Defense: A New Military Means Fewer Bases
George Cahlink - National Journal
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger faces a host of challenges as
California's chief executive. He must right a sluggish economy,
strike budget compromises with a largely Democratic Legislature,
and avoid future energy crises. Nonetheless, the
actor-turned-politician took time out in his first State of the
State message in Sacramento earlier this month to warn that one
of the state's biggest economic threats is coming from the
Defense Department.
"The Pentagon will make the next round of base closures in
2005," Schwarzenegger said. "This could mean thousands of lost
jobs to California. These bases are important to national
defense, and they are important to our steady economic recovery.
As a state, we will fight to keep our bases open."
California is not alone. Florida has already spent $475,000
to hire the Washington law firm Holland & Knight as well as
former Rep. Tillie Fowler, R-Fla., who has close ties to the
Pentagon, to protect its 21 bases from closure. Texas voters
created a $250 million fund last fall that communities could
borrow money from to upgrade roads and access to the state's
bases. Arizona state legislators are writing laws to curb
development around their bases. Indeed, across the country
states are preparing for battle as the Pentagon takes a likely
final shot at realigning a set of military bases established to
win the Cold War.
However, hiring lobbyists, launching "save-our-base"
campaigns, and investing millions of dollars in nearby
infrastructure improvements won't guarantee that a base will
stay open. In a new era of war fighting, the Pentagon sees the
base closures as part of its larger strategy to protect the
nation. This round of base closings, as a result, will likely be
far different from those in the past.
Two years ago, Congress approved Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld's request to hold another round of bases closures in
2005. Now the Army, Navy, and Air Force are drawing up lists of
bases to close. By spring of 2005, the Pentagon will turn those
lists over to an independent commission that will hold hearings,
visit bases, and crunch numbers before recommending a final list
of closures. Early next year, Congress and the president will
appoint the nine-member commission. The commission's list must
be approved or rejected in its entirety by lawmakers and the
president in fall 2005.
The Pentagon used the same process, known as Base Realignment
and Closure, or BRAC, to shut down a total of 97 major bases in
1988, 1991, 1993, and 1995. The closures cut military
infrastructure by 20 percent and saved billions of dollars.
However, the similarities between past BRAC rounds and next
year's end there. Earlier rounds were viewed largely as
cost-cutting exercises, while next year's review will be linked
to Rumsfeld's larger goal of transforming the military into a
leaner and more agile force.
"We are not talking about a capacity-reduction exercise --
that's how we implemented BRAC in the past," said Philip Grone,
who, as principal assistant deputy undersecretary of Defense for
installations and environment, is one of Rumsfeld's top BRAC
advisers. Instead, Grone said, just as the Defense Department
has transformed how it fights wars, buys weapons, and manages
its personnel, it must now also revamp how it bases its troops
and airmen. "BRAC makes a profound contribution toward
transforming the Defense Department by rationalizing our
infrastructure with our defense strategy," he adds.
Grone will not predict how many bases will close; he said
that lists of proposed base closures circulating on the Internet
are false. However, he notes, past analyses show that the
Defense Department could reduce its infrastructure by an
additional 25 percent. Rumsfeld, in arguing for BRAC, told
lawmakers that since the end of the Cold War, the military's
troop strength has fallen 40 percent, but that bases have been
cut by only about 20 percent.
Rumsfeld has taken a far more active interest in BRAC than
his predecessors, who generally rubber-stamped lists created by
the military services and then sent them to the BRAC commission.
Rumsfeld has created two Pentagon organizations to oversee base
closures. The Infrastructure Executive Council will provide
policy and oversight; it is headed by Deputy Defense Secretary
Paul Wolfowitz and includes the secretaries and chiefs of staff
of each of the armed services, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, and the undersecretary of Defense for acquisition,
technology, and logistics. The Infrastructure Steering Group,
headed by the Defense acquisition chief and made up of the vice
chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the services' assistant
secretaries for installations and environment, and others, will
manage various joint reviews. Past BRACs did not have such
high-level oversight.
In this round, Grone said, "enormously significant emphasis"
will be placed on creating "joint" bases where the armed
services can combine separate but similar functions.
The Pentagon has created seven joint study groups, composed
of representatives from each service and the Office of the
Secretary of Defense, to examine seven functional areas where
the services can share work. Those groups are intelligence;
industrial; technical; medical; education; headquarters and
support activities; and supply and storage. The Infrastructure
Steering Group will oversee the seven study groups.
