Abstract
This paper examines the contemporary MacDill Air Force Base, arguing that a field built to train bomber crews in the Second World War has become one of the most strategically weighted installations in the United States military. It accounts for the presence of two combatant commands on a single base—United States Central Command, the geographic command responsible for the Middle East and Central Asia, and United States Special Operations Command, the functional command for the nation’s special-operations forces—and explains why both came to rest at Tampa Bay. It describes the base’s own flying mission, the aerial-refueling wing whose tankers extend American air power across the globe, and MacDill’s operational role in directing the Gulf War and the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. It considers the coalition presence that has made the base a diplomatic-military nexus, and it assesses the present-day meaning of concentrating so much command authority on one Gulf coast installation. It closes by pointing toward the synthesis of the whole series in Paper X.
1. Introduction
Paper VIII traced the growth at MacDill, across the Cold War, of a line of joint headquarters that culminated in the establishment of two combatant commands—Central Command in 1983 and Special Operations Command in 1987. This paper takes up the base as those commands have made it: a headquarters installation of the first importance, from which the major American wars of the past three decades have been directed. The transformation this represents is worth stating plainly at the outset. The field that produced the “one a day in Tampa Bay” reputation training B-26 crews in 1942 is now the home of the command that ran Desert Storm, the command that ran the war in Afghanistan, and the command that supplies the special-operations forces used in nearly every American conflict of the era. How that came to be, and what it means, is the subject of this paper.
2. Two Combatant Commands on One Base
The most unusual feature of MacDill is the presence of two unified combatant commands on a single installation. The commands are different in kind. Central Command is a geographic command: it holds responsibility for American military operations across a region of roughly twenty countries stretching, as the command describes it, from Egypt to Kazakhstan—the Middle East, Central Asia, and parts of South Asia, including the Persian Gulf and Afghanistan (Drea et al., 2013). Special Operations Command is a functional command: it oversees the special-operations component forces of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps, and it plans and directs special operations—counterterrorism and unconventional warfare foremost among them—worldwide (Marquis, 1997).
Their establishment at MacDill had different immediate causes but a common institutional root. As Paper VIII showed, Central Command was elevated in 1983 from the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force, itself a creature of the Readiness Command that had occupied the base since the early 1960s; it inherited the headquarters and infrastructure that a succession of joint commands had built up at Tampa Bay. Special Operations Command was created four years later, in 1987, for reasons rooted in a specific failure: the botched attempt to rescue the American hostages in Iran in 1980, which exposed grave deficiencies in the coordination of the nation’s special-operations forces (Marquis, 1997). The remedy, enacted after years of resistance from within the Pentagon and mandated by Congress through the Goldwater-Nichols defense reorganization and its accompanying legislation, was a single unified command for special operations, and it was placed at MacDill alongside Central Command (Drea et al., 2013; Marquis, 1997; see Note 1).
The consequence of this pairing is that MacDill houses, side by side, the geographic command responsible for the most militarily active region of the past forty years and the functional command that supplies the forces most heavily used there. That co-location has made the base a center of American operational command out of all proportion to its size or its runways.
3. The 6th Air Refueling Wing and Global Reach
MacDill retains a flying mission of its own, and it is one well matched to the base’s role as a hub of power projection. Since 1996 the host unit has been the 6th Air Refueling Wing, part of Air Mobility Command, flying the Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker; it is augmented by an Air Force Reserve associate, the 927th Air Refueling Wing, flying the same aircraft (see Note 2). The wing’s mission is aerial refueling—the passing of fuel from tanker to aircraft in flight—which is among the least visible and most consequential capabilities in modern air power.
Aerial refueling is what converts American air forces from regional into global instruments. Fighters, bombers, transports, and surveillance aircraft can reach and remain over distant theaters only because tankers extend their range and endurance, and the vast distances of the Central Command region—where airfields may lie thousands of miles from targets—make refueling indispensable to sustained operations. MacDill’s tankers, and the crews trained on them, have deployed repeatedly to the forward bases of the CENTCOM theater in support of the campaigns described below. The base thus contributes to force projection in two registers at once: as the seat of the commands that direct operations, and as a source of the refueling capability that makes those operations physically possible.
