Leaked documents show Army's bold plan to acquire 10,000 square miles of Colorado
Artillery ranges and tank maneuvers on fragile grasslands. Depopulated farm towns, suitable for urban warfare exercises for thousands of troops. A military installation the size of Massachusetts, sprawling across southern Colorado from Trinidad to the Kansas border. If you're going to plan, plan big. And the U.S. Army's plans for expansion of its Pinon Canyon Maneuver Site have an audacity that's hard to beat.
This week's cover story, "The War Next Door," explores the long-running battle over the PCMS, a 235,000-acre site the Army acquired in the 1980s to prepare troops from Fort Carson for combat, and a current proposal for increased training there. After several political setbacks, the Army says it's put aside any plans to expand the PCMS for now. But landowners, preservationists and others are skeptical, given the grand scenario for expansion contained in military documents obtained by opponents through leaks and Freedom of Information Act requests.
Ranchers who've run cattle in southeastern Colorado for generations first started hearing rumors of possible expansion of the site in 2005. In fact, prompted by a growing concentration of troops at Fort Carson because of base closures and realignments, the military had been studying acquisition of additional land for years before that. But locals' first clue of the scale involved came in the form of a leaked map that looked a lot like this one: 
Army exercise at PCMS.
The map, which appears in a 2004 planning document, shows a series of phased-in purchases over many years, starting with modest strips of property adjoining the current site. But the entire deal would eventually encompass 6.9 million acres -- that's more than 10,000 square miles, a tenth of the entire state's land area. The Pinon Canyon Expansion Opposition Coalition promptly translated this into a more vividly colored map, on view below, to give a better idea of what the Army had in mind: 
Click image for a larger (800 pixel-wide) version.
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