Pentagon considers Indiana site for homeland defense training

INDIANAPOLIS -- Indiana officials are lobbying the Pentagon to name Camp Atterbury as a regional or national training center for soldiers and civilian agencies involved in homeland defense.\nThey join Ohio and Nevada officials who also are pitching bases in their states as candidates for homeland defense training sites, said Clifford Ong, director of Indiana's Counter-Terrorism and Security Council.\n"The National Guard Bureau thinks highly of our Guard," Ong said. "The problem is nobody really knows what the plan is, whether they are going to have a training program."\nThe National Guard's 33,132-acre Camp Atterbury, which straddles Johnson and Bartholomew counties, has slowly become one of the country's top training facilities.\nPremier military units, such as the Navy Seals commandos and the 101st Airborne out of Fort Campbell, Ky., train there regularly, as do many federal and local police agencies.\n"You've already got a history of law enforcement and military using this facility," Guard spokesman Maj. James McGallivray told The Indianapolis Star for a story Sunday.\nLt. Col. Barry Richmond of the Guard's strategic plans office in Indianapolis said only about six or seven other states have a Guard training facility as extensive as Atterbury's.\nIts features include an air gunnery range, an airfield that can land up to four large cargo planes, more than 30 small-arms ranges and specialized training resources such as rubble piles with 300 feet of tunnels used to train search-and-rescue dogs and their handlers.\nGuard officials also point to other selling points -- a central location nationally, a railroad line upgraded about five years ago and barracks that easily can house 8,000 soldiers.\nRichmond said Atterbury's best edge, however, has been its willingness to tailor training exercises to whatever a military unit or agency needs.\n"You can have the best resources," he said, "but if you don't have good people, their value is undermined"