Berkeley Planning Journal

It is always good to have additional empirical evidence for one's work In her regressions on the relationship between U.S. military procurement spend­ ing and state-level changes in growth rates over the period 1977 to 1986, Elizabeth Bury adds to the body of work confirming a statistically significant and positive correlation between the two. What puzzles us is the interpretation that Bury places on these results, especially her suggestion that they refute our contention about the substantial contribution ofAmerican military preparedness to the economic remapping of the United States. In fact, Bury's formulation comes nowhere near capturing the extent of the phenomena we encompass with our term "the gunbelt."