Roughly between President Clinton’s “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and September 2001, people who notice such things worried about an expanding cultural gap between military and civilian society. Some went so far as to call the gap a chasm, and seemed to be working themselves toward an abyss when the nation entered what became essentially a permanent state of war and the issue collapsed back to merely a gap, and not a very interesting one at that.

Before then, how-ever, the situation was considered serious. Defense Secretary William Cohen summarized in 1997: “One of the challenges for me is to somehow prevent a chasm from developing between the military and civilian worlds, where the civilian world doesn’t fully grasp the mission of the military, and the military doesn’t understand why the memories of our citizens and civilian policy-makers are so short, or why the criticism is so quick and so unrelenting.”

The gap noticers should go back on at least ravine-alert status based on last week’s Department of Defense base-closure announcement and, in particular, two maps provided by the Brunswick Naval Air Station Task Force in support of its home base. The first, from 1994, shows nine glowing dots representing active-duty military airfields across the Northeast; the second shows a single dot, in Brunswick, as of 2005. Eight of the nine are gone and Brunswick, though it won’t close under the Department of Defense proposal, will be made puny, a base with two airstrips and no airplanes. A parallel BRAC dot, the last naval base in New England, is also scheduled for closure in Groton, Conn., with 8,460 military jobs lost.

You may see a political conspiracy in the Defense proposal sent to the Base Realignment and Closure Commission. Blue states, those that went for John Kerry, would lose a total of 28,000 military and civilian jobs through this plan, while red states, those that helped elect George Bush, would gain 15,000. But the losses merely follow the pattern of the BRAC rounds since 1988, during which New England active-duty personnel dropped from 30,600 to 12,700 – Maine lost half its number then, Massachusetts lost three-fourths, according to The Boston Globe. I don’t see a conspiracy, but I do see bad policy for the military and for the rest of us.

Strategically, closing bases that have proven themselves over decades and are needed in an uncertain war on terrorism doesn’t make sense, as Maine’s congressional delegation has spent the week vigorously explaining. Less noticed is that the closure proposal ensures the generalized military-civilian gap will be felt especially in this specific region because of the continuing reductions. The result of such a decision will be a military that is a mystery for too many of us in blue states who already know too little about it and a military that may become more suspicious of a region it barely inhabits.

This separation didn’t begin with BRAC, with the 1990s or even the 1890s. Samuel P. Huntington, in his 1957 book “The Soldier and the State,” traced it to post-Civil War. “Withdrawn from the mainstream of American life,” he wrote, “realizing that their existence depended upon the probability or at least, the possibility of war, and that war was only likely if human nature contained a substantial streak of cussedness, the military found little in common with the doctrines of optimism and progress. By the turn of the century, when other professions, such as law and the ministry had thoroughly adjusted to the liberal climate, the military were alone in their uncompromising conservatism.”

Liberal and conservative can live well together, indeed should live together to live well. This isn’t easy, but by doing so, they come to appreciate each other’s humanity and, for the most part, good intentions. Diversity may bring dissent, but a home team can count on a unified rooting section not only because, in the military’s case, of the economic lift it provides, but because support comes naturally to the proximate.

If a cultural gap between military and civilian life already is a worrisome thing, there can be no advantage in ordering it widened in the areas where the gap may be already most apparent. One of the BRAC criteria asks whether existing and potential community infrastructure can “support forces, missions and personnel.” It is a stretch to say community infrastructure includes the civilian knowledge, understanding and empathy for military personnel, but it is a stretch profitably and necessarily made. The military is, after all, overseen by civilians (even those from the Northeast) who must make, as the continued fighting in Iraq shows, life-and-death decisions on a tremendous scale.

The South, broadly, is not only warmer for year-round golf but warmer to an expansive military. A pro-military culture there creates even more comfort than its short-sleeve temperatures, so it wouldn’t be surprising that the generals and admirals passing along recommendations to Secretary Rumsfeld, when confronted with a close call on base closure, chose to lean south much more often.

Segregating the military from a large part of the nation it is sworn to protect is clumsy policy, just as it is dangerous policy to segregate civilians from a military they must support, direct and, at some level, trust.

Todd Benoit is the editorial page editor of the Bangor Daily News.