4. MacDill’s Operational Role: The Gulf, Afghanistan, and Iraq
The commands headquartered at MacDill have directed the principal American wars of the past three decades. The pattern in each case was the same: the command remained institutionally seated at Tampa Bay while forward-deploying a headquarters element into the theater of operations.
The first great test came in 1990–91. When Iraq invaded Kuwait, Central Command, under General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, planned and directed the coalition campaign that liberated it—Operation Desert Storm—one of the largest military operations since the Second World War (Gordon & Trainor, 1995). Schwarzkopf ran the war from a forward headquarters in Riyadh, but the command that fought it was the MacDill command, and its contingency planning for the defense of the Gulf had been developed at Tampa Bay in the years before (Gordon & Trainor, 1995; see Note 3).
The second test came with the attacks of September 11, 2001. Central Command, now under General Tommy Franks, directed Operation Enduring Freedom, the campaign that overthrew the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and opened what became the longest war in American history; Franks directed the operation from the Tampa headquarters (Franks & McConnell, 2004). Eighteen months later the same command and the same general directed Operation Iraqi Freedom, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, with Franks alternating between MacDill and a forward command post in Qatar (Franks & McConnell, 2004; Gordon & Trainor, 2006; see Note 4). Through both wars, and in the campaign against the Islamic State that followed from 2014, Special Operations Command supplied the special-operations forces that were central to the fighting, and its most sensitive units conducted the pursuit of high-value targets that characterized the era’s conflicts (Marquis, 1997).
The significance for this study is geographic in an ironic sense. The wars of the Persian Gulf, the Hindu Kush, and Mesopotamia were commanded by an organization headquartered on a peninsula in Tampa Bay—an arrangement that owes nothing to the geography of the battlefields and everything to the institutional history traced across Papers VIII and IX (see Note 5).
5. The Coalition Village: A Diplomatic-Military Nexus
The concentration of command at MacDill has drawn to it a concentration of allies. Because Central Command’s operations have been coalition operations—fought alongside partner nations from the region and beyond—those partners maintain liaison officers at the headquarters, housed in a section of the base commonly called the Coalition Village. The number has been large: dozens of partner nations, and at times more than sixty, have kept representatives at MacDill to coordinate planning and operations with the American command (see Note 6). The presence expanded markedly with the coalition wars that followed 2001.
This gives MacDill a character unusual for a military base: it is a diplomatic-military nexus, a place where the uniformed representatives of many nations are co-located with the American command they support. The base functions, in this respect, less like a traditional airfield than like an international headquarters, and the daily business of coalition warfare—liaison, planning, the reconciliation of national interests and rules of engagement—is conducted on the shore of Tampa Bay. The concentration of foreign military representation at MacDill is one of the clearest measures of how far the base has traveled from its origins as a bomber-training field.
6. Present-Day Significance
What MacDill concentrates today is decision-making authority. On a single Gulf coast installation sit two combatant commands, two flying wings, and a wide array of supporting organizations—by the base’s own reckoning, some three dozen mission partners under the collective name “Team MacDill”—together with the coalition partners housed in the Coalition Village (see Note 7). The base is at once a command center, a communications hub, a logistics node, and a diplomatic meeting ground, and the authority gathered there reaches across half the globe.
The concentration has weight of a more local kind as well. MacDill is among the largest employers in the Tampa Bay region, and the military presence that began with a frontier garrison in 1824 and became a permanent installation in 1941 now anchors a substantial part of the metropolitan economy (Mormino, 2005). The city that grew up around Fort Brooke and languished after the Civil War is today a metropolitan region whose fortunes are bound, in part, to the command headquarters on its bayfront peninsula.
