Posted on 10/24/2003 8:23:29 PM PDT by inPhase
The hit list taking shape today may be the biggest ever.
Former Sen. Alan Dixon, D-Ill., wishes he had said no in 1994 when then-Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Sam Nunn, D-Ga., called and asked him to oversee the 1995 round of military base closings. Instead, Dixon agreed to take the job as a favor to his former colleague and led what turned out to be the military’s most recent and largest round of shutdowns. “It’s not a fun job. It’s a bad job. I wouldn’t do it again for anything,” says Dixon, adding that one senator who he had considered a friend still won’t talk to him because the commission closed a base in that lawmaker’s state.
Somebody, though, will have to take the job again.
The Pentagon is gearing up for what is likely to be its final shot at realigning the military base structure set up to win the Cold War. Already, the Defense Department has been examining how work can be consolidated at bases that would be used by more than one of the military services. Over the next year the Army, Navy and Air Force will each draw up lists of bases that can be closed or realigned. By the spring of 2005, the Pentagon will hand off those lists to an independent commission that will hold hearings, crunch numbers and compose a final list that must be approved or rejected in its entirety by Congress and the president in the fall of 2005.
The verdict for military communities may be two years away, but the fate of many bases will be determined over the next 12 months. In the past, about 85 percent of the recommendations to shutter bases made by the Pentagon have become law. Indeed, the 2005 base realignment and closure process (known as BRAC) has already begun.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld lobbied Congress two years ago to close more bases, saying the military’s 40 percent personnel reduction since the late 1980s with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War outpaced cuts in infrastructure of only about 20 percent. Rumsfeld has said as much as 25 percent in excess base infrastructure could be eliminated to save several billion dollars annually. Lawmakers eager to free up funds in the Defense budget for new weapons systems and the war on terrorism went along with the proposal. Mindful of losing military jobs in their states, however, they agreed to just a single BRAC round.
... The biggest way this base closing round will differ from its predecessors is that it will be managed in much more of a top-down fashion. In earlier BRACs, the services had substantial leeway in determining which of their bases to target, often frustrating Pentagon efforts to consolidate work or identify types of bases for privatization or closure.
For example, before the 1995 BRAC, Defense created six special joint task forces to find ways bases could be consolidated and operated across services. The groups came up with several recommendations, such as combining the military’s maintenance and repair operations. In November 1994, those recommendations were handed off to the services, which were told to consider them in coming up with their BRAC recommendations. But six months later, when the Defense Department’s list came out, there was no mention of combining depots. The recommendations had been ignored.
DuBois says that will not happen again. “The process needs to start with the presumption of jointness—multiservice and multimission installations—instead of being washed through the services individually,” he says. Last fall, in a memorandum kicking off BRAC 2005, Rumsfeld wrote that a “primary objective [is] to examine and implement opportunities for greater joint activity.” The Pentagon, he said, would review in joint study groups all operations done by more than one service , while the services would only review unique operations. In past rounds, the services reviewed all operations and then handed off their recommendations to the Office of Secretary of Defense, which more often than not rubber-stamped them and sent them to the commission.
Rumsfeld has created two organizations to oversee BRAC. The Infrastructure Executive Council—headed by the deputy Defense secretary and including the secretaries and chiefs of staff at each of the services, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the undersecretary of Defense for acquisition, technology and logistics—will provide policy and oversight. Another organization, the Infrastructure Steering Group, will oversee the joint study groups. The steering group will be headed by the undersecretary of Defense for acquisition, technology and logistics and will include the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the services’ assistant secretaries for installations and environment, the services’ vice chiefs of staff and the deputy undersecretary of Defense for installations and environment. Previous BRACs did not have such high-level oversight, nor were joint reviews a top priority early on.
Last spring, the Infrastructure Steering Group recommended that joint cross-service groups be created to analyze ways work can be shared across the services in six areas: technical, industrial, medical, education, headquarters and support activities, and supply and storage. Those groups, which have already begun meeting, include representatives from each service and are headed by a senior Defense officials with expertise on each group’s functions. For example, the Pentagon’s top scientist, Ronald Sega, director of Defense research and engineering, will oversee the technical group, while the services’ surgeons general will head the health group.
... The Air Force will determine whether its plan to lease commercial refueling aircraft would allow it to consolidate its tanker bases.
... Meanwhile, the Air Force raised eyebrows among some depot backers in August when the service restructured its acquisition programs and moved procurement responsibility away from its three depot commanders. The Air Force has said the move was not a precursor to closing the depots, and in fact, it allows them to better focus on their core repair missions.
The three depots that repair tracked ground vehicles—the Anniston, Ala., Army Depot; the Red River Army Depot in Texarkana, Texas; and the Marine Corps Logistics Base in Albany, Ga.—also could be consolidated. In 1995, the Army wanted to close Red River, but the BRAC commission opted to keep it open, shifting work there from other depots.
