MacDill: Tampa's Secret Headquarters

At the southern tip of the Interbay Peninsula, on a wedge of land between Tampa Bay and Hillsborough Bay, sits an Air Force base that most Tampa residents drive past without thinking much about.

MacDill Air Force Base was established in the years before World War Two and has served various functions across the decades: bomber base, fighter wing, training command. What makes it unusual in the present day is the pair of commands headquartered there, both of which are among the most consequential military organizations in the world.

United States Central Command, known as CENTCOM, was established at MacDill on January first, nineteen eighty-three, by President Reagan as the successor to the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force. CENTCOM is responsible for American military operations across twenty-one countries stretching from Egypt to Kazakhstan, encompassing the entirety of the Middle East and Central Asia. Every major American military engagement in that region for the past forty years has fallen under this command: the Gulf War in nineteen ninety-one, the invasion of Afghanistan in two thousand one, the invasion of Iraq in two thousand three, and the continuing operations that followed.

Also headquartered at MacDill is United States Special Operations Command, SOCOM, responsible for the country's elite special operations forces across all branches.

The generals who commanded American wars in the Middle East, from Norman Schwarzkopf to Tommy Franks to David Petraeus to Lloyd Austin, all worked from Tampa. The decisions that shaped the lives of tens of millions of people across the Middle East were made in a building that looks, from the outside, like any other Air Force administrative structure.

Tampa has a bar district. It has a pirate festival. It has Ybor City on a Friday night. None of those things make the news the way the decisions made at MacDill have made the news. The city and the command exist in parallel, mostly invisible to each other.