☰
In terms of actual acreage, Nellis (3.1 square miles) and Creech (1.9 square miles) Air Force bases, the Naval Air Station in Fallon (12.3 square miles), and the Hawthorne Army Depot (235 square miles) account for a mere 252.3 square miles of Nevada’s total 110,567 square miles (0.00228).
However, if you include the Nevada Test and Training Range around Nellis (4,800 square miles) and the Fallon Training Range (390 square miles), that total grows by a factor of 123. (The Nevada Test Site is controlled by the Department of Energy, not the Department of Defense.) A handful of small restricted military areas add another roughly 28 square miles. So all in all, actual bases and related land add up to approximately 5,470 square miles, which is still less than one-half of one percent.
Now, the military also controls 10,000 square miles of restricted airspace around the Nellis Range and 13,000 square miles of airspace around the Fallon Range, though that doesn’t translate into land area.
A few interesting facts: The annual average 40,000 flights out of Nellis account for 75% of the Air Force’s total training operations; up to 3.6 million pounds of explosives are consumed in the training every year, though we’re told that only 5%-10% of the range is bombed out.
Naval Air Station Fallon hosts the Navy Fighter Weapons School (Top Gun) and trains the best fighter pilots in the world. Its 14,000-foot-long runway is the Navy’s longest and could land the Space Shuttle in an emergency.
The Hawthorne Army Depot is the largest ammunition dump in the world, with 2,400 buildings and structures (with 7.7 million square feet of storage space). The Depot also houses a demilitarization facility on 160 acres that disarms 10 million pounds of explosives annually.