By Olin Lagon
When the Thirty Meter Telescope was proposed for Maunakea, I pushed back on one assumption that kept coming up. That the mauna was “irreplaceable.”
I am not an astrophysicist, so I asked Dr. John Mather who won the Nobel Prize in Physics and led science on the James Webb Space Telescope for nearly three decades. He explained that ground-based and space-based telescopes do complementary work, and that Webb data combined with other Earth-based observatories can offset the infrared advantage Maunakea holds over sites like La Palma.
Moving TMT was not a retreat from science. It was a viable path forward.
The military is making a similar argument about the Pōhakuloa Training Area. So, is Pōhakuloa really “irreplaceable?”
The military is already training on comparable terrain every day. Fort Bliss and McGregor Range in Texas and New Mexico together cover 1.12 million acres at elevations that overlap with Pōhakuloa’s, beneath one of the largest restricted airspace corridors on the continent.
Peer-reviewed research documents that Idaho’s eastern Snake River Plain, where the Army trains, shares Hawaiʻi’s volcanic geology, including pāhoehoe, ʻaʻā, cinder cones, and lava tubes. The Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center at Twentynine Palms in California includes ancient lava flows geologically similar to our own.
The alternatives are not just geographic. The Army has invested billions in its Synthetic Training Environment, which it describes as allowing more training repetitions than live fire at lower cost and with improved safety, and as essential for replicating complex, large-scale environments.
Demanding better alternatives to Pōhakuloa is not anti-military. It is pro-innovation.
Then there is the question of what this ʻāina is worth. The U.K. pays the Republic of Mauritius roughly $20,000 per acre each year for Diego Garcia. The U.S. pays the Republic of the Marshall Islands around $13,600 per acre on Kwajalein.
These agreements tell us what fair market value looks like when countries negotiate honestly. Apply either rate to Pōhakuloa’s 23,000 leased acres and the number lands between $313 million and $460 million a year.
So, what if the Army moved training to Twentynine Palms tomorrow? Many would call that a win.
But I know it would be devastating for the Twenty-Nine Palms Band, the Chemehuevi, and the other peoples who hold that desert sacred, who know their Oasis of Mara the way we know our wahi pana. They have already had their places taken, fenced off, and bombed. We know what that feels like.
Trading one people’s wounds for another’s is not justice.
So maybe the real question is not about irreplaceability at all, but why 27 million acres of military-controlled land is still not enough? The Army’s own reporting shows that 29% of its infrastructure capacity exceeds its needs. That’s their number, not mine.
One and a half cents per year for 23,000 acres at Pōhakuloa. Somewhere in that number is everything you need to know about how this ʻāina has been valued, and by whom.
Pōhakuloa is irreplaceable. Not as training ground. As ʻāina.
Olin Kealoha Lagon is a technology entrepreneur and loʻi kalo farmer. A military and Peace Corps veteran, he has deep roots in Kānaka-serving organizations. He is a member of OHA’s Technical Advisory Group, which provides guidance to the Board of Trustees on matters related to the military in Hawaiʻi.
