The United States Department of Defense (DOD) has decommissioned over one hundred urban installations in the United States alone over the last thirty years through the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) Process. Current scholarship describes the federal closure process and provides snapshots of transition, yet there is very little exploration about what happens after bases close. This omission is significant due to the amount and quality of land transferred, the challenges of financing such complex projects, and the difficulties in incorporating private federal lands into the public ether. The lack of a comprehensive, longitudinal, and interdisciplinary analysis means that urban communities are unable to draw on similar cities' experiences or take national trends into account because there is no systematic information about what kinds of redevelopment take place or which types might work better than others. The result is uninformed redevelopment policy with the capacity to damage cities along many different dimensions‐ economic, environmental, social, educational and beyond. Our work builds knowledge around these issues, by drawing on an original dataset of military base redevelopment supplemented by government documents, key interviews, and media coverage. We debunk several pervasive myths surrounding base closures. Specifically, we present evidence suggesting the Federal government in many cases does not allow its properties to fully devolve to local government or private partners, that projects take on a thematic land use structure and that implementation differs from traditional development projects. Furthermore, we argue many base closures improve cities' hopes for economic growth through redevelopment and that the DOD does not equivocally save money by closing many bases due to the costs of environmental rehabilitation the military must bear. Our arguments represent a new direction for scholarship on this topic and the first step toward identifying national trends for military base redevelopment as well as a foundation for a set of best practices to help cities redevelop mothballed bases that have stalled and struggled.