On this day 25 years ago (Commentary Thread)

[Homer]

Oh yes, the tethered aerostat site out by garden canyon!

I’m betting it and the other sites would have picked up their original purpose of cruise missile detection very quickly.

Once hostilities with Mexico start, I could see the perimeter getting expanded very quickly down past miller’s peak and the Coronado memorial to keep direct fire off the aerostat site. Naco probably gets evacuated and becomes part of an expanded security zone south of the border to deny the Naco Hwy/92 junction, rail lines, and the the high ground around Bisbee once Mexico enters the fray. The main defensive positions are probably along the San Pedro along the Miller’s Peak/Huachuca Complex to Patagonia, with at least the initial intent of denying penetration up the 92/San Pedro mobility corridor to the whetstone junction and the I-10 junction.

You could hold the Huachuca area pretty easily against anything other than mountain and/or air assault trained light infantry without a lot of trouble. Any force coming in from the south between Patagonia and Lowell has to contend with some pretty gnarly terrain. Rock drops or other blocking obstacles are very viable on the mountain roads and passes, and even infantry movement is canalized. Moving mounted forces across at Naco requires you to negotiate the San Pedro (the riparian area and channel is the obstacle, not so much the river) or fight through the Bisbee/Lowell Area. The other mounted avenue of approach is through the Miracle Valley Area, but to negotiate that you’re going to have to fight through Sierra Vista and the wadi complexes south of town while exposed to potential enfilading fire and masked indirect fires from the west. North of there you get a little break until the Huachuca city/whetstone area. Envelopment from the west is possible once the green valley/sahuarita area is secured, but even then you’ll still have a mountain fight to break through the passes to the 83/82 mobility corridor.

The problem is it doesn’t really get you much. The prizes are the mobility corridors along I-10, the population center in Tucson, the active copper mines around green valley, and the agricultural areas of the Santa Cruz basin. Most of them are outside the immediate area of Huachuca and squarely in the crosshairs of the forces moving north on 19 from Nogales. Unless there is another compelling need, Huachuca and Cochise county could be very easily isolated and bypassed, at least initially.