Amazon’s recent announcement that it has chosen two locations for its second headquarters has been greeted with a general deflation of enthusiasm mixed with pique. Despite the Cinderella dreams of the many people who wanted the behemoth to choose a city beyond the Acela corridor, it looks like Amazon will use its magic wand to transform already glutted metropolitan areas into even more glutted metropolitan areas.

Amazon’s landing just outside of Washington, in particular, has some worrisome implications beyond adding to traffic on the beltway and pushing housing prices from being really unaffordable to truly astronomical. Unless Congress and the Defense Department respond quickly, Amazon’s arrival may come at a cost to the U.S. national security apparatus —especially to the Pentagon just up the road.

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