Do the services still give tours of your facility to scouts, etc?

Do they still take the tours?


Just curious.

For some reason, I figured that they stopped doing that during the Vietnam era.

I suppose it would depend on the base, what area of the base, what's kept on that base, etc.

Example: The Air Force probably isn't going to give you, me, or anybody a nice informative tour around the Stealth Bombers any more than the Navy is going to let you take a tour of a nuclear Sub.

I would imagine that unrestricted areas shouldn't be overly difficult to get permission to tour though.
Of course I'd have no idea HOW to get that permission.

every year my battalion had an open house of sorts for family members and we had a boy scout troop show up to see what we played with on a daily basis.

depends more on the CO than anything(short of super secret stuff of course)

Submit a request to the post's HQ and I'm sure you'll get a first class tour.

Quoted: any more than the Navy is going to let you take a tour of a nuclear Sub.

reminds me of the old days when you could drive your boat right up to a (possibly) nuclear sub down in san diego.
A sailor would come out and ask you to stay away from the dock, those subs always freaked me out anyways.
Try that now and your are going to get shot up really quick!

Quoted: Quoted: any more than the Navy is going to let you take a tour of a nuclear Sub. reminds me of the old days when you could drive your boat right up to a (possibly) nuclear sub down in san diego. A sailor would come out and ask you to stay away from the dock, those subs always freaked me out anyways. Try that now and your are going to get shot up really quick!

Hint: They ALL are nuclear.  We haven't had any diesel subs since the late 70s, early 80s.

That's pronounced "nuk-ler".

Quoted: reminds me of the old days when you could drive your boat right up to a (possibly) nuclear sub down in san diego.

Call SubDevGru 5 in San Diego and you can probably get a tour of a sub for your Scout troop.  the troops around here used to get a chance to ride the ships from San Diego to Seal Beach or back.  And that was in the last few years.

Tours are going to be dependent on operational issues.

Quoted: The Air Force probably isn't going to give you, me, or anybody a nice informative tour around the Stealth Bombers any more than the Navy is going to let you take a tour of a nuclear Sub.

Actually, if the Air Force is like the Navy, then you would get to fly a Stealth Bomber!

Let's not forget the incident out at Pearl Harbor where a civilian who was part of a tour group drove a Nuclear sub right through a Japanese fishing boat.

Back in the early 90's I had the pleasure of help host a three-day event for two boy scout troops that came to visit Fort Campbell.  We gave them a shoot-house demo by tarping the floor of our gym and flipped off the lights, they each had a pair of night nision goggles to see how we worked in the dark.  We did the entire demo that way, before-brief and AAR.  It was pretty cool.

They did the SAAS obstable course and we took them out to an M4/ SAW live-fire range where we also gave them a demonstration with sniper weapon systems, smoke, pyro, traps.  

They had a fucking blast.

What you need to do for an in-depth tour/ event of a particular base is find out what they have at the base.  After that you just find a unit that will coordinate with you.  The troop leader used to be a MSG at one of the 5th group battalions, made some connections that way.  Also, if there is going to be any sort of demonstrations given, the unit will probably have to come up with the funding for them on their own.  If you can get it set up so that your visit will coincide with regularly-scheduled-training you'll probably have quite a show in store for you.  

The trick is to get to know someone that is in a position to help you get what you want for whatever tour you want.  Of course the higher the rank of your new friend and the amount of coordination involved will reflect in the quality of event you'll get in the end.

A good start for finding contacts for high-speed events like this would be your local recruiting office.  I can vouch for how this will work in an Army setting, might vary according to service... Here goes: Get a handle on your local recruiter (they'll try to wangle out of helping you at first as they're mostly desk-bound trying to get people in the Army), get them to give you the telephone number to their Battalion headquarters (tell them what you need it for, or they probably won't give you the number), The person you want to talk to at the Battalion level will work in the department usually called APA (basicall Public Affairs, it'll be a civilian in this position probably retired).  Ask how you could get a handle on starting an event at a local Army base.  If they have a motivated civilian willing to coordinate for them, they might want to throw some of that Army funding into a Recruiting event.  At the very least, you could get some contacts out of it to steer you in the right direction.

If you don't find the work worth the trouble, You could show your driver's license at the main gate, get a visitor's pass and go on-post that way.  I suppose you might have fun looking through a fence at someone's motor pool, maybe.

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