateway to the Air Force" is trying to send. Complacence tends to vomit all over itself, with even the least alert among us eventually getting the message that no one in power "gives a shit."

 

It is never (these days) that the military lacks money. It is "always" that it wastes it on one child-like and usually violently unnecessary stupidity after another, while overlooking the basics of sound military operation.

 

The nation's carefully maintained service academies engender pride. Not so this essentially equivalent place. Why is that? Is America's enlisted cannon fodder not worthy of equal respect?

 

Lackland is the visual parallel of a military uniform. No competent TI or DI would tolerate a slovenly appearance like Lackland's for even a minute. Why should the nation?