Naval Special Warfare Group One has been working on a plan for a completely new compound situated just south of their current location in Coronado. The $1 Billion facility will be constructed on the Silver Strand Training Complex South located in Imperial Beach, California.
Last week, an environmental impact assessment was released meaning the process remains on track with possible groundbreaking before the end of the year. However, a WWII bunker (bldg 99) currently located on the property must be demolished in order to make room for the campus. The elephant cage antenna on the site has already been dismantled.
The new facility will include a 120′ tall parachute drying tower but the remainder of the planned buildings won’t be over 45′ tall so as not to upset the coastal view. Although this MILCON project includes NEX fuel and shoppette in addition to dining and logistics/maintenance facilities as well as classrooms and Team buildings there won’t be any ranges. The SEALs will still have to travel to use those.
NAVSPECWARCOM and the Center will both remain at their current location.
My apologies beforehand to SSD if this is considered complaining about pricing or costs. I would not normally do so if taxpayer dollars were not involved.
That being said, and assuming the $1 billion dollar price tag stated is not a typo, that seems like an insane amount of money for a compound to be built. I am not a Navy SEAL and truly have no working knowledge of their operational requirements, however I am a taxpayer and a well intentioned citizen of the United States. And this cost seems outstanding.
To put it in perspective, that’s the cost of 84 A10 aircraft, 71 M109A7 SP howitzers, or 333 Bradley Fighting Vehicles. That is if I did the math right. Does this not seem a little high to anyone else?
+1
Chuck,
As with all things, I think it depends. The article doesn’t quite elaborate on what the compound will include beyond the parachute building, simply that there will be “buildings”. These buildings might include everything from vehicle maintenance facilities to a facility able to process classified material (SCIF). An open-source google search indicates a SCIF can cost up to about $300 per square foot as of 2009.
Just food for thought.
-M
Completely understandable. Thanks for the input. I appreciate the professional manner in which you have replied. Again, I do not claim to have any knowledge of what may be required in this new NSW facility. I only wish to have a reasonable budget for DoD and to have that budget spent upon reasonable projects that will favor force multiplication.
Parachute facilities, dive locker, NEX add-ons, housing, team rooms, secure storage facilities, and the costs of demolitions.
I can easily see $1B, ($500M if built in NC or TX).
Some of the most advanced healthcare facilities in California are built and furnished for under $700M. A facility in San Francisco was recently built for under $1.5B, but a majority of that went into the demolition of existing buildings prior to construction. Even the proposed NFL Stadium in Los Angeles was estimated to be $1.5B. There’s absolutely no way the SEAL compound project should come anywhere near $1B. Especially if the max building height is 45′ and the land is already owned…
If it truly DOES cost that much, they’re investing a lot more into the technology and security facets than we’d be able to stipulate on.
To be honest, I’m less concerned with what NSW could do with $1 billion. I know they could spend it on great facilities, equipment, etc. but I’m very concerned with the fact that they are going to spend such an extraordinary amount of money on this when I could find, as a taxpayer (again with due apologies to SSD and all of SOCOM), so many other projects that are in need of such expenditures such as preserving the daunted A10 attack aircraft, which would require only a fraction of the cost.
According to a San Diego newspaper release from July 2014, the proposed construction calls for 24 projects over a 10-year period. The end result would be a SEAL training and administration compound with 1.5 million square feet of facilities. Construction would include a traffic signal at a new base entrance along Highway 75 and the intersection would be upgraded with additional turn lanes on the highway.
Knowing this, the 1.5bil spread out in the manner makes a bit more sense. That and reworking a fairly heavily used highway isn’t going to be cheap.
Each cage is gonna have a state of the art tanning bed and hair gel dispenser. It’s totally gonna be cool bro.
I hadn’t realized they were building a dedicated facility to Christiano Ronaldo and every concievable future Navy SEAL movie ever.
Good call. I forgot about the movie set and author lounge for writing books.
Don’t forget about their push up machine shops and perfect abs.
Part of the $1 Billion is gunna be for all the water that has to be trucked in from out of state. Since California is going thru such a dry spell
Well, maybe the team buildings won’t have rats running around trying to eat the salt out of your cammies anymore. Maybe new guys will actually get cages instead of being given a ‘cage’ in a shipping container in the parking lot. NSW looks great from up the beach but reality is quite a bit harsher.
Gotta have that sweet beach for all the cali’ boy SEALs to go out and catch some waves on. Not to mention the ultraslick roads for them to ride their longboards on.
I’m sure they need a supply building as large as a Costco to store all the hundreds of millions of dollars of obsolete equipment they’ve acquired throughout the last fifteen years of war.
All that delicious AOR1….
Could just expand and build new facilities on NAB…what a waste.
Because heaven forbid they have to share facilities with the Marines… that price really isn’t that high for a military construction project I mean it’s really less than the cost of one research project into a vehicle that will be in development till its obsolete. At least these facilities in theory should last 20 or 50 years… if they really wanted to save money they could move to camp pendleton
Why the devil would they share with Marines? They’ll presumably be building new team buildings for ST1,ST3,ST5 AND ST7. Plus new dive locker,paraloft,armory,supply facilities,medical facilities and a HPP gym.
Yes, Group 1.
Now if we could could finally move out of the old ass team 2 building i’ll be happy.
How the Navy spends its money has nothing to do with how other branches of the military spend their money. Saying this could buy the cavalry new horses or the infantry new muskets doesn’t mean a damn thing, those branches have their own alloted money for their own use.
It’s a construction project in California, it’s going to cost a metric fuckton of cash, whether it has a SCIF or is just a basketball court.
Jon, OPT
Well actually there’s a fixed pot of money to draw from. If one service overspends then the others get cut.
I understand that, but it doesn’t start that way. It’s not a bunch of guys slapping each others hands over a pot until a certain point, mixed with numerous other dynamics I won’t go into here. Bottom line is other services have their own money use as they see fit. The Navy isn’t going to say “we don’t need this, buy sabres and horses for the Army cavalry”.
Jon, OPT
Why are they getting rid of the bunker, they should keep it and just build a training area around it. They could fix it up a bit and use it in their training, like a HVT hit or snatch that hides out in a bunker. Then again, I suppose if the US really wanted to take out a HVT hiding in a bunker we’d simply send in a B-2 or a B-1 and just drop a bunker buster or two.
…Why are they getting rid of the bunker…?
It is a grave mistake to prepare for tomorrow’s ops based on yesterday’s war.
as a example, they might need a real datacenter built such that they can train CQB while SSE’ing a high-value server they need to make sure they don’t kill before they yank the hard drives…
If they put a few server racks in an old facility, then they’d never know how a raised floor and heavy air conditioning effects CN/CS/Smoke employment, until it is too late 🙁
rinse/lather/repeat for more missions in more odd environments than we know. realistic training and rehearsals dramatically increases mission success, and we need to try to get as many of our guys home as we can.
Ok. As a former rigger. I Kept thinking of this as a deep bunker. Why not use this this as a base for the chute dryer. We had a few of these at Bragg. They could get up to 120 degrees Fahrenheit. So there’s there is their sauna. Now they just need hair gel and what ever else Matt best says in that awesome rap. But don’t seals need Heroes too?