Army decision on new brigades may hold clues to base closings

Defense Department officials are remaining very tight-lipped about next year's round of military base closures, but a recent announcement may hold some clues as to what the Army has in mind.

Last month, the Army announced where 10 new combat brigades, along with several thousand soldiers, would be based by the end of 2006. As part of that process, thousands of soldiers will be relocated and added to bases in Texas, Hawaii, Washington, North Carolina and Georgia.

The new units, known as Brigade Combat Units of Action, are part of the Army's ongoing effort to replace its traditional divisions with smaller but more lethal war-fighting packages. The Pentagon has given the Army permission to add more than 30,000 soldiers to create the new units.

Army officials said they chose the locations based on the operational needs of the units, which included training space and ready access to airfields and ports for rapid deployments.

"It was a very thorough analysis, and we felt for several reasons…that these are really the right installations for these units," Brig. Gen. David Ralston, the Army's director of force management, told reporters in July.

In connection with the creation of the new brigades, the Army will complete the following moves by the end of 2005:

• The 3,900 troops of the 2nd Armored Calvary Regiment will relocate from Fort Polk, La., to Fort Lewis, Wash.
• Fort Polk will in turn gain about 300 troops as the 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, N.Y., puts together a combat team at the Joint Readiness Training Center at the Louisiana base.
• Fort Richardson, Alaska, will gain about 2,600 soldiers, while Fort Hood, Texas, will add about 5,000.

The services are coming up with recommendations for the Defense Department about what bases should be shut down. By spring, the Pentagon will finalize those lists and hand them off to an independent Base Realignment and Closure Commission, which will hold hearings and deliver a definitive list of bases to shut down or merge to the President and Congress by next fall.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has said that as many as one in four bases could be closed. Shutting them down would free up billions of dollars annually that would go toward developing transformational capabilities and weapon systems.

Arthur Cebrowski, the Pentagon's director of transformation, steered clear of commenting on the base closure process during a meeting with defense writers in Washington Thursday. "This is high political season and, of course, BRAC is an element of that," he said. "I am not interested in politicizing transformation."