By Jim Camden / Staff writer

The American military is a key part of the Inland Northwest community and economy, and has been for nearly 200 years.

The region's largest employer is the U.S. Air Force, which flies air refueling tankers out of Fairchild Air Force Base, about 10 miles west of Spokane.

Those KC-135 tankers are the gray, four-engine jets that can be seen landing and taking off north of the more brightly painted commercial airliners using Spokane International Airport.

These flying gas stations look very much like a 707, but the KC-135s are easy to spot. They have a long pipe with little wings just below the tail Ñ the "boom" that is used to pass fuel to another plane while both are flying hundreds of miles an hour.

Fairchild has about 60 tankers total for its Air Force and Air National Guard units. Although the exact numbers are classified, dozens of those planes, as well as hundreds of flight and ground forces, are now overseas for the war on terror and the buildup in the Persian Gulf.

During the last Gulf War in 1991, tankers from Fairchild were regularly in the air refueling the fighters and bombers attacking Iraq. For the last dozen years, they've been rotating through the Middle East to help enforce the No-Fly zones.

About 4,200 people work at Fairchild, although relatively few actually fly the planes. The majority work at other jobs, like maintaining the planes and buildings, handling the fuel, providing security, medical care, food service, housing and administrative help. People from the base are regularly sent overseas to do all of those things as well as fly planes.

Fairchild is very much like a separate city, with its own roads, houses, stores, churches and even a grade school. It is also home to the Air Force's Survival School. All flight crews must attend courses at the school, where they learn how to avoid capture if they are shot down and how to survive captivity if they are taken prisoner.

As part of their training, flight crews are taken to remote locations around the Inland Northwest, where they learn to "live off the land" Ñ which can include eating bugs and worms.

Washington state has one of the nation's highest concentrations of military and naval bases. One of the nation's main Army bases, Fort Lewis, is near Tacoma. It has more than 20,000 soldiers, including infantry, tank and special forces units.

Aircraft carriers, amphibious ships and nuclear submarines have homes in ports around the Puget Sound. Although the Inland Northwest is between two mountain ranges, it also has a small naval base near Bayview, Idaho, where new designs for submarines are tested in the deep waters of Lake Pend Oreille. Sixty years ago, one of the Navy's biggest training centers was located at the south end of that lake, at what is now Farragut State Park.

McChord Air Force Base, which has transport planes that carry soldiers where they are needed, is located near Fort Lewis.

Another air base, Mountain Home, located near Boise, has a special Air Force unit that includes bombers, fighters and the tankers needed to refuel them.

But the bases housing full-time, or "active duty," forces are only part of the region's connection to the military. About half of the nation's military strength is in the National Guard and Reserves, where members typically train for one weekend each month and spend about two weeks a year on special duty.

The guard and the reserves are the modern equivalent to the nation's first armed forces, the militia. Most members have civilian jobs, but can be ordered into the active duty Ñ known as a call up Ñ for special circumstances like a local emergency or a war.

Guard and reserve units are located throughout the region. Spokane has separate centers for the Army Reserves and the Navy and Marine Reserves, and for its Army and Air National Guard units. They include groups who specialize in artillery or tanks, building bridges or running hospitals, and providing security for harbors and ports.

Depending on the job they do while in uniform, other reservists might report to a center in Colville, Medical Lake or Post Falls, or travel to Seattle or Boise.

As the nation gets closer to a war, more reservists and guard members are activated, to expand the total force of the nation's military.

In January, for example, about 100 Army reservists based in Spokane were part of a Combat Support Hospital unit that was called up for two years of service. About 100 members of an Idaho National Guard unit in Post Falls were activated to provide additional security for Mountain Home Air Force Base because many base security police have been sent overseas.