It’s military base closure and realignment time! Can’t you feel the tension? A day after Northern Virginia went on alert that as many as 50,000 Defense Department workers could be leaving the area because their buildings do not meet federally mandated terrorist safeguards, a quiet corner of Bethesda might be the next area to see a Pentagon retreat. The Post reports that the Defense Department is considering consolidating agencies like the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency on larger military reservations. In this case, the agency’s facilities are too close to Sangamore Road. As anyone familiar with the area can tell you, the agency’s campus is tightly interwoven with the surrounding leafy neighborhood, its shopping district and the Capital Crescent bike trail.
What is the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (fka the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, fka the Defense Mapping Agency and fka — according to our great aunt who worked there during World War II — Army Map … here’s a full history)? According to a press release about the disestablishment of the agency’s Office of Strategic Transformation, the agency’s mission “is to provide timely, relevant and accurate geospatial intelligence — shows what’s where on the Earth — in support of our national security.”
(If the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency leaves its Sangamore Road complex, we assume that some of the helicopters that kept us up late at night when we lived nearby will leave too.)
If you have access the time and transportation, we suggest a leisurely scenic drive (or intense bike ride) out MacArthur Boulevard, past Sangamore Road, past Glen Echo, over the one-lane aqueduct bridge, on through Cabin John and out to the Maryland side of Great Falls. Speaking of random Defense Department facilities, on the way out MacArthur Boulevard, you might spy the gargantuan creepy-looking arched warehouses of the Carderock Division of the Naval Surface Weapons Lab (where the Navy develops “superior stealth technologies through signature control and silencing, greatly reducing the vulnerability of Navy vessels to mines, torpedoes, and other dangers” among other things …) near the Capital Beltway.
