Local Activists Gather at Vandenberg Air Force Base
By VINCENT A.LOMBARDO
The Alarm! Newspaper contributor

The third Saturday of May is celebrated as Armed Forces Day to commemorate the creation of the US Department of Defense. On May 18 this year, close to one-hundred people took the opportunity to voice their concerns about nuclear weapons and the corporatization of the military budget. The activists gathered at the gates of Vandenberg Air Force Base on California’s central coast. Two people were taken into custody after entering the base to deliver a message to its colonel. “We are here to say that we do not want bombs in space, we don’t want the Space Command, we don’t want space militarized… There’s enough weapons on
the planet to kill everyone several times over, so please stop,” declared MacGregor Eddy of Salinas, as she prepared to hop over the 30 inch orange plastic barrier that separated her from the confines of the base. “The message is peace,” added Santa Cruz activist Liz Rondell. “There is war happening all over the world and it’s time to stand up and [be a] witness for peace.” With those words, the two
infiltrated the base perimeter and were quickly surrounded by military police. After a few warnings bellowed from a loud speaker, military officers rounded up the two women and hauled them off to the brig.

Located some 200 miles south of Santa Cruz, on more than 98,000 acres of open land, Vandenberg is the third largest Air Force Base in the continental United States. For more
than thirteen thousand years, this land sat undeveloped and cared for by the Chumash Indian tribe, who were driven out of their traditional ocean-front villages and onto reservations by the Spanish conquistadores. In 1941, at the height of World War II, the United States Army took control of the land and used the site to train tank-gunners and other military personnel. Camp Cooke, as it was originally called, also took in more than 8,000 POW’s during the war, with 16 branch camps under its jurisdiction. The base was renamed Vandenberg in 1958, a year after the US Air Force was designated caretaker and transformed it into the nation’s first space and ballistic missile test facility. At present, Vandenberg is operated by the US Air Force Space Command’s 30th Space Wing.

Established in 1985 and currently operating under a budget of $66.8 million, the U.S. Space Command of the Department of Defense coordinates the Army, Navy and the Air Force for
space warfare—under military jargon, to perform missions of “space control,” “force application,” and “computer attack network.” The Space Command’s 1996 document Vision for 2020 reads on page four, “During the early portion of
the 21st century, space power will also evolve into a separate and equal medium of warfare. Likewise, space forces will emerge to protect military and commercial national interests and investments.”

Vandenberg is also the only site in the world where the Pentagon tests intercontinental ballistic missiles and
long-range nuclear missiles. The missiles are often aimed at Kwajalein Atoll, the planet’s largest corral atoll,
where six or seven thousand indigenous people have been forced off their land by the US Space Command. “It is
not just a paranoid speculation,” said Founding Member of the Vandenberg Action Coalition Peter Lumsdaine, “it is actually a circumstantially and directly documented fact of US strategic doctrine and policy that we have always reserved the right to strike first with nuclear weapons.”

On May 14, the US and Russia announced an agreement to cut existing nuclear stockpiles by almost three quarters over the next 10 years. Dave “Woody” Wood, who traveled from
Santa Cruz with his mother and son to attend Saturday’s protest, calls the agreement “a great first step.” But Wood said he was skeptical since the plan allows the weapons to essentially be on-call. “If we could take about 95% of [the weapons] off, that would be a really great second step,” he said.

Sabiha Basrai, a student at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo said she was at the demonstration because her school
receives a lot of funding from corporations like Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Raytheon. “Those companies also highly recruit from our campus and we’re very much a part of the war machine in that way,” she said.

But not everyone was there to voice opposition. Seven people, who said they live near the military installation,
were positioned on the opposite side of the base entrance. Adorned in red, white, & blue, they held hand-made signs bearing the words “We Support Our Military,” and similar slogans. “We’re here because the protesters are here,” one man explained. “It’s Armed Forces Day, they should be giving thanks to our military, they shouldn’t be protesting against them.”

According to Lumsdaine, however, the demonstrators did not intend to denounce the soldiers in the armed forces. “We are gathering to call ourselves and our nation to task for the level of violence and the level of injustice that this government and the high command are choosing to inflict,” he ex-plained.

A pair of deputies from the Santa Barbara Sheriff’s Office and a handful of CHP officers assisted the dozens of military officers on duty. The deputies distributed flyers to the assembled demonstrators, emblazoned with the letterhead of the Defense Department. The handbill was a memo issued by Air Force Colonel Robert M Worley II, declaring the base closed to non-military personnel. Attached was information explaining the effects of pepper spray and instructions on arrest procedures.

Meanwhile, in the adjacent field of Vandenberg Middle School, a crowd of demonstrators gathered into a circle. Mary Rider, the director of the Seamless Garment Network in North Carolina, pointed out that the United States government spends approximately $600,000 per minute on its military. “Think what that money could do if we used it to start peace academies, to feed the hungry, to house the homeless around the world, [provide] healthcare, food
and basic human necessities for everyone,” she said.

Meg Lumsdaine, a Lutheran minister, read from a card sent to her by a friend whose son is stationed in Afghanistan, “I spoke by phone, Thursday, to my son in Bagram. I told him of your plans next week. His reply was, Mom, if you had seen what I’ve seen, and done what I’ve had to do over here, you wouldm do anything you could for peace. You tell her to do whatever she needs to do if she thinks it can help give us peace.”

Eddy and Rondell were released within an hour. Both are restricted from entering the base for the next three years.

For more information contact: Vandenberg Action Coalition,
MPGturningpoint (at) aol.com or Vandenberg Air Force
Base www.vandenberg.af.mil/.