Keesler Air Force Base and the Air Force's Technical Training Mission
Near Biloxi Gulfport, Mississippi
Keesler Air Force Base occupies the eastern side of Biloxi, roughly three thousand acres between the Gulf beach and Biloxi Bay. It is one of the largest training facilities in the United States Air Force and one of the oldest continually operating Air Force bases in the country. It is also, by most measures, one of the largest employers on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.
The base was established in nineteen forty-one, named for Second Lieutenant Samuel Reeves Keesler Junior of Greenwood, Mississippi, who was killed in aerial combat over France in October of nineteen eighteen. Keesler had been one of the Army Air Service's early pilots, trained in the first years when military aviation was still an improvised and extremely dangerous enterprise.
During World War Two, Keesler trained enormous numbers of mechanics, radio operators, and technical specialists for the Army Air Forces. The base's training function expanded rapidly as the war began, and at its peak it was processing tens of thousands of trainees per year. Technical training, rather than combat pilot training, became the base's defining mission.
After the war, Keesler remained a center for electronics and technical training for the Air Force. Today it houses the Second Air Force, which oversees technical training for the entire Air Force, and the Eighty-First Training Wing. The base trains Air Force personnel in a wide range of technical specialties, from cyber operations to weather forecasting to aircraft maintenance.
The base's presence has shaped Biloxi's economy and demographics for more than eighty years. Military personnel and their families form a significant portion of the city's population. The interaction between the base and the surrounding community has been a constant feature of Biloxi's twentieth-century history, through World War Two, Korea, Vietnam, and the post-Cold War era.
