Remote Southwest Communities Resist Dangerous Combat Flight Training Expansion

The area from Cochise County, Arizona, to Hidalgo County, New Mexico, is largely remote and highly biodiverse. This part of the Southwest is home to national monuments like the Chiricahua Mountains, national forests and endangered species. It is also home to ranching communities, small towns built around the natural beauty of the area and tribal communities, including the Tohono O’odham, San Carlos Apache and White Mountain Apache.

This is also the site of growing opposition to a proposal by the U.S. Air Force to expand military flight training. Since early 2022, communities have been organizing against a plan by the Air Force to increase combat flight training which poses numerous environmental and human health risks.

This organizing has become more pressing following the Air Force’s release of a Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) on August 9. The document contains 212 pages assessing the areas where the Air Force aims to expand its activity in the rural Southwest, as well as the potential risks posed. The expansion would increase the number of flights and loosen certain restrictions on trainings by flights from Luke Air Force Base, Davis-Monthan Air Force Base and Morris Air National Guard Base. In the document, the Air Force makes the dubious claim that the expansion would bring “no new or unique flight safety issues or additional risk.” The DEIS is open for public comments until October 9 and community organizers are making sure that the statement receives as much scrutiny as possible.

Opposition is spearheaded by Peaceful Chiricahua Skies (PCS), a coalition of organizations, businesses and individuals in some of the areas of Arizona and New Mexico that would be most affected by the flight expansion. PCS launched in 2022 with a website that provides information about the expansion, is circulating a petition, which thousands have signed, and collects comments by those opposed to expansion. Kim Vacariu, a spokesperson for PCS, explained the importance of the resources they’ve developed.

“The further expansion of information that we’ve developed over time on the website has really been … sort of a public place to go,” Vacariu told Truthout. “There really isn’t too much other information available other than through the actual Air Force website.”

An Abundance of Risks

The coalition’s demands are fairly modest. They aren’t opposed to military combat flight training, but simply want it and other intense forms of flight training to be confined to Barry M. Goldwater Range, a military bombing range consisting of 1.9 million acres in the Sonoran Desert.

The Air Force insists in its own materials that its current Military Operations Areas (MOA) are not enough to “support modern day aircraft and training requirements” and that “certain aspects of training are either curtailed, delayed, or restructured to occur over several training events.” The Air Force does not provide much information on why exactly it sees a need to increase combat training activity. However, the U.S. Department of Defense “National Security Strategy” published in October 2022 (roughly nine months after the Air Force announced its plans to expand trainings in the Southwest), shows how the military is shifting to a focus on great power confrontation, requiring more ambitious plans for combat training throughout the military.

According to PCS’s analysis of the DEIS, proposed expansion would increase the amount of space for Air Force training flights, lower the level at which they fly above ground, and increase the regularity to 8,000 low-level training flights over Southwest Arizona annually, effectively doubling the current amount. These trainings include dropping of hazardous materials like flares and chaff and the production of sonic booms (shock waves that occur when an aircraft travels faster than the speed of sound), all of which would harm the environment and communities below.

Todd Schulke, a co-founder of the Center for Biological Diversity which is part of the PCS coalition, explained some of the environmental threats the expansion poses.

“There’s a lot of protected areas, for one thing — wilderness areas, wildlife refuges, national monuments,” Schulke told Truthout. “There’s a lot of species that are on the endangered species list and some of those species are in great danger of extinction.”

While the DEIS claims that there are “no new or unique flight safety issues or additional risk in any of the MOAs involved,” research conducted in the 1960s and 1970s by the Air Force, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Ecology Research Center found that “effects of aircraft noise and sonic booms on wildlife include such nonauditory effects as stress, behavioral changes, interference with mating, and detrimental changes in the ability to obtain sufficient food, water, and cover.”

Vacariu had a lot to say about sonic booms as someone who has had to endure them firsthand.

“I heard one the other day, supposedly from 30,000 feet, and my windows in my house rattled,” Vacariu said. “The newly proposed regulation for supersonic flight drops it from 30,000 feet to 5,000 feet. Essentially, Vacariu and other residents in the area have long been accustomed to loud aircraft flying overhead, but if the expansion goes through, overhead will be significantly closer to the ground, and far louder as a result.

He added that the economic impact would likely be devastating, potentially risking the appeal of tourism and the health of cattle in local ranching communities.

Additionally, the use of military flares are highly suspected to have caused wildfires in Arizona and Oregon and were confirmed to have caused wildfires in New Jersey. Schulke sees risk for wildfires to spread in the area under consideration for expansion.

“There’s a large number of inaccessible areas that are wilderness where no motorized vehicles are allowed and places that are extremely difficult to get firefighters into,” Schulke said.

Along with flares, the military flights drop chaff, which are thin strips of aluminum made to disrupt radar systems. Research by the Department of Defense indicates that an “ingredient” in chaff is PFAS, referring to a group of human-made chemicals, which increase congenital anomalies and cancer rates in people exposed to them. The military is one of the main producers of PFAS pollution and has often shirked any responsibility to clean up its pollution and compensate victims. In August, the Air Force challenged an order to clean up PFAS contamination that it produced in Tucson, Arizona.

A Lack of Transparency

The military’s resistance to acknowledge its environmental impact is part of the struggle for Peaceful Chiricahua Skies. In May of this year, the Center for Biological Diversity sued the Air Force under the Freedom of Information Act over its “failing to release public records.” Meanwhile, the coalition has been encouraging residents to file public noise complaints over disruptive noise from Air Force trainings. There is a section of the Air Force’s website designated for filing these complaints, but Vacariu said that the Air Force has been largely unresponsive.

“Suddenly, once we started passing out this information about how people can complain … they have been bombarded with public complaints about noise,” Vacariu said. “There have essentially been zero responses.”

Vacariu added that the coalition has received copies of every single complaint and calculated that this year alone there have been hundreds of noise complaints filed.

Despite the lack of transparency from the Air Force, organizers are not discouraged. They’re holding local presentations to inform the community and encouraging participation in the ongoing public hearings that the Air Force has scheduled. The Air Force intends to finalize its proposed expansion plans and release a “Record of Decision” in spring of 2025.