Despite the ongoing government shutdown in Washington, D.C., Senators met last week to pass a massive annual national defense budget.
This year’s bill includes $4.4 million for a new All-Domain Warfighting Training Complex at Camp Grayling that will teach the latest combat techniques to National Guardsmen across the country.
The camp also received permanent funding for the popular Northern Strike exercise. The bill also included $31.9 million to support a new munitions facility that will be built near the base in Grayling.
Over the last few years, Northern Strike has become one of the largest military exercises in the country, and some of the top military officials in the country are taking notice.
Michigan Senator Gary Peters is a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and is regarded as one of the strongest supporters of Camp Grayling in Washington.
He took the time between contentious negotiations in Washington to talk with Nine and Ten about why Camp Grayling has become such an important focus for the U.S. military.
“I think the last Northern Strike had units from over 30 states, I think close to 36 states,” Peters said. “And you get very specialized kinds of training that’s going to be essential for the military. So it’s really great that Michigan can play such a major role in our country’s national defense.”
Camp Grayling has a few unique features that make it ideal to train for combat that takes place on water, on land, and in the air.
Combine that with our area’s harsh winter conditions, and Peters says, you get the perfect training ground for the next generation of warfighters.
“So you can really do all domain training,” Peters said. “Which is going to be essential, particularly if we deploy troops into the Asian region, that’s going to be air, sea, and land, operation- and all that training can occur in Michigan.”
Military leaders have seen what warfare like this looks like in the snowy fields of Ukraine, but Peters said that years of American support have taken a toll on American stockpiles.
“So many of those supplies we have sent to Ukraine to help the Ukrainians fight for freedom and push back on the illegal aggression from Putin and the Russians,” Peters said. “But we now need to backfill. We need to make sure that we have those systems available to us.”
That need is leading to more investment in northern Michigan.
$30 million of federal support will be going to the new munitions factory in Grayling, and that’s going to help create up to 100 new jobs in the coming years.
“This investment is important,” Peters said. “Not only to ensure that we have the material necessary to protect our soldiers and to fight wars overseas, but also to create jobs in our local communities. And that’s going to be the largest benefit for Northern Michigan as more good-paying jobs are created.”
The new defense bill also included new language that improves transparency for PFAS investigations and remediation efforts, along with continued access to bottled water for community members living near contaminated areas of the base.
“It has always been a source of frustration for me to get the kind of information we need from the Department of Defense,” Peters said. “Let us know in Congress exactly what’s happening on the ground. What progress is being made? And when do they expect to complete the cleanup?”
