ARTICLE

March 2003

‘Joint Bases’ Is the Name Of the Game in BRAC ‘05

by Sandra I. Erwin

Details on the Bush administration’s plan to close scores of military bases by 2005 will begin to surface next month, when a top-level panel of military and civilian defense officials is due to outline its recommendations to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

The panel’s report primarily will address what, if any, military facilities that now are owned by individual services can be turned into “joint” bases that would be shared by more than one organization. Potential candidates for consolidation include military pilot-training schools, laboratories, health care and medical treatment facilities.

Unlike previous rounds of base realignments and closure (BRAC), the 2005 event will target facilities that are “single purpose,” rather than joint, sources said. And while the services heavily managed past BRAC rounds, this time the center of power is the office of the defense secretary.

The administration wants to slice at least 20-25 percent of its real estate, claiming that this “excess infrastructure” costs billions of dollars a year to maintain and is draining resources from higher-priority accounts.

The 30-member panel working on the initial proposals is made up of top military and civilian leaders from the Defense Department, the Joint Staff and the services.

The group can be described as a “board of directors ... through which all recommendations will flow to the secretary of defense by the spring of ‘05,” said Raymond DuBois, deputy undersecretary of defense for installations and environment.

The defense secretary, DuBois told reporters, views the 2005 BRAC as a “singular opportunity, perhaps the last best chance in a generation, to reshape our infrastructure to optimize military readiness.”

If the 2005 BRAC moves forward as planned, several hundred installations would be scrutinized for possible shutdowns or realignments. “All installations are going to be judged equally,” said DuBois. “All installations are on the table.”

In the previous four BRAC rounds (in 1988, 1991, 1993 and 1995), the Defense Department closed 352 facilities, including 97 major installations, and realigned 145.

The administration’s aggressive advocacy of base closures is founded on the premise that the Pentagon could save more than $6 billion a year by shutting down facilities that no longer are deemed useful to the military mission.

Congress only agreed to endorse a BRAC round if it was timed so that it would not interfere with the 2004 elections. Under the plan approved by lawmakers in late 2001, the defense secretary will submit a list of proposed closures and realignments to a nine-member BRAC Commission by May 16, 2005. The commission (whose members must be confirmed by the Senate) would have until September 8 to revise the list.

As was the case in the other four BRAC rounds, both the president and Congress will have to accept or reject the entire list.

“The earlier BRAC rounds were essentially service-centric,” said DuBois. The services independently “wrestled with their own BRAC analysis, and at the end, presented them to the secretary of defense.”

Rumsfeld wanted his office to take over this time around. At first, the services rejected the idea. After a year’s worth of negotiations that began in February 2002, the service chiefs agreed to support a centralized, Pentagon-driven BRAC.

“My sense is that, from here on out, all the services are on board with this process,” said Paul Taibl, a policy analyst at Business Executives for National Security, a think tank that supports base closures.

“The approach taken by the secretary is exactly the right approach,” he said. “If you want the BRAC to accomplish what it can accomplish, you need to make the decisions from a joint perspective.”

In the past, each service was expected to bear a certain percentage of the cuts. That approach is inefficient, Taibl said, because it fails to take into account potential cross-service consolidation of facilities. “Maybe everyone shared in the pain, but it wasn’t done from some kind of integrated, strategic plan.”

Under Rumsfeld’s current plan, “the damage won’t be evenly spread,” said Taibl. “It will be determined what service has excess training capacity, excess R&D, medical. The cuts may be uneven.”

It is hard to say which service has the most excess capacity. “It depends on how you define capacity,” said Taibl. “Overall, there is about 25 percent excess capacity.”

The 25 percent figure was cited in a 1998 “Capacity Utilization Study” sponsored by the Defense Department. But DuBois cautioned that “it’s a clumsy number” that can be misinterpreted. Removing “all excess capacity” does not necessarily mean that 20 to 25 percent of all installations will close, he said. Different sectors have various degrees of overcapacity or undercapacity, so the 25 percent is an “aggregate number.”

Despite their historical resistance to change, the services likely will agree to share facilities, “where it makes sense,” Taibl said. “It’s going to be a stretch. We’ve never really had joint bases before. ... If this is done on a widespread scale, it is going to be plowing new ground.”

During the Cold War, most, if not all, installations were single-service, single- mission, said DuBois. “Over the last 25 years, we have seen a movement toward multi-service, multi-mission installations. ... The secretary put down the marker: maximize joint use.”

The Washington, D.C., metropolitan area is a target-rich environment for consolidation, he said. “In the national capital region, it’s obvious that an Army function or facility ought to be able to exist on an Air Force installation. ... We’re not going to homogenize the installations, but what we are going to do is rationalize where certain functions ought to best exist.”

