Not all of us military related personnel are 20 somethings spending minuscule paychecks on largely undesirable things. I'm a military spouse who actually works for IBM and is working on my PhD in information science. While I realize I'm not necessarily the norm, I do live here on base so I have a bit more understanding than most who have never been here or in this situation would. The towns here that are in direct proximity to the bases are actually a lot better than many of the other towns around the U.S mostly because you can't put a base in the middle of no where on an island since the island as a whole is in the middle of no where and it isn't that big to begin with.
That said, they did an economic study here on what would happen if they did a drawdown of troops:
"Under the Army’s 2020 Force Structure Realignment, potentially 20,000 soldiers and 30,000 family members could be forced to leave.
On top of the nearly 20,000 soldiers, another 3,053 direct contract jobs and 3,936 indirect jobs are at stake. Together, they make up roughly 4 percent of Hawaii’s labor force. With a move like this, officials say Hawaii’s economy could lose out on $1.3 billion."
http://khon2.com/2014/11/14/ar...
That is a much bigger impact than you would think being that the only real money makers here on the islands are tourism and food exports including Dole and Monsanto. There is no real economy beyond that.
I also know some of the people who are actually a part of the team working on the telescopes here. They in no way want to do any harm to the natives or native lands. That said, the natives go back and forth a lot in what they want or choose to promote from one issue to another. The telescope project simply provides a face to the "foreign" institution that they can fight against at the moment. Being an anthropologist, I did of course research as much as I could when I got here about the natives. There is no denying that the acts perpetrated against the then standing monarchy of the Hawaiian islands where underhanded, however, that particular ruling class was not the long standing establishment many would have you believe. The islands were a part of many hostile take overs between warring tribes long before Captain Cook ever landed there.
The real issue at hand is how poorly the island natives are doing in comparison to the prosperity that surrounds them in the form of 5 star resorts and million dollar estates of the rich and famous (http://www.ksbe.edu/_assets/spi/pdfs/reports/demography_well-being/05_06_5.pdf); the infrastructure on the outskirts of the island where there is no tourism to support it is crumbling into the ocean (http://khon2.com/2015/04/28/portion-of-crumbling-kamehameha-highway-in-kaaawa-to-be-repaired/); and the fact that there is really no such thing as affordable homes (http://www.hawaiibusiness.com/the-high-cost-of-affordable-housing/). The telescope project is simply a way to get their voice heard when everyone turns a deaf ear and blind eye to all of the other maladies occurring at a much more local level.
