Danger, Will Robinson, Danger!
Reedley is a little over 40 minutes from Lemoore, California. That’s the location of Naval Air Station Lemoore. NAS Lemoore in California is the U.S. Navy’s largest and only dedicated West Coast Master Jet Base. It is the primary hub for all Pacific Fleet strike-fighter operations. It houses over half of the Navy’s F/A-18E/F Super Hornets and is the only installation on the West Coast where F-35C Lightning II’s are based.
Put together, this means that Lemoore supports four carrier air wings, comprised of 16 operational squadrons, two fleet replacement squadrons, and four carrier air wing staffs. This is the Navy’s largest air base - anywhere.
Imagine then if you were to release a bio weapon in the area surrounding Reedley. It would not even have to be a biological agent that killed those it infected. A serious respiratory ailment that was passed directly from human to human in the air could ground most of the Navy’s strike aircraft pilots and maintainers in a matter of days and effectively render our carriers toothless. That move, in conjunction with a Chinese move on Taiwan, would instantaneously change the entire strategic calculus in the Pacific.
The recently discovered Chinese bio lab is in Las Vegas. That’s about eight miles from Nellis Air Force Base.
Nellis Air Force Base is a critical installation for air combat training. It is also one of the primary locations for the storage of nuclear weapons that would be used in the Pacific theater in the event of Presidential authorization. According to open source data, there are in excess of one thousand nuclear weapons at Nellis.
Because it is a training hub and used for large-scale exercises, U.S. aircraft and their crews from all over the world cycle through Nellis. These include not just fighter aircraft but also bombers, tankers, and reconnaissance aircraft. That means an infectious agent released in the vicinity of Nellis might well be spread not simply on base but worldwide as infected pilots and airmen, unaware of their infectious status, returned to their home bases.
With Reedley and Nellis effectively offline, everything would change. Our ability to respond to a Chinese move anywhere in the Pacific would be crippled, and potentially, we would lose the use of these bases entirely for some significant period of time. That’s assuming that the two bio labs discovered so far are the only ones in existence. There is no reason to believe that is true. As noted above, the FBI did essentially nothing when it discovered the first lab in Reedley. It appears, in fact, they never even bothered to test all the biological agents they found there.
The labs in Reedley and Las Vegas may be the only ones there are, and they may represent nothing more than reckless private actors looking somehow to make a quick buck. They may also be two of a dozen or more, and all of the others may be fully operational and ready to go into action at a moment’s notice.
Here’s hoping somebody somewhere is proceeding with a sense of urgency, before we experience another Caffa, this time on U.S. soil.