... CLOSING IN
The efficiency and operational necessity of military bases won’t be the only factors under consideration as the Pentagon weighs closure and consolidation decisions. Another factor will be what happens outside the walls of bases.
When DuBois first worked for Rumsfeld, as a staff assistant during the secretary’s first tour at the Pentagon, the term “encroachment” never came up in discussions of military facilities. Two decades later, the Joint Chiefs of Staff raised the issue with Rumsfeld within his first two weeks on the job—and it has come up regularly ever since. Encroachment is used to describe the impact of increased development near military bases and the effects environmental laws have on military training and operations. All of the military services have said encroachment hurts their training.
DuBois says encroachment will be a factor in deciding which bases to close, but will not be applicable to every base. “You could have critical habitat [for an endangered species] to the fence line of an installation that does research and development, and it will have no effect on its value. If you have encroachment of an endangered species on a training range, that could be a major issue,” says DuBois.
...
Rapidly growing Arizona cities, such as Phoenix and Tucson, have encroached on military bases. Luke Air Force Base, the service’s largest fighter training base, had few neighbors when it opened more than 50 years ago, but now finds itself about 10 miles from the suburbs of Phoenix, the nation’s fifth largest city. Pilots at Luke’s Goldwater training range, which is used by both Marine and Air Force fighter pilots, have been hamstrung by sightings of Sonoran pronghorn antelope, which have moved onto the range as surrounding lands have been developed. Every time an antelope is sighted, training sessions must either be canceled or relocated.
In Tucson, a local school district might relocate an elementary school because it’s within a mile of David-Monthan Air Force Base’s runway. City officials there have said they expect closing the school would alleviate some encroachment concerns. The Arizona legislature is studying changes in laws to ease encroachment around the state’s military facilities.
Even in the wide open state of Alaska, encroachment issues have emerged. The Army has proposed fencing 34 miles of boundaries Fort Richardson shares with the city of Anchorage to tighten security as it expands training on the base. However, local residents argue that miles of fence would be unattractive, damage property values, harm moose and other wildlife, and limit access to public land. The Army has not made a final decision on the fence, but the Anchorage Chamber of Commerce has backed the idea, saying the lack of a fence could be cited as an encroachment issue and count against the base in the upcoming BRAC round.
...
THE POLITICS OF CLOSURE
Of course, there’s one other factor that plays a major role in base closure decisions: politics. “People critical of the Defense Department tend to lose bases,” says David Sorenson, an Air War College professor at Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala., and author of the 1998 book Shutting Down the Cold War: The Politics of Military Base Closure.
For example, former Rep. Ronald Dellums, an outspoken opponent of Defense spending, saw five bases shut down in his Oakland, Calif., district in the 1990s. Former Rep. Patricia Schroeder, D-Colo., another Defense critic, lost two bases in past rounds of base closures. Georgia’s Nunn, on the other hand, did not lose a single base in his state. “If I were Ted Kennedy, I’d be worried about Hanscom Air Base” in Massachusetts, says Sorenson.
Some lawmakers already have tried to protect bases by making changes to the BRAC process. One proposed amendment to the House version of the 2004 Defense authorization bill would require the Pentagon to create a list of bases that cannot be closed because they are critical to national security. Another proposal would require the Pentagon to come up with a plan for basing all military forces in the United States rather than overseas, which would mean few bases could close. The Bush administration has threatened a veto of the Defense bill if any changes are made to current BRAC plans.
In the hope of playing the political game well, several local communities near bases have hired former BRAC commission staff members and retired military officers who once managed installations as lobbyists and consultants. One BRAC consultant says just hearing that a military service may put a particular base on its list can convince a state or municipality to hire a lobbyist—often for a minimum of $250,000.
At the same time, others are waiting in the wings to pick up the pieces when bases are shuttered. Developers who specialize in turning closed military facilities into commercial shopping centers and residential communities turned out in record numbers for a National Association of Installation Developers conference in Chicago this summer to discuss the upcoming BRAC round.
Retired Air Force Gen. James B. Davis, who served on the 1995 closure commission, says that there’s no simple way to shut down installations that provide hundreds, often thousands, of well-paying jobs to communities across the country. “Like Churchill said about democracy, ‘It’s a lousy form of government, but it’s the best I know,’ ” Davis says. “That’s exactly where we are on the BRAC process.”
(Excerpt) Read more at govexec.com ...
This was first posted as
Erasing Bases. The hit list taking shape today may be the biggest ever.
Government Executive | October 2003 | George Cahlink
Posted on 10/22/2003 7:28 AM MDT by SandRat
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.