Sid Salter
- Columnist Sid Salter points out that Wicker follows another Mississippian as Senate Armed Services Chairman, the late John C. Stennis.
The 2024 election saw a historic shift of power in which Republicans will soon control the White House, the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives.
That outcome will change the federal bureaucracy, the federal courts, and hundreds of patronage jobs in Mississippi. There will be new federal agency heads, new U.S. attorneys and new U.S. marshals.
But without question, the most impactful development on Nov. 5 for Mississippi was winning GOP control of the Senate that will position Mississippi senior U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Mississippi’s military infrastructure means jobs for the people of the state.
In Pascagoula, the sprawling shipyard called Ingalls Shipbuilding, now a division of Huntington Ingalls Industries, employs some 11,000 workers.
Wicker will step into the role last held by a Mississippian when the late Sen. John C. Stennis, the Democrat from DeKalb, chaired Armed Services from 1969 to 1980 and earned the title “the father of the modern Navy.” One of the nation’s nuclear-powered aircraft carriers bears his name in testament to his influence on the nation’s defense – the USS John C. Stennis, CVN-74.
At the height of Stennis’s power on Capitol Hill, military installations like Naval Air Station Meridian, Columbus Air Force Base, Biloxi’s Keesler Air Force Base and the Naval Construction Battalion Center (Seabees), and Camp Shelby, the massive National Guard training facility near Hattiesburg employed some 27,800 people when the senator retired in 1988.
Stennis also used his Senate Armed Services Committee influence to steer what was in 1961 the second-largest construction project in the nation. The Mississippi Testing Facility, later renamed the Stennis Space Center, evaluated the Saturn V rockets’ first and second-stage components that later took U.S. astronauts to the moon.
The 1961 MTF project in Hancock County brought 9,000 new jobs and an annual income of $65 million to the area. Today, the Stennis Space Center employs some 5,000 employees and has an annual economic impact of over $1 billion.
Few developments illustrate the influence Stennis wielded from that position than the acquisition and development of the tiny Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, the largest island of the Chagos Archipelago in the British Indian Ocean Territory. Diego Garcia is a coral atoll that covers some 17 square miles.
Late in 1966, the U.S. leased the island for 50 years (later extended through 2036) from Britain in a deal that gave the UK a $14 million discount on Polaris missiles. After the U.S. obtained the remote outpost, the Seabees went in 1971 to build a joint U.S.-British military outpost from which the U.S. would years later launch military airstrikes on Afghanistan and Iraq.
In 1974, the Defense Department asked Congress for $29 million to expand the $20.5 million Diego Garcia communications and airfield assets the Seabees finished in 1973. Stennis wrote to Defense Secretary James Schlesinger on Jan. 29, 1974, to lodge his inquiry: “I should like to be promptly advised exactly what your present plans are for this installation, and your projected planned activity in the Indian Ocean area for the next 5-to-10-year period.”
Schlesinger supplied Stennis with a detailed report outlining the strategic importance of the tiny island military base. However, the Senate Armed Service Committee trimmed the supplemental appropriation to $18 million during negotiations with the House.
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger sent a memo to then-President Gerald Ford advising him to make a personal entreaty to Stennis before the Defense Authorization negotiations were finished.
Ford wrote Stennis a note making the ask personal: “I know that you recognize the importance of this proposal and am confident that I can count on your support to resist any efforts to reduce the funding to carry it out or to restrict otherwise my latitude to do so.”
Diego Garcia was expanded as Ford requested. From his Armed Services chairmanship, Stennis was a confidant of several U.S. presidents to Mississippi’s enduring benefit. Wicker will likewise be able to help his home state and have an important seat at the highest table in matters of national defense and foreign policy.
