Republicans in Detroit [[photos)

[Detroitnerd]

In 1940, the government built the Detroit Tank Arsenal out in Warren. To this day, that is the center of automotive research and development for the US Army. It employs quite a few civil service engineers at the high end of the civil service pay scale. Both the Abrams Tank and the Bradley Fighting Vehicle were developed there. Most of the M48 and the M60 series tanks were built on a GOCO basis by Chrysler [[union shop).

So they built a factory there in 1940. How many tanks have they produced in the last, say, 50 years?

Camp Custer in Battle Creek [[my father did ROTC summer camp there in 1934) was not selected for retention due to climate [[in the Truman admin). Fort Brady in Rexford, MI was declared surplus in 1944 [[FDR).

Hermod, I am not talking about military installations. I am talking about the very profitable business of producing munitions, tanks, airplanes, bombs, mines, rockets, warheads and ships.

Michigan did have a significant number of post-war gun and NIKE air defense installations and Selfridge AFB had interceptors until the beginning of the ballistic missile age made anti-bomber defenses obsolete. Detroit was considered to be a high priority target.

That's interesting, but still has little bearing on what I'm talking about.

If you take a list of all of the posts, camps, and stations in the US Army during WWII, you can see that posts were closed in all of the northern states [[red and blue) and retained in the southern states [[mostly Democratic). This selection of which posts to close and which posts to retain was done during the Truman administration. The basis was strictly which posts gave the most effective training days. San Antonio, TX has always had a large number of air fields because it has the most available clear flying days.

You're reaching for a rationale here when it's right in front of you: Southern states, by and large, never have more than 10 percent of their work force organized. In the north, it's generally 15 percent to 20 percent [[Michigan is a 20 percenter) organized.

After Detroit's union labor helped win the war for the United States government, the U.S. turned right around and said, "Let's never let THAT happen again." They started a program of industrial dispersal [[the rationale for that was that too many factories too close together were too good a target for nuclear attack) and started sluicing money to military contractors in more conservative states.

Was the visibility a little better? Sure. In fact, forget everything I've pointed out, about the government, the military, labor trends and the historical record. You said it was visibility and flying days? I'm sure that was all there was too it. No need to dig any further.