The case has been made and remade. Now Maryland must sit back this summer and wait to discover whether the state will receive thousands of relocated military jobs, and whether Fort Meade will get its hands on most of them.
But if a delegation of Maryland's top leaders proved persuasive last week, the Army post that's home to the National Security Agency could undergo an even larger expansion of its intelligence operations than previously anticipated.
Before the commission that is overseeing the Pentagon's Base Realignment and Closure process in Towson, Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski made the pitch to bring about 3,000 workers at National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency in Bethesda to the extra-secure confines of Fort Meade, a move that she said would bring together "the technical eyes and ears of U.S. intelligence."
The Democrat said that by bringing NSA and NGA together on one site, Fort Meade would become "the national home for signals and technical intelligence."
Maryland officials have been working behind the scenes to secure the state's intelligence work force since the Pentagon announced its base realignment plans two months ago. Those plans included moving the geospatial agency to Fort Belvoir, part of an anticipated shift of more than 18,000 jobs to the Northern Virginia installation.
Many see Fort Meade, which is likely to undergo a decades-long expansion of its intelligence operations, as the answer to preventing the Bethesda agency from leaving Maryland. Under the Pentagon's recommendations, Meade is set to gain more than 5,300 jobs - many of them related to surveillance efforts at NSA - within seven years.
Saying the mission of the geospatial agency "is closely tied to that of National Security Agency," Mikulski added that "NGA can establish itself faster, more securely and with less disruption to its mission at Fort Meade. ... Upgraded infrastructure would allow NGA to `plug in' quickly."
Officials at Fort Meade recently revealed details of a three-decade master plan to accommodate growth in and around the Army post in western Anne Arundel County, as local and state leaders estimate that tens of thousands of jobs will come to the Fort Meade area because of NSA. One proposal involves eliminating the 400-acre golf course in the center of the 5,400-acre installation to create space for federal agencies seeking the extra security that Meade could provide.
