Denver Direct: All of Southeastern Colorado to be a Massive Electronic Warfare Testing and Training Center


Saturday, November 15, 2014

All of Southeastern Colorado to be a Massive Electronic Warfare Testing and Training Center

LIAR’S POKER 


 
with Department of Defense (DOD), its contractors, and politicians!  

Stone-cold bluff: A bet or raise with an inferior hand that has little or no chance of improving.  Stone-cold bluffers believe they can win because all opponents will fold.  
— Wikipedia


TRINIDAD, CO – When military contractors decided to have U. S. Senate candidates Mark Udall and Cory Gardner kill the six-year-old funding ban that prohibited spending on any part of the massive planned expansion at Department of Army’s 236,000-acre Joint Forces Pinon Canyon Maneuver Site (PCMS) in southern Colorado, they slapped down our tax dollars and put a stone-cold bluff.  Udall-Gardner assured us the largest secretly planned military expansion in U.S. history was off the table!     
            
Despite their bluff, here’s what the contractor-run Department of Defense has been doing to expand electronic warfare across generational ranch lands, rural communities and public lands that keep the largest remaining expanse of native shortgrass prairie on the planet thriving:  
  •  On Halloween Army Special Operations Command (SOC) released a 430-page environmental study that dumps onto 236,000 acres of land and airspace at Piñon Canyon Maneuver Site — already ravaged by military use — every drone warfare weapon system DOD said for over a decade it needed 7 million acres to accommodate.  Army SOC will hold only one public meeting to review their expanded and intensified high-tech weapons and operations plan: 
5 – 7 pm  Thursday, Nov. 20
Piñon Canyon Maneuver Site                         
  •  During years of secret military expansion planning, The Nature Conservancy took covert DOD money to put ‘conservation’ easements on private ranch land surrounding Piñon Canyon Maneuver Site enabling Joint Forces vision of a  7 million acre “world class” drone warfare center to gain ground. This past summer, The Nature Conservancy and its partners unveiled plans to declare all of Southeastern Colorado a Natural Heritage Area, by purchasing ‘heritage’ easements on private property throughout the 7 million-acre expansion area. The Nature Conservancy and their partners’ efforts would not honor heritage; these groups are under contract with the Department of Defense (DOD), lining their pockets with DOD slush fund money for real estate deals. Thanks to a robust effort by ranchers, townspeople and private property rights advocates across the region, the disguised military expansion was soundly defeated.
  • Players at the Liar’s Poker table are strong-arming the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to expand military use of public lands around Cañon City and up the Arkansas River corridor — all connected to expanded and intensified operations at Joint Forces Piñon Canyon Maneuver Site.  DOD claims it needs more land and airspace to operate Sen. Mark Udall’s new $3.5 billionCombat Aviation Brigade, the most lethal integrated electronic war weapons systems on the market.  Residents bordering BLM lands in the area have recently discovered they are living in Military Training Areas (MTA’s) that were never publicly disclosed to private property owners or their communities. Take a tour of the expanded military Landing Zones (LZs): click here. 
  • Then, Army published an Environmental Assessment seeking to expand Army and Joint Force Special Operations use of an Air Force drone testing site called Bullseye east of Colorado Springs.
These pieces of the puzzle, separately pursued, fit together to reveal the big picture: a massive electronic warfare testing and training center devouring 7 million acres of native prairie and national airspace across SE Colorado and Northern New Mexico, extending north through BLM and Forest Service lands around Canon City and Victor, then east past Colorado Springs and south to Pueblo Municipal Airport — all of southeastern Colorado.


Not only will generational ranches be swallowed up and public lands decimated, but communities too are in DOD’s Joint Forces Piñon Canyon expansion plan. Army’s secret planning documents, obtained by Not 1 More Acre!, call using towns for Special Operations training an “exciting opportunity.”


We’re calling the stone-cold bluffers out. Udall-Gardner killed the six-year-old funding ban and expansion is real. The Department of Defense daily increases the risk of tipping a catastrophic dust event at ravaged Piñon Canyon that will roll with growing fury across the Southern Great Plains perpetrating a national disaster and wiping out the very people who keep the last shortgrass prairie thriving through generational ranching, rural communities and national grasslands.


Challenge everything that is wrong with politics and governance in this nation today!  


CLOSE Piñon Canyon Manevuer Site!   CLOSE PCMS!

Not 1 More Acre! 


PO Box 773
Trinidad, Colorado  81082