These groups, Grone said, have the authority to incorporate
their recommendations into the Pentagon's base-closure list. The
groups are broad by design -- to allow them to look across the
services -- but they will tackle specific topics. For example,
the training group will review whether the services can combine
their separate programs for training new aviators. The
industrial group will study ways the services' in-house repair
centers, known as depots, can share work, particularly for
overhauling airplanes. The technical group will look at how the
services manage their research efforts and whether they can
combine laboratories.
The Pentagon also wants to consolidate active-duty bases with
Reserve bases. But combining these bases could prove
challenging, because states have a say in how National Guard
facilities are used. Retired Navy Rear Adm. Benjamin Montoya, a
BRAC commissioner in 1995, said that smaller Guard and Reserve
bases are among the most obvious candidates for closure.
However, he notes, "closing down a Guard base is as hard as
trying to shut down a rural post office."
David Sorenson, a professor at the Air War College at Maxwell
Air Force Base and the author of a 1998 book Shutting Down the
Cold War: The Politics of Military Base Closure, said it's too
early to predict all the bases that will close, but that past
trends help identify which ones are vulnerable this time. Bases
recommended for closure last time by the military, but spared by
the commission, will likely be targets again. (Typically, the
commission approved 85 percent of the Pentagon's
recommendations.) Bases housing out-of-date weapon systems, such
as older long-range bombers or the Army's heavy armored
divisions, might find themselves on the list.
And how the Pentagon views a congressman or senator can also
be a factor. "People critical of the Defense Department tend to
lose bases," Sorenson said. For example, then-Rep. Robert
Dellums, a Democrat who long advocated slashing defense
spending, saw five bases shut down in his northern California
district in the 1990s. However, then-Sen. Sam Nunn, the
Democratic chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee in
the 1990s, did not see a single base shuttered in his home state
of Georgia during any of the BRAC rounds.
"Encroachment," the Pentagon term to describe the effects of
suburban sprawl and environmental preservation laws on bases and
operations, will be a factor in deciding which bases to close.
These two problems have been particularly acute in Southwestern
states, where once-rural military bases are now in or near major
metropolitan areas. Noise complaints from neighbors are
increasingly common, and the bases' wide-open spaces have become
safe havens for rare plant and animal species. The desire by
nearby civilians to limit noise and curb destruction of local
flora and fauna have created pressures on the bases to limit
training exercises.
For instance, Luke Air Force Base, that service's largest
fighter-training base, is only 10 miles from Phoenix, and the
base sometimes has to cancel training exercises when endangered
antelope species are sighted on its property. The Arizona
Legislature is now studying ways to ease encroachment around the
state's five major bases. Other bases, meanwhile, such as the
Army's Fort Riley in Kansas, say they have wide-open training
spaces and no encroachment problems and could thus assume work
from other bases.
The repositioning of forces overseas will also affect which
bases are closed in the United States. Few of the Army's large
training areas were closed in earlier rounds, and those areas
with excess capacity would normally be targets for closure this
time. However, if the Pentagon chooses to pull forces back from
Europe, as is expected, then those large bases, such as Fort
Riley in Kansas, Fort Hood in Texas, Fort Lewis in Washington
state, Fort Stewart in Georgia, and Fort Carson in Colorado,
face little risk of closing because they would possibly gain
troops.
The Defense Department's industrial facilities may be the
most obvious -- and the most politically sensitive -- targets
reviewed for BRAC. Each of the military services has maintenance
depots that overhaul ships, planes, or vehicles, and employ tens
of thousands of civilian workers. Their annual budgets total
nearly $20 billion. Past rounds have seen the Navy close four
shipyards, the Air Force privatize two aircraft depots, and the
Army close several of its depots and support organizations.
Still, Rumsfeld has talked repeatedly about privatizing and
outsourcing more depot work. But members of Congress who want to
protect well-paying government jobs in their districts have
prevented military depots from being eliminated. They have been
aided by a federal law requiring that half of all
military-weapons repair work be performed at depots. Depot
backers now fear that by putting the repair centers on a new
BRAC list, the Pentagon could, in effect, bypass the law and
outsource the work.
Whatever bases the Defense Department targets for closure, it
will hear howls of protest from lawmakers and governors worried
about the economic fallout. Schwarzenegger, whose state lost
more than 90,000 jobs in the four previous rounds and whose 62
bases provide the state with a $19 billion federal payroll, has
already made it clear to the Pentagon that he'll look to allies
in Washington to fight any cuts. In a January 12 letter to
Rumsfeld, Schwarzenegger wrote: "The California congressional
delegation is fully committed to reducing the impact of base
closures in the state."
--George Cahlink is a staff correspondent with Government
Executive magazine.
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