Army Plans for Bigger Base Pit Tank vs. Turtle

BARSTOW —  The battle of the tanks versus the tortoises is heating up once again in the middle of the Mojave Desert.

For more than a decade, the Army has wanted to expand its already sprawling National Training Center at Ft. Irwin, northeast of here, saying that it is too cramped to accommodate its fast tanks and battalion-size war games.

But as it has in the past, the plodding, government protected desert tortoise is standing--or burrowing--in the way of a military force that says it can conquer any human opponent.

The Army’s latest land expansion proposal was unveiled Friday to the federal Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. In it, the Army retreated from plans to expand toward the east, and instead, seeks land primarily to the southwest.

By shifting its sights, the Army no longer targets more than 300,000 acres that contain desert streams, lakes and mountains that are home to rare bighorn sheep and are popular among off-road vehicle enthusiasts, campers, prospectors, rock hounds and dry-lake land sailors.

Nor would tanks rumble through large underpasses beneath California 127 and maneuver even farther to the east, kicking up dust and startling motorists driving along the two-lane highway that runs between Baker and the southern entrance to Death Valley.

Instead, the Army is seeking about 150,000 desert acres mostly to the southwest that it says are of little use to anyone--except the threatened desert tortoise. It also seeks the use of an additional 24,000 acres that are within Ft. Irwin but have been off limits as a desert tortoise habitat.

The Army has preferred this property all along, saying that it offers the most usable land for training soldiers who arrive by the thousands, 10 times a year. They undergo several weeks of the most realistic training the military can provide its soldiers and tank drivers, short of war itself.

When the issue surfaced during public hearings two years ago, the Army acknowledged that expansion to the south would take it into a habitat rich with tortoises, so it reluctantly agreed to look east instead.

But there it ran into objections from the desert users, and the expansion issue has remained unresolved while the BLM and Army revisited their maps.

New studies by the Army suggest that the southern land has fewer tortoises than believed. Based on new surveys and modeling, the tortoise population is now thought to be only a fraction of what it was thought to be, the Army’s chief biologist has reported.

The BLM suggested about 17 months ago that the Army revisit expansion plans to the south. It said the impact on tortoises could be minimized, either by building fences and culverts to protect their movements, or by relocating tortoises, which are listed on federal and state threatened species lists.

On Friday, Army officials met with BLM and federal wildlife officials and said it would adopt the BLM’s proposal--with an important caveat that caught the BLM by surprise.

The Army said it wanted only some of the land offered by the BLM--but also wanted to capture an area to the southwest, known as Superior Valley, situated between Barstow and the Navy’s China Lake facility. Most of the land is controlled by the BLM, but some is in private hands.

BLM officials said after the meeting that they would need time to study the Army’s request. “It introduces some new elements that we hadn’t considered, and we’ll have to take a look at it,” said Tim Salt, manager of the BLM’s California Desert District.

Among the issues, he said, was how the Army planned to minimize the expansion’s impact on the desert tortoise population.

Representatives of the Sierra Club voiced strong objections to the Army’s plans to expand into tortoise country.

“We have enormous problems with that,” said Elden Hughes, head of the Sierra Club’s California desert committee. “Because of the tortoises that are there, that’s more offensive than expanding to the east.”

The Army is unapologetic about its desire to expand. Ft. Irwin covers more than 642,000 acres, but only about half the area is usable for maneuvers. Much of the balance of Ft. Irwin’s land is too steep for exercises, or is off limits for environmental reasons.

In order to conduct the kind of training the Army says is necessary to prepare for today’s warfare--where faster tanks and new weapons systems will dictate larger battlefields--an additional 190,000 acres are needed, said Ft. Irwin’s commanding officer, Col. Tim Reischl.

Irwin is unique in the country in providing high-tech desert training with simulated and live-fire exercises. But the largest battlefield exercises are contained to an area 12 miles by 25 miles, and Reischl said the Army needs to practice in an area 25 miles by 40.

The land expansion, Reischl said, “is in the best interest of national defense.”

“Army training and tortoises are not mutually exclusive,” he added. “We’ve seen increased pockets [of tortoises] in the training range where we didn’t expect them. It’s a big desert.”

Despite an image of tanks scouring the desert soils, leaving wholesale destruction in their wake, their tractor treads leave only a 4-foot-wide footprint, and the tanks are separated by 100 yards or more, he said. “It’s not like they’re vacuuming up everything in their path,” Reischl said.

Besides, he and Army land consultant John Gifford said, there are fewer tortoises than earlier believed nestled in the desert to the south and southwest.

“We have absolute confidence that the new [tortoise counting] techniques are better than the old ones,” Gifford said. “But there will be critics. There always are.”

Indeed.

The Superior Valley is as good a habitat for tortoises as can be found in the desert, said Jim Dodson, past head of the Sierra Club’s desert committee and a longtime critic of Army expansion plans.

“The quality of the habitat isn’t necessarily measured by the number of tortoises,” he said. “That area has historically had high [tortoise] numbers because it has the right combination of soil type, climate and vegetation.”

Bill Presch, director of the California Desert Studies Consortium and a biology professor at Cal State Fullerton, also expressed skepticism that tortoises and tanks make for good neighbors.

Fences may contain the animals, but the tank-generated dust, he said, could discourage plant growth and choke the tortoises’ respiratory systems.

Transplanting tortoises altogether, he said, “is basically not a good idea” because of the various stresses it causes the animals, and because they probably would be placed in a competitive situation with other tortoises.

Some, like Dodson, say that the expansion issue transcends tortoises.

Dodson, an Army veteran and a civilian employee at Edwards Air Force Base, said the Army doesn’t need more training territory. “They need to use what they’ve got more effectively,” he said. “The Israelis fought and won wars in smaller areas.”

Reischl disagrees, saying that the nation needs a place to test its battalion-size battle plans--and that this kind of warfare consumes more space than ever, given the advances in technology.

But he said that if this expansion is approved by Congress, the Army will be content. The next step in training, involving multiple battalions, will be conducted on different battlefields, he said, and linked by computers.