METHODOLOGY: TOTAL POPULATION OF MILITARY PERSONNEL AND DEPENDENTS STATIONED IN THE DAKOTAS, 1955–1995
GRAND FORKS AFB, ELLSWORTH AFB, and Minot AFB (henceforth referred to as GF, EW, and MT, respectively) had, in 1970, combined military and civilian populations of 10,474, 5,805, and 12,077. No census data is present before 1970, which presents a significant difficulty, since during the 1970s, the US military was in the process of becoming an all-volunteer force. The overall estimate of three hundred thousand is thus based on extending the following estimate model for the 1970s, to the four-decade period of the Cold War, with assumptions that the 1960s and 1980s had similar population numbers, but that the periods from 1955 to 1960 and from 1990 to 1995 were lower. It also does not account for air force personnel deployed to Vietnam and then replaced temporarily, some of whom returned to the base but some of whom were killed in action. By definition, it also does not include the numbers of military personnel and their families who have been assigned to bases on the Northern Plains between 1995 and 2019.
MT AFB will be used as an example to demonstrate the model. Rough breakdown of the USAF officer-to-enlisted ratio is 1-to-5,1 with 84.9 percent of the officers and 47.5 percent of the enlisted being married and the average military family having two children.2 As such, MT AFB has 9,822 enlisted (+ families) and 2,857 officers (+ families) (this rather imprecise calculation accounts for most of the uncertainty). Due to longer contracts of the officers (especially so before the transition to the all-volunteer model), the theoretical turnover rate for the officers every four years is 25 percent, in comparison with the 75 percent of the enlisted (little to no hard figures are available regarding this). At this time, due to switching to the all-volunteer model, reductions in force (RIF) affected all three AFBs. For example, the complement of GF AFB was reduced from 10,474 to 9,390 by 1980. RIFs are handled much the same way as the turnover rates. Total RIF is divided by ten (an annual model), with 75 percent of the result being subtracted from the enlisted (+ families) figure and the 25 percent from the officers (+ families) figure. After plugging MT AFB into the model, the resulting data indicated that 33,020 personnel and family members rotated through MT AFB over the ten-year span between 1970 and 1980. Taking into account that, at the time, roughly a full third of the USAF was stationed overseas (Norway, Germany, etc.), under the staggered long/short CONUS/overseas tour system,3 the full figure for MT AFB is 40,001.
After plugging the values of all AFBs into the model individually, the final range for all three bases for the period from 1970 to 1979 is 85,741–87,941. The difference is accounted for by the discrepancy between the predicted values (as arrived to by the multiplication of the married personnel by three on account of the average size of the military families of the period) and the observed values (as in the figures present on the US Census data for the three AFBs). The final range is arrived at by subtracting the discrepancy from the final high-end estimate to get a clearer picture regarding the figure of personnel and families rotated through the AFBs in question.