Although San Antonio is best-known for the ill-fated 19th-century battle at the Alamo, the city has a vibrant and rapidly growing 21st-century military- and federal-contractor presence.
The city recorded slightly more than 89,000 military and civilian contractor jobs in 2006, a figure that is expected to soar in the coming years from Base Realignment and Closure closings elsewhere. “There is an extraordinary influx of people, construction [and] new groups coming into San Antonio,” said Jim Poage, president and chief executive officer of the San Antonio Technology Accelerator Initiative, a nonprofit that helps find funding for local technology companies.
“Some of the last numbers I heard were [that] around 15,000 people would be coming into San Antonio as a result of BRAC activity — people with jobs,” he said. Their families would swell that number. “We’re the seventh-largest city in the U.S., so I don’t think there’ll be a problem absorbing that influx.”
The Bureau of Economic Analysis placed 61,388 civilian and military jobs in the area during 2005, the most recent year for which statistics were available nationally.
Central to San Antonio’s military presence is the Brooke Army Medical Center. The 450-bed health care facility houses the Army’s Institute of Surgical Research, which studies new treatments for trauma victims. The center also serves the area’s numerous military installations, including Camp Bullis, Camp Stanley, Fort Sam Houston, and Lackland and Randolph Air Force bases.
In October, the city broke ground on a $47 million expansion of Brooks City Base, a major center for the study of aerospace medicine formerly called Brooks Air Force Base.
“This is a very military-friendly city but not one that I would characterize as a military city,” Poage said. “We have a lot of military presence — and no doubt it’s a huge economic driver — but that’s not the major driver of San Antonio,” he said, citing the city’s universities, AT&T’s headquarters and the presence of key units of Lockheed Martin Corp., Pratt and Whitney Corp.