Further, the Defense Department spends huge sums of money leasing office space in the Washington area. “The question is, can we better utilize the military installations, the military real property assets owned by the services, and reduce the expense of leased space?” DuBois said. “I don’t know yet, but I do know the only way to properly rationalize that is to do it in a cross-service way.”

He noted that more than 100,000 military and civilian employees of the Department of Defense work within 50 miles of the White House. The Washington region holds many of the “crown jewels of our real estate. ... And we’ve got to use them intelligently.”

Individual Concerns
The senior-level panel that will put together recommendations for the secretary is called the Infrastructure Executive Council. The IEC will supervise “analytical teams” that will study options for cross-service consolidations, said DuBois.

The service secretaries and service chiefs will have an opportunity to present their individual concerns to the IEC.

A subset of the IEC—the Infrastructure Steering Group—will include the vice chiefs, DuBois himself, and the assistant service secretaries for installations and environment. The head of the ISG is Edward “Pete” Aldridge Jr., the undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics.

“It’s a balanced approach,” said DuBois. “Neither is it all service-oriented, nor is it all, shall we say, OSD-oriented.”

The goal, he explained, is to make a distinction between what functions are “service-unique” and which ones are candidates for cross-service restructuring.

Examples of “service-centric” considerations that affect BRAC decisions include where tanker aircraft or bombers are positioned, where carrier battle groups are stationed or where to set up maneuver training areas for Army divisions.

The cross-service “efficiencies” sought by Rumsfeld more likely will be seen in the laboratories and research and development centers, said DuBois. “Military value and operational necessity are going to drive these decisions.”

DuBois acknowledged that cultural barriers will impede efforts to consolidate. Numerous and complex issues would have to be resolved.

The study panels will be asking questions, such as whether a Marine Corps aviation unit could exist on an Air Force base. And, if so, who would be in charge? Who would be in command of the base? “This is, at the very least, modifying some cultural aspects of our services that have been ingrained for many, many years,” said DuBois. “But it is the time to address it.”

The BRAC process now under way is cumbersome and bureaucratic, he said, but given the magnitude of the cuts the Pentagon wants, the alternatives were few.

“There are a lot of cooks in the kitchen, but I didn’t know any other way to do it, by virtue of what the secretary of defense is trying to achieve, which is essentially the same amount of infrastructure reduction in four prior BRACs he wants to do in one,” he said. “The more people you put at the table, the longer it takes ... the more contentious sometimes the discussion, but in my humble estimation, the better the product.”

Each of the assistant service secretaries for installations and environment has identified a deputy assistant service secretary for BRAC. DuBois assigned Phil Grone—a former legis-lative aide—as his point man for BRAC issues.

The Pentagon obviously anticipates preemptive moves by lawmakers to cancel or postpone the 2005 BRAC.

Last month, two members of the House Armed Services Committee—Mississippi Democrat Gene Taylor and Colorado Republican Joel Hefley—said they would seek to revoke the legislation signed in fiscal year 2002, authorizing the 2005 BRAC.

DuBois said that some congressional resistance is to be expected, given the billions of dollars that bases contribute to local economies. As the process unfolds, DuBois also anticipates grousing on Capitol Hill about the cost of cleaning up bases after they are closed. The up-front expenses associated with environmental cleanup mean that the savings the Pentagon estimates won’t come until 2011, at the earliest.

BRAC could end up costing $10 billion to $20 billion over a four-to-six year period, said DuBois. The cost depends on the number of bases closed and the level of cleanup required. The Pentagon spent about $3 billion on environmental cleanup of bases closed in the past four rounds.

In the long run, however, savings will come, he said. “We believe that, by 2011, you will have a steady state savings-rate of in excess of $6.5 billion annually. That includes the projected environmental remediation necessary for properties returning to the civilian sector.”

Environmental remediation costs often are tricky to forecast, he noted. “I cannot deny that these are large numbers.”

One of the biggest complaints about BRAC, which DuBois called “a legitimate complaint,” is that when a decision is made to close an installation, it takes too long to transfer the property to civilian authorities for redevelopment by the community. Many bases that were closed in the early and mid-1990s still haven’t been cleaned up and returned to state authorities.

The solution to that problem may be for communities to plan ahead, he said, and “work with us on how to most quickly transition” the properties.

The Defense Department will have the right to veto any community’s decision on how the land will be reused. The idea is to make sure that the reuse plan does not lead to unreasonable requirements for environmental cleanup, said DuBois.

“Remember, their incentive is not to stretch this thing out,” he said. “Their incentive is to transition that prior military-owned and operated property into something that’s economically viable for the community.

“For a local redevelopment authority to suggest that their desire to use the land for purpose A requires an enormous environmental cleanup bill, which Congress is not necessarily in the mood to appropriate, only extends the time ... Redevelopment authorities are smart enough to recognize that their objective is to use the land smartly and try to use it in ways so that it doesn’t require an enormous amount of time and money for environmental remediation.”

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