CHARLESTON — The Pentagon is taking steps to rename Joint Base Charleston after Air Force veteran and late U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, according to an internal memo first shared with The Post and Courier.
In a letter dated July 27, Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink ordered staff to begin work with Air Mobility Command and Joint Base Charleston leadership to take “all necessary and appropriate actions” to begin converting the name of the crucial East Coast air base to Joint Base Lindsey Graham.
The letter cited the late senator’s “decades of distinguished service to the United States Congress and the United States Air Force.”
“Senator Graham’s lifelong devotion to the military was shaped by his own military service and his public service in both the United States Senate and the United States House of Representatives,” Meink wrote. “His steadfast advocacy was instrumental in modernizing our military infrastructure and enhancing aviation security, ensuring that Joint Base Charleston remains as one of America’s premier military installations.”
Graham was a powerful advocate for the base, which was established from a number of adjoining North Charleston-based military installations as part of a larger reorganization of Defense Department facilities in 2010.
In the years since, Graham has helped direct hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding to help support the missions there, and was closely associated with a contentious effort to recruit Boeing to move to the area to construct its 787 Dreamliner over unionized Washington state, where the company was based.
In May, Graham helped secure an additional $212 million in funding to enhance Coast Guard readiness at JBC, with the money going to improve the installation’s pier infrastructure and construct new medical and dental facilities on site.
“It is imperative this base has the necessary tools to protect South Carolina’s coastline and prevent deadly drugs, such as fentanyl, from reaching our shores,” Graham said at the time.
Graham served 33 years in the Air Force after law school, including six years of active duty in the 1980s that included a four-year stint as lead prosecutor for the Air Force’s felony case division out of Germany’s Rhein-Main Air Base.
In 1989, he transferred to the South Carolina Air National Guard, where he served a similar role at Columbia-based McEntire Air National Guard Base during the first Gulf War. While in office, he also served two separate deployments in the Middle East, earning commendations from now-retired Gen. David Petraeus, who oversaw U.S. military operations in the region in the late 2000s.
“I am not aware of any other current Member of Congress who, while in office, spent remotely as much time deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Petraeus said after Graham’s 2015 retirement from the military.
Graham was also credited by colleagues for exposing flaws in the military’s drug testing protocols as a young captain in the early 1980s, earning a feature on “60 Minutes” since credited with clearing the names of falsely implicated service members at the time.
“To me, he was much more than a public figure,” Jack Rives, a former Air Force attorney who served alongside Graham, wrote in a tribute shortly after Graham’s death July 11 of a torn aorta. “He was a valued colleague, a trusted friend, and a man I was honored to know.”
Joint Base Charleston makes up more than 50 military commands of all sizes but it is more widely known as the site of the nation’s largest fleet of C-17 cargo jets. It is home to two primary flying units: the active duty 437th Airlift Wing and the Air Force Reserve’s 315th Airlift Wing.
The announcement was quickly praised by state Republican officials and Graham’s former Washington colleagues as well as Republican gubernatorial nominee Alan Wilson, who called it a fitting tribute to Graham’s legacy. But not all agreed.
In a statement to The Post and Courier after the announcement, Air Force veteran and Charleston Democratic state Sen. Ed Sutton said that while Graham was a “tremendous advocate for South Carolina’s military community” who deserved recognition, he believed renaming Joint Base Charleston without local input was “the wrong approach to honoring that legacy.”
Notably, a similar effort to rename the Charleston airport after late Sen. Fritz Hollings in 2019 ended in a compromise brokered locally where only the main terminal was named after him.
“A more fitting tribute would be naming the new Coast Guard facility in North Charleston after Senator Graham, especially given his recent work to secure major federal investment for the Coast Guard mission here,” Sutton said.
“That would honor his legacy without erasing Charleston’s military tradition,” he added.
