Pentagon will pick new US base location by June 2027, prioritizing 4 requirements

TAMPA, Fla. — The Pentagon wants to select a location for a new military base by June of next year based on four key metrics, and is asking states to submit their broad plans by Dec. 1, the senior official in charge of the effort told Breaking Defense this week.

“We talk about this as a base, but this is building a city,” Dale Marks, the assistant secretary of defense for Energy, Installations, and Environment, said during an interview on the sidelines of the Installation Innovation conference here this week. 

His quest to find a home for this future base follows Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s late September announcement of a handful of new initiatives that involved tapping Marks to lead the effort to identify, evaluate, select, and prepare an “optimal site” for the installation.

“Rapid advancements in disruptive technologies, growing strategic alignment among peer adversaries, and persistent, sophisticated cyber intrusions against critical defense and homeland infrastructure necessitate a modernized, resilient posture,” Hegseth wrote in that initial memo kicking off the hunt. “To counter multi-domain threats and maintain strategic deterrence, the Department of War must rapidly establish a new, highly hardened joint military installation within the Homeland.”

Speaking from stage, Marks expanded on Hegseth’s remarks, pledging that the new base will focus on standing up “an entirely new operational formation … Think autonomous uncrewed strike wings, directed energy and counter drone brigades, hypersonic maneuvering units, and SI-driven joint operational task forces.”

The goal, Marks said in the interview, is make the bids and decision making process as public as possible to help alleviate any concerns that the Trump administration will favor a Republican-led state over one run by Democrats.

“There’s going to be a panel,” Marks said. “We’ve been told the president might be involved, but at this point, we’re just driving in a direction to get it to that selection criteria [in place].”

So, what will go into that selection criteria? Based on comments Marks made during the interview, on stage and in an Oct. 22 letter sent out to the nation’s governors and adjutants general, there are four key factors that will matter the most.

First, the department is eyeing swaths of land within the 100,000 to 250,000 acre range, but that does not preclude consideration of “otherwise compelling offers” that may be smaller or larger, a detail he clarified in his letter to the state leaders. 

Second, this new installation will need to be able to house and support 15,000 to 25,000 active service members and their families, or roughly 80,000 to 100,000 people. It will also need to support future formations with “autonomous mass” capabilities like those aforementioned drones and directed energy weapons. 

Third, the future base is required to be self-sufficient with on-site, small modular nuclear reactors, hardened microgrids, and closed-loop water capture treatment and recycling systems that operate “indefinitely.” 

“In our phased implementation roadmap, this base must demonstrate within its first 24 months that it can sustain 30 continuous days of full combat sorted generation, completely disconnected from the civilian grid and power supplies,” Marks told the audience. “If the continental United States experiences a catastrophic grid collapse, this installation will remain 100 percent operational, locked and loaded, ready to respond.”

Fourth, Marks wants states to pursue public-private partnerships in order to help with cost. Under that vision, the Defense Department could potentially fund things like the combat mission, power projection capabilities, subterranean command shelters, munitions bunkers, and tactical proving grounds, while commercial capital builds and operates the supporting digital infrastructure.

Marks did not offer a cost estimate for the program since a site has not been located, but he did tell Breaking Defense that  the forthcoming 2028 budget request is expected to include a “wedge” to get the project up and running. 

With these four broad pillars in place, state leaders have until Dec. 1 to submit site nominations. Marks and his team will then begin talking with the nominees about their concepts, helping flesh them out and examining the pros and cons of each location — down to small details.

“Some of these concepts, by the way… are ideas like where the fence lives. Maybe the fence is a fence. Maybe the fence isn’t a fence,” he told Breaking Defense. “Do I build houses or not build houses? Maybe the answer is the community, as part of their public-private partnership with us, says that they build the support infrastructure for us. Maybe they have hospitals that they want to use, or they’re going to build in the schools.”