Pentagon sees base closings as critical to larger strategy

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."