Far from Northeast Pennsylvania, missiles on navy ships corrode and rust from the sea’s salt.
Tobyhanna Army Depot employees travel to the vessels to do basic repairs. Once the ships dock, the salty missile launchers come off and are taken to the depot in Monroe County.
"We give them the full repair and then get them back out to those ships where they're needed. And so a lot of the big work happens here, and it's tedious, right?,” said Danielle Weinschenk, the depot’s Public Affairs Officer.
She’s standing near a towering Rolling Airframe Missile Launcher. The matte blue frame is stripped to bare metal. Basketball-sized holes where the missiles launch are empty. Yellow tape and plastic protects areas of the launcher’s circular platform. The area is loud as employees sandblast off paint and hand sand smaller areas.
"Then we're painting it, we're touching it up. We're getting it back to where it needs to go, to be integrated with the other parts of the system and then sent off," she said. "So there's a lot of moving pieces here, and we need a lot of people to help keep all those 2,300 different jobs straight."
The depot is on 1,200 acres in Coolbaugh Twp. The facility is part of the United States Military’s organic industrial base. About 3,000 employees do work that support all six branches of the United States Armed Forces and beyond. Some employees work off the depot and around the world.
Employees worry about the future of the depot after conflicting correspondence from the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The department’s goal within the Trump Administration is to create a more efficient federal government. That has meant lay-offs for many federal workers.
“Are times challenging now? Sure ... we've been through that before and, and we'll work through it. It's nothing that we can't overcome," said Deputy Commander Rob Lantka II.
Training, housing, communications
The property in the Poconos was first leased by the Army as a field artillery site in 1912.
"At the time, it was the only place within the state of Pennsylvania where you could live fire a cannon," said Weinschenk.
Soldiers trained there, including, by some historical accounts, a young Dwight D. Eisenhower.
“I can't guarantee the provenance of that," she said.
The depot was a site for the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Great Depression that began in 1929.
Then it was briefly a German Prison of War camp during World War II. Aircraft were next repaired at the property.
The Tobyhanna Signal Depot officially opened on Feb. 1, 1953 to fix communications and electronics equipment for the military that could not be easily replaced.
Fast forward to today: Technology has changed and so has the depot.
In June, Tobyhanna will open its microelectronics facility. They’ll repair and manufacture circuit cards, often called chips, on post.
"Which is a huge initiative for the Department of Defense, and we're really leading the way in that,” Weinschenk said.
Those chips help power nearly everything with an electric component. That extends to technology used by the military. There was a global chip shortage during the pandemic, which led to delays across industries.
"And just as we felt that as consumers with private industry, we felt it as well within the Department of Defense. And so yes, there was a sense of urgency that came down through Department of Defense leadership. There was funding made available to establish capability where we knew that there was not that capability within the industrial base to provide that support,” said Kristyn Smith, the depot’s chief of staff.
Tobyhanna is part of the country’s organic industrial base. Twenty-three facilities across the country make up the base, including the Scranton Army Ammunition Plant, which is about 24 miles away from the depot in Lackawanna County.
"From an ability to take on additional workload, expand the mission, I will just say Tobyhanna stands ready to support. We know we have the talented population in Northeastern Pennsylvania with the skill sets that we need to support if there were to be additional opportunities for us here, and certainly we have the space and facilities to support that as well," Smith said.
The height of Tobyhanna’s operations was in 2010. They had 6,000 employees and $1 billion in orders from the Department of Defense, said Smith.
The depot's typical workload today is about $500 million across its various customers, which includes all branches of the U.S. Armed Forces as well as other government agencies and allies across the world, according to Weinschenk.
The depot's work is funded by the Department of Defense’s (DOD) working capital fund. That means Congress does not directly allocate any money to fund the Tobyhanna Army Depot. Rather, its services are funded through defense dollars from other agencies — such as how the Navy pays Tobyhanna to fix their missiles.
"Because of that, we have to operate like a small business," Weinschenk said. "If we don't have customers coming to us with orders, then we don't have money or need people, and so we operate as close to a private small business within the DOD as there exists.”
They live and breathe government efficiency and are well postured to exist within the current administration, she added.
"As we think about some of the things that are happening in the federal government right now, they're instinctual to who we are as an organization," Weinschenk said. "We've always been focused on effectiveness and efficiency, because we've had to be because that is our our business structure.”
Depot updates
The gated campus in the Poconos is sprawling. Light yellow buildings, almost the color of sand, line a grid of marked streets through the depot. Employees walk, bike and drive carts to the many different buildings. Windows are sparse. The work instead is sometimes confidential.
Over the last decade the depot has spent $900 million to modernize its facilities, infrastructure and equipment.
Those upgrades set Tobyhanna apart from the rest of the facilities in the industrial base, said Lankta.
Old copper lines were ripped out and upgraded to updated fiber lines. Better lighting, HVAC and air quality was created in the tactical end item repair facility.
The current radar campus is expanding. The depot is adding new new testing pads and spaces and a testing tower for one of its Marine Corps radar projects
"When this is done in the next five to seven years, it's really going to make us the radar destination ... really in the United States, and so we're super pumped about that," said Weinschenk.
Much of that work has been done by local companies.
"That's a significant amount of money that has been infused in Northeastern Pennsylvania,” said Smith.
The Northeast Pennsylvania Alliance calculates that Tobyhanna has a $2.4 billion impact in the region, added Lankta. He said for every job at the depot, it provides at least two jobs in the local economy. Tobyhanna supports around 6,000 jobs locally.
