r/politics • u/sweatycat New York • 1d ago

California to Negotiate Trade With Other Countries to Bypass Trump Tariffs

https://www.newsweek.com/california-newsom-trade-trump-tariffs-2055414
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u/Aliensinmypants 1d ago

Legitimately, it'll be interesting to see how much of the military listens to orders to take action against America and how much of the military is based in California

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u/cg415 1d ago edited 1d ago

Well, there are 20,000 members of the CA army national guard, and 5,000 members of the CA Air National Guard, which are controlled by the governor to a certain extent, but which are still part of the Army/Air Force, and ultimately controlled by them and the president. But, the members are all from California. There's also the 1,000 members of the CA state guard, which is a militia controlled only by the governor, unlike the national guard. It's mostly comprised of former military and in practice acts as backup for the national guard. Only a few states have these, and CA is the only one that does weapons training (as of a few years ago, at least).

As for military bases, there are a whole lot of them in California. Multiple large bases each, for the Army, Marines, Navy, Air Force, National Guard, and Coast guard, as well as smaller supporting bases and airfields, and dozens of coast guard stations. Notably, one of the largest Army depots is in CA (the Sierra army depot), which has tens of thousands of armored vehicles in storage, among other things. The main navy base for the US Pacific fleet (2nd largest navy base in the world), as well as some major training centers for the Marines and Army are also in CA.

So, there are probably tens of thousands of US military members in CA at any given time, along with 1.3 million veterans who live there (as of 2022).

Also, CA has the Lawrence-Livermore national laboratory, which researches and develops nuclear weapons.

CA also has some oil fields, plenty of refining capacity, and some other resources that could be useful for military stuff.

In a vacuum, CA has everything it needs to be military superpower. Of course, the US government controls all of the existing military stuff, so that's not much of a help in the event of secession...but at least some of the soldiers would defect to CA, and if they managed to be fast and organized enough, they could take control of some serious assets.

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u/TrumpDesWillens 23h ago

Whatever we don't have, we will just buy from overseas since we are the 6th largest econ in the world.