Maxley

§1 · The prompt

On 30 September 2026 the Secretary of War signed a memo launching a nationwide competition to site the “Next Great American Base”: a “highly hardened joint military installation within the Homeland,” off the commercial grid, with its own power, autonomous systems and air defenses (reported by National Defense Magazine and My Base Guide). The second report gives 15,000 to 25,000 troops, from the Secretary’s speech at Quantico; that figure is secondary reporting and I have not seen the speech. The selection plan was due 14 October and, as of the 19 October report, was not public. The memo, as reported, names no site, cost or opening date.

The same report quotes a defense-communities executive: housing, child care, schools and health care are connected; communities should be in the planning from the start; and the department “may want to consider building a few smaller, more geographically dispersed installations.” Everything on this page follows from taking that seriously.

§2 · The thesis

1. Urban, not underground. The threats named are drones, cyberattack and loss of the grid. Meeting them needs dispersal, independent power and protected cores, not burial; and families need schools and clinics that do not go underground well.
2. Families are in the plan from day one. A base of this size is a small city, so it is sized as one (§3).
3. About 100,000 people, built in about five years. The only precedent for a state-built capital at that pace is Brasília (§6), which is a warning as much as a model.
4. Linked across four counties so that no single town absorbs the whole load (§4, §5).
5. It becomes a hub. People and jobs gather around it, so 100,000 is a seed, not a cap.

§3 · Sizing the people

Ratios come from the 2024 active-duty family profile (Military OneSource): 1,495,107 family members, of whom 621,400 are spouses and 869,007 are children; 47.6% of members are married; children are 41.1% ages 0 to 5, 32.5% ages 6 to 11 and 22.6% ages 12 to 18. This page assumes about 1.3 million active-duty members to turn those counts into per-member ratios (family 1.15, children 0.67); that 1.3 million is not confirmed in the source. Estimates, not measurements.

About half the troops are unmarried, so the town needs barracks and small apartments next to family housing, not a barracks core with a family ring around it. The 100,000 target is roughly twice the military-only figure, leaving room for civilian staff, contractors, teachers, clinicians and the businesses that follow; that allowance is my assumption, not a Defense Department number.

§4 · Four counties

Essex and Passaic figures are from Census QuickFacts (Essex, Passaic); Bergen and Hudson 2020 counts are from citypopulation.de, a different source, so the four are not strictly comparable. The four together held about 3.07 million people in 2020. Maxley’s 100,000 is about 3.3% of that; the 32,000 to 54,000 military residents are about 1.0% to 1.8%. Split four ways that is roughly 8,000 to 13,500 military residents per county. Shares of population are not capacity: county housing vacancy, school seats and flood exposure are not checked.

Newark as the core

Newark had an estimated 323,808 residents in July 2025 on 24.14 square miles (about 12,900 per square mile), with 24.4% of units owner-occupied and median rent $1,392 (Census). A Rutgers inventory found about 27 acres of city-owned vacant land suited to affordable housing, 21 for commercial use and 17 for green infrastructure (Rutgers CLiME), about 65 acres. At Newark’s density the 32,000 to 54,000 military residents need roughly 2.5 to 4.2 square miles and 12,000 to 21,000 households (at 2.62 per household). If the other counties take half, about 6,000 to 10,000 units fall in Newark: 95 to 158 units per acre on those 65 acres. That is tower density, and city-owned vacant land alone would not be enough.

§5 · A linked schematic

Reading the schematic: a hardened Newark core with dispersal outward. The labels on the outer districts are guesses from density alone (Passaic, at 2,818 people per square mile, is less dense than Essex at 6,850; those are the only two counties I have density figures for), not findings. The fifth hexagon is deliberately open. The point of the picture is the structure: hexagonal districts, a core, and links.

§6 · What comes from the off-world habitat pages

The hive idea already exists on this site as Hex Habitat Mars: a Mars settlement of hexagonal modules that lock together like a honeycomb, stack upward and stand on legs, marked on that page as a draft. It is a Mars design, not a lunar one. A separate page, WP136, Living in a Moon Habitat, is about the human side of a small lunar crew and is not a hive design. Some of the first carries over to Earth and some does not.

A place to train for the off-world habitats

The author’s idea is that a hive city on Earth could double as the place where people train for the Moon and Mars habitats, since it would already be a working example of clustered living, shared power and shared walls. That is a proposal, not something any agency has said. NASA and the Department of Energy signed an agreement on space nuclear power on 8 October 2026, effective 1 November (NASA release 26-084, 8 Oct 2026, as pasted by the author), and the Pentagon competition asks for independent power on the ground. These are separate efforts; the release says nothing about the base competition, and nothing here shows they are linked. What a shared training habitat would need (crew numbers, who runs it, whether any agency wants one) is not established.

§7 · Brasília, and land

Brasília was built in 41 months, from 1956 to its inauguration on 21 April 1960, with residential areas designed for 500,000 people, a figure reached by 1970; the construction camps became the basis of the satellite cities, 27 of which surround it today, and the project is generally regarded as one of the most expensive in the world (History of Brasília). Three lessons for this sketch: house the construction workforce on purpose, plan the periphery from the first day, and control cost. The Congressional Research Service range quoted in the My Base Guide report, five to seven years or more for military construction, makes five years the optimistic end, and a city also needs teachers and clinicians, who arrive on a different clock from the buildings.

New payroll and new residents raise nearby land values; speculation follows; residents and workers can be priced out. Tools to consider: public or land-trust ownership with leases, reserved workforce housing, and a share of the value the base itself creates. How Brasília handled land tenure is not checked. Buying land near a likely site before it is announced invites conflict-of-interest problems even for a private concept, so the clean version is to assemble public land in the open and publish the plan.

§8 · What is not established

Sources

National Defense Magazine · My Base Guide · 2024 active-duty family demographics · Census: Newark · Census: Essex · Census: Passaic · citypopulation.de · Rutgers CLiME · History of Brasília

Memo (not read by me): media.defense.gov, 30 Sep 2026. Related: Hex Habitat Mars · WP136 · WP137 (not used for any figure here). Companion script: book6/wp138-verify.py.