With modernization, comes efficiency for not just their mission and clients but also their employees. They've co-located employees for work with similar technologies.
Take for example, antennas.
"They all go into radar systems. But as opposed to having a group of people who could work on radar A and radar B and radar C, we have people that are really flexible and dynamic and agile," Weinshenk said. “What that does is that really empowers our employees to gain additional skill sets. It also helps us be more efficient and effective, because we have people who can fit in a lot of different holes, as opposed to very rigid and inflexible skill sets.”
The depot itself is flexible. During Base Realignment closure efforts Tobyhanna added more work, including from the Air Force.
At the time, Weinschenk said they were questioned if the work could physically fit in the depot facilities.
"You can see where the concrete blocks end and the corrugated sheet metal begins," she said. "We actually raised the roof of this building to accommodate the workload.”
The depot is also efficient with the materials used. Among many industry standards certifications, is their environmental certification. The depot has award-winning sustainability programs.
"Paint thinner, blast media, any type of chemical that can be retained and reused or repurposed, we do. As well as water management. So a lot of effort into making sure that we can recycle water and use as much as possible again as we can," Weinschenk said.
Low morale
In early March, Ned George, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 1647, described morale as low at the depot.
George, an Army veteran, represents the unionized employees. He asked for meetings with U.S. Senators Dave McCormick, a Republican, and John Fetterman, a Democrat; and Republican Congressman Rob Bresnahan, who serves the 8th congressional district where the depot is located.
Bresnahan toured the facilities on March 17.
“The hardworking men and women at the Tobyhanna Army Depot are vital to our military readiness and strength of our local communities,” Bresnahan said in a statement. “As our nation discusses proper allocation of federal resources to ensure mission critical operations and our national security, ensuring the continued operations is a top priority. Our team is in constant communication with the Army and the DoD to ensure the facility’s continued success. I want to assure our community that I will continue to advocate for Tobyhanna and the family-sustaining jobs it provides Northeastern Pennsylvania.”
George commended Bresnahan for visiting Tobyhanna to understand “the vital role Tobyhanna Army Depot’s federal civilian employees play in supporting our nation’s security and strengthening our local economy.”
“We appreciate his time and interest in the dedicated workforce that keeps our military mission ready,” George was quoted saying in the release.
Workforce support
The depot works with local colleges and universities to hire students from those institutions, said Weinshenk. The jobs are high paying. The average salary at Tobyhanna is $83,459.
They also work with Allied Services to employ individuals with intellectual or developmental disabilities in less complex jobs, like janitorial services.
"It's a great opportunity to make sure that all Northeastern Pennsylvanians have equal and meaningful employment," Weinschenk said.
They also partner with the National Technical Institute for the Deaf.
“A number of those students have gone on to find employment here … It's just, I think, made us a better organization, because we've, you know, we've had the opportunity to learn American Sign Language and had the opportunity to look at some of our processes through the lens of somebody else.”
The depot also is a leader in safety standards.
"We want to keep people safe, and we want to keep them employed. We want to keep them here. And so one of the ways you do that is by keeping them physically safe," she said.
Tobyhanna supports their employees in different ways.
Employees can receive around $10,000 a year in tuition reimbursement. They also have an employee wellness center, where they can seek help for physical or mental health issues.
“We also take great care to be good stewards of our employees and the people that dedicate their lives to serving here, whether it's in a uniform or not," she said.
The depot is a maze. With employees working on different projects throughout the campus. Weinschenk briskly walks through the facility, saying 'hi' to her fellow employees and pointing out the various missions employees work on and where the modernization projects are happening.
Turn a corner and sewing machines quickly tap. Employees make sheaths for soldiers' uniforms in the equipage and composite area.
"For some of this equipment we're actually manufacturing cables as well that we can then take over to our packaging center to have tested," she said. "And so our customers can get everything they need right here under this roof. And that's why Rob said that could be kind of hard to replicate elsewhere in the DOD.”
Walk up a set of stairs into a small trailer above that area, and Tobyhanna is creating cabinets designed to house cables and cords for the electronics they repair and carving military emblems into command room tables.
"We ended up building this whole thing, and it just kind of opened Pandora's box," supervisor Brandon Pauselli said of a large long table engraved with the different military branches' emblems. "And we've been doing stuff all around the country, really engraved stuff like this ... it ... definitely opened up our window of opportunity. You know, we could do so much more than just wood. We could do metal, aluminum."
Pauselli also discussed a mission on the southern border that supports an organization contributing to border security.
"We have our hands on a lot of different things that the administration is doing right now, and we're really proud to do that," Weinschenk said.
The bigger picture
Being part of the military industrial base comes with more of an obligation than a privately owned defense company.
Smith said it was essentially created as an insurance policy for the defense department.
“It's that there is an investment by our government into our facilities to ensure that there are personnel that are trained ready to provide that support in a moment's notice, if required," she said.
At any moment, Tobyhanna employees can stop their work and focus on a current conflict or war.
It was a lesson learned during World War II, when the nation’s economy shifted towards the war effort.
"When you read some of the history books, what they say is, the reason that the Allies won World War II was because of the industrial base, because they were able to repair and manufacture tanks faster than the opposing forces, right? And so that is what the industrial base is for," Lankta said.
When they’re not in a wartime environment, it’s up to industrial base to keep costs low for the military.
"To remain competitive, to keep that relevancy and provide that readiness to the warfighter," he said.
Weinshenk said the depot has a motto.
“We are Tobyhanna Army Depot and there's nothing that we wouldn't do for American heroes," she said.