The larger significance is the one with which this paper began. A field laid out on the Interbay Peninsula to train bomber crews in a hurry as the United States prepared for the Second World War has become one of the most strategically weighted addresses in the American military—the seat of the commands that have directed the nation’s wars for a generation. That outcome was not planned in 1939, and it did not follow from the base’s geography. It accumulated, command by command, across the second half of the twentieth century, until MacDill held a concentration of authority that few installations in the world can match.
7. Conclusion: From Beachhead to Command Center
The arc of this series closes, for now, at MacDill. The estuary that served the Tocobaga as a contested frontier, the conquistadors as a beachhead, the smugglers of an ungoverned coast as a haven, the frontier Army as a garrison, the Confederacy as a blockaded storehouse, the nation of 1898 as a port of embarkation, and the airmen of the Second World War as a training field, now serves the United States as the home of two combatant commands. The same bay has been chosen, again and again, for the projection of force—though the reasons have differed in every age, and though the final placement of the combatant commands owed more to institutional inheritance than to the geography that governed all the earlier chapters. How these many uses of a single coast fit together, what they share and where the analogy between them breaks down, is the question taken up in the concluding synthesis, Paper X.
Notes
- The creation of Special Operations Command followed the failure of the Iran hostage rescue mission of 1980 and a prolonged institutional struggle resolved by the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 and the accompanying Cohen-Nunn Amendment, which mandated the establishment of a unified command for special operations. Marquis (1997) is the standard scholarly account of this process; readers are directed there for the legislative and bureaucratic history compressed in this paper.
- The 6th Air Refueling Wing has borne slightly different designations over the years of its service as MacDill’s host wing since 1996; its current designation and its KC-135 mission are as stated. Its subordinate squadrons operate the KC-135 and a small number of command-support aircraft. Precise unit details current as of this writing may change; readers should consult the base’s official fact sheets for the present organization.
- During Operation Desert Storm the Central Command headquarters forward-deployed to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and popular accounts sometimes locate the command there. The distinction observed in this paper—between the command’s institutional seat at MacDill and its forward headquarters in theater—applies to each of the operations discussed and is essential to understanding MacDill’s role.
- This paper describes the operational command of the Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns without entering the extensive and contested debates over their justification, conduct, and consequences. The rationale offered for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, centered on claimed weapons of mass destruction, and the subsequent controversy over that rationale, are noted here only as context; a full treatment lies outside a paper concerned with MacDill’s institutional role.
- The irony that Central Command directs operations on the far side of the world from its Tampa headquarters is developed in Paper VIII, which explains the placement as a product of institutional continuity rather than strategic geography. This distinguishes the contemporary chapter from every earlier one in the series, in which Tampa Bay’s own geography was the operative factor.
- Figures for the number of partner nations represented at MacDill vary over time and by source, reflecting the changing composition of coalition operations; totals in the range of several dozen, and at times exceeding sixty, are commonly cited. The Coalition Village is associated principally with Central Command’s coalition operations.
- The most recent operations of Central Command—including actions in the region in the mid-2020s—fall after the period covered by the settled historical and scholarly literature on which this series relies, and are not treated in detail here. This paper’s account runs firmly through the major campaigns of 1991 to the 2010s and characterizes the present arrangement of the base as of this writing.
References
Drea, E. J., Cole, R. H., Poole, W. S., Schnabel, J. F., Watson, R. J., & Webb, W. J. (2013). History of the Unified Command Plan, 1946–2012. Joint History Office, Office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Franks, T., & McConnell, M. (2004). American soldier. ReganBooks.
Gordon, M. R., & Trainor, B. E. (1995). The generals’ war: The inside story of the conflict in the Gulf. Little, Brown.
Gordon, M. R., & Trainor, B. E. (2006). Cobra II: The inside story of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Pantheon Books.
Marquis, S. L. (1997). Unconventional warfare: Rebuilding U.S. special operations forces. Brookings Institution Press.
Mormino, G. R. (2005). Land of sunshine, state of dreams: A social history of modern Florida. University Press of Florida.
