Pentagon pushed to use vast swath of desert wildlife refuge ‘primarily’ for military purposes, draft bill says

By Dino Grandoni and Juliet Eilperin
11/3/2019, 2:50:13 p.m.

The U.S. Air Force is seeking to assert control over as much as two-thirds of a wildlife refuge in Nevada for training troops and testing weapons, according to a legislative proposal sent by military planners to the Department of the Interior and obtained by The Washington Post.

The military’s Nevada Test and Training Range already encompasses much of a vast stretch of southern Nevada desert originally set aside for bighorn sheep, desert tortoise and other wildlife. But the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service retains primary authority over the refuge to halt military drills that would otherwise disturb key habitat for plants and animals.

The draft legislation would instead carve out 1.1 million acres of Desert National Wildlife Refuge to be used “primarily for the military purposes” and only “secondarily” as a nature preserve. The military wants to add as much as 260,000 acres of the refuge — the largest in the contiguous United States — to the testing range.

In a statement, the Air Force said it is working with Interior officials to amend the proposed legislation and the version obtained by The Post is “not the current draft.”

The Air Force says it needs the extra space as a safety buffer for the testing of new and more powerful weapons and no new areas would be bombed, adding it plans to physically disturb no more than 35 acres in the expanded range

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