Living on Maui, with its mostly undeveloped landscape and near complete lack of military facilities, makes it easy to think that America’s global war on terrorists, dictators and all-around bad dudes is something far away. Not according to the Rand Corporation’s new study “How Much Does Military Spending Add to Hawaii’s Economy?” which came out in early June. In fact, while reading (okay, perusing) the 52-page report, I learned five funny things about Hawaii’s growing addiction to the money that surrounds our nation’s all-but-unstoppable legions and war machines:
1. There are currently more than 75,000 service members and DOD personnel in the state today. Of those, nearly two-thirds (48,000) are active duty, 18,000 are civilians and the rest are National Guard or reserves. This is of course down from the stratospheric number of service members stationed here back in the From Here to Eternity days, but is considerably more than the 56,000 personnel stationed here in 1999.
2. The money spent by those service members and on militar
Comments
comments