North Carolina’s massive defense establishment has plenty of room to grow.
I retired from daily newspaper work in 2018, and started writing for Business North Carolina. I started writing more and more about the military in North Carolina, including the bases and the companies that transact with the military. Having never served in the military, I found this new and interesting.
For the past year, I have written a weekly email newsletter for the magazine, the NC Military Report. When I talk to friends about what I do, I mention that North Carolina has the fourth-most active duty military in the nation, and this surprises them. They are also surprised to learn that the military is the second-largest sector in the state’s economy.
I have lived in the Raleigh area for nearly 29 years. The military is not very visible from Raleigh. You have to drive a ways. There is not much to see from the main roads except miles of fences, behind which warfighters are constantly training.
WHAT’S HERE
Along the coast, the Marines extend from Havelock to Jacksonville, nearly 40,000 of them, from Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point to Camp Lejeune to Marine Corps Air Station New River. There are a lot of new buildings. The Marines’ installations have seen $3.4 billion in repairs since Hurricane Florence six years ago.
Fort Liberty in Fayetteville is the largest Army base by population in the U.S., with nearly 43,000 soldiers. It is home to the XVIII Airborne Corps, the 82nd Airborne Division and a lot of special operators. Fort Liberty covers 269 square miles in the Sandhills west of Interstate 95. In World War I, the Army looked for a place for artillery training. No one expected that a century later, 10% of the Army would garrison in Fayetteville.
The Air Force has a smaller footprint, with around 4,300 active duty personnel at Seymour Johnson in Goldsboro. They maintain and fly F-15Es.
What the services have in common is that they deploy a lot from these bases. The 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit left in June on three Navy amphibious ships for the eastern Mediterranean sea. The 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade arrived in Naples, Italy, in May to support the 6th Fleet. Fighters from Seymour Johnson were in the Middle East in April, and shot down Iranian drones headed for Israel. And the 82nd Combat Aviation Brigade got back in July from a nine-month deployment in the Middle East.
The state has nearly 95,000 active-duty service members. At a recent defense conference in Charlotte, Sen. Thom Tillis said: “We’ve got a military presence in North Carolina that exceeds the capacity of most nations.”
This is the part where people often overlook the Coast Guard. First, because it is not in the Department of Defense. It is in the Department of Homeland Security. Second, because Base Elizabeth City is up in the northeastern corner of the state. It is the same distance from Raleigh as Charlotte, but seems further away. I visited because I wanted to see the Coast Guard’s Aviation Logistics Center, which overhauls the service’s 200 aircraft. The ALC turns battered, sea-corroded helicopters into shiny ones, with the latest avionics.
HOMECOMINGS
In March, I was in Jacksonville to watch the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit come back after an eight-month deployment. A Marine Expeditionary Unit is a self-contained task force that brings everything it needs – several thousand warfighters, logistics support, aircraft, landing craft and artillery. It operates from a group of amphibious ships. The 26th had spent most of its time in the Mediterranean.
On Camp Lejeune’s Onslow Beach, air-cushioned landing craft were shuttling Marines from the USS Bataan, three miles out, making a terrific racket. A line of buses was waiting to take the Marines the last five miles to the main part of the base. I went to an open field next to Goettge Memorial Field House, where family members gathered with welcome-home signs for Marines coming in on helicopters from the Bataan. Then I finished up at Marine Corps Air Station New River, next door to Lejeune, and watched more helicopters ferrying Marines ashore.
The homecoming scenes were emotional. It is easy to think of our warfighters as one number, 95,000. But they are sons and daughters, husbands and wives, moms and dads, who have been away for many months. We have some 600,000 veterans in North Carolina, many who know what homecomings are like.
THE BUSINESS OF DEFENSE
While the military is very important to our state, and we have a lot of medium- and small-business defense contractors, we do not have the biggest prime contractors. One place that does is Tarrant County in Texas, where Lockheed Martin is building F-35s on the west side of Fort Worth. In the 2023 fiscal year, the military issued $33.5 billion in contracts in Tarrant County alone. Or look at Fairfax County in Northern Virginia, where many big defense contractors are headquartered. Fairfax had $18 billion in contracts in 2023.
We do OK, considering that we don’t build jets or aircraft carriers, and we aren’t inside the Washington Beltway. The Department of Defense issued $4.4 billion in contracts in North Carolina last year. The big three counties were Cumberland, $1.3 billion; Onslow, $1 billion; and Craven, $623.5 million. That is what comes from having Fort Liberty in Fayetteville and Fleet Readiness Center East and Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point in Craven and Camp Lejeune and MCAS New River in Onslow. Installations need vendors to supply goods and services.
THE INFORMATION GAP
One of the problems with building a more robust defense industrial base is a lack of knowledge. The Department of Defense buys everything, but it doesn’t know all the companies capable of filling its orders. The economy is filled with companies who don’t know what the military needs. That is one reason you see a lot of DoD civilians and military officers at the industry conference. They are trying to find more vendors. But the real problem is that a lot of potential suppliers aren’t attending these conferences and trade shows.
I will give you an example of how this plays out. There was a conference in Charlotte at the end of October, the Defense Industrial Supply Chain Summit, put on by the North Carolina Military Business Center and its Defense Technology Transition Office. One speaker was Donald Schulze from the Defense Logistics Agency, which buys just about everything you can think of. Batteries, fuel, clothing, nuts and bolts. It stocks millions of items. Schulze is deputy director, Land Supplier Operations, DLA Land and Maritime. He is one of the most important logistics persons in the Department of Defense, based in Columbus, Ohio. He was talking about things in short supply, this valve and that seal. On the back of his business card, he has a QR code that would send you to a spreadsheet with all the urgently needed items.
I had gotten Schulze’s card the night before, when I met him on a tour of GM Defense near the Charlotte Motor Speedway. The next day, I pulled out the card, turned it over, and the QR code took me straight to the spreadsheet. Which is great. But I don’t make bolts for Black Hawk helicopters or gaskets for howitzers.
He needs help getting this spreadsheet around. ■
