The Largest Marine Base on Earth

Just north of the town of Twentynine Palms, past where the pavement gives out, lies the largest Marine Corps base in the world. It is called the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, and it sprawls across roughly a thousand square miles of open Mojave Desert, an expanse of live fire ranges bigger than some small states. Its military life started in World War Two.

In nineteen forty-two the airfield here became Condor Field, where the Army Air Forces trained pilots during the war, before the program closed. The Navy took it over, and then on August twentieth, nineteen fifty-two, it became a Marine Corps training center. Its enormous size is exactly the point.

Nowhere else can the Marines maneuver so many troops, aircraft, tanks, and artillery together with live ammunition across such vast, empty terrain. During the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, units cycled through here for realistic desert warfare training in exercises nicknamed Mojave Viper, and large scale training continues today as the Integrated Training Exercise. Thousands of active duty Marines and sailors are stationed at the base, and many more pass through every year to train before they deploy.