Military

Military

On a stretch of California desert the size of Rhode Island at Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center Twentynine Palms here, thousands of Marines train for combat each year. And the ammunition casings, shells and bomb fragments fired in these exercises are making the Marine Corps millions of dollars each year.
Marine Corps Times, "Marines make millions off ammo casings, bomb fragments," by Taylor Hall and Lydia Randall, May 16, 2015. Submitted by Tina in Wakefield.

The U.S. military base Fort Bliss, covering an area larger than Rhode Island, has become one of America's largest military installations, and that's having a dramatic impact on an otherwise depressed economy.
—CNNMoney.com, "How El Paso, Texas dodged the recession," by Nin-Hai Tseng, November 16, 2010.

Officials of Dugway [Proving Ground]—the bigger-than-Rhode Island base sprawling across much of Utah's western desert—aren't saying how much they would like it to expand or even why.
Deseret News, "Dugway seeks to obtain more land," by Joe Bauman, October 28, 2004.

Two helicopters will be used, one as a backup. One will trail 400 feet of cable and a hook to intercept the Genesis space capsule, which will float to Earth Sept. 8 at about 9 mph on a parasail over an Air Force bombing range the size of Rhode Island.
Daily Times, "Pilots to pluck space capsule from air," August 26, 2004.

Maloney said the addition of a division is feasible because "Fort Bliss has enormous potential. The post alone is the size of Rhode Island, but put it together with White Sands Missile Range and Holloman (Air Force Base), and it's almost the size of Connecticut," he said.
El Paso Times, "Bliss hopes for portion of 70,000 troops," by Laura Cruz, August 17, 2004.

Meanwhile, elements of the 3rd Infantry and the 1st Cavalry are slated for training this fall at the Army's sprawling National Training Center in California's Mojave Desert. The training site is roughly the size of Rhode Island, and its tawny mountains and wide, sandy stretches closely resemble the barren landscape of much of Iraq.
The Baltimore Sun, "Army units train hard with an eye toward Iraq," by Tom Bowman, September 25, 2002.

I became in the 1980s an antinuclear activist and participated in the spring demonstrations at the Nevada Test Site, a Department of Energy site the size of Rhode Island in southern Nevada where the United States has been detonating nuclear bombs—more than a thousand to date—since 1951.
Wanderlust: A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit, 2000.

Now the great hunt would always begin with the armies spread out in a semicircle, I would say about the size of Rhode Island.
—Mr. Teasdale (Frank McRae), in the 1984 film Red Dawn, explaining the military strategy of Gengis Khan.

The Dugway Proving Ground in Utah was larger than the state of Rhode Island and was used principally to test poison gasses such as Tabun, Sklar, and Kuff-11.
The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton, 1969.

Last Edited
2022-11-01