Some first thoughts as I look at the U.S. military's BRAC recommendations (Base Realignment And Closures).
Many of the facilities proposed for closing are very old. That's true of the depots, for instance. The reason so many need to be phased out is that they are obsolete, both in terms of facilities and also in terms of need.
I'm told the sub bases cannot support our more advanced subs, either. Same sort of rationale.
Second, as Noah points out at Defense Tech, the proposal calls for consolidating R&D by research area rather than by military service. Makes a lot of sense, especially given the joint ops focus that will only continue to grow in the near and mid future.
Similarly, since both Walter Reed and the Bethesda Naval Hospital are underutilized, the plan calls for consolidating them in Bethesda.
The big picture goes beyond these details however. A major realignment of overseas basing, as in Germany and Korea, means consolidating housing and other base capabilities for these units back home. And if you look at the bases that are NOT recommended for closing, you'll see that no base which can support large training operations is on the list. That's important, because it is difficult to find open land and get the legally required environmental permits etc. to do things like tank or combined ops training. And the environmental issues are not trivial.
Our professional military fights the way they train, so that was a key priority in this recommendation, along with consolidation to supporter longer assignments in one place for families. Similarly, DOD says a key priority is re-basing some units to restructure forces and facilitate joint training.
UPDATE: the Political Teen has video of the press conference today.
And if you haven't seen the full list of proposed closings, here it is, broken down by state. Be sure to check out the ones which are recommended to get increases in personnel. It's not just base closing ... it's also base realignment.
UPDATE: As Random Probabilities reader AB notes, there are safety issues in some of these locations. Willow Grove Naval Air Station used to be out in the boonies ... now it's in the middle of a developed area and already there have been some near-collisions in the air.
More from AB:
You can get an aerial view of Willow Grove NAS here, which shows the triangle-shaped NAS in the center; you can see the single, long runway as well as the aircraft service buildings. Note all the suburban development to the southeast in line with the runway-- a major hazard. And if you zoom in on the north end of the runway and look at the aircraft parking area on its northeast side, you can see the P-3 Orions parked there (submarine hunter/killers) as well as the Warthogs operated by the Army (or Air Force) people.
While everyone is looking at the Congressional and Senatorial winners and losers, I think a more comprehensive review illustrates some other (and potentially more) important patterns:
132 Reserve Centers are CLOSED
3,650 jobs were lost in closed (132) Reserve Centers
1,327 jobs were lost in realigned (9) Reserve Centers
676 jobs were created in gained (9) Reserve Centers
So the DOD Reserve Force lost 4,301 jobs of the 14,684 total lost positions (30%).
Question: How confident is the DOD and the administration in our Reserve Force?
My guess is that we will see a comparable increase in the active duty force structure.
I wouldn't characterize this in terms of confidence (or lack therof) in the Reserves.
After Vietnam, a lot of functions were pushed into the Reserves in order to make it difficult for politicians to take us to war again without popular support. The problem is that the choice of those functions assumed a major, force-on-force war with time to mobilize and integrate.
Now we face - and will IMO continue to face - very different kinds of conflicts. The existing structure of functions in the Reserves is, at least in the opinion of some professional military, a serious hindrance to the kind of nimble, flexible, joint ops required by today's threat.
Folks who want a more detailed explanation of the dynamic Robin cites will find an excellent resource in Tim Oren's Winds post MilStuff for Dummies: U.S. Force Structure.
This is the first BRAC that I actually read the whole detailed rationale. I was really impressed by the in depth rationale that they did for the USAF realignments. Locally, closing Cannon AFB is big news, but Clovis NM should have seen this coming with the legacy status of the F16 over the next decade.
But the areas that directly affect me were rather ironic in their changes or lack thereof. LA AFB was not closed down; well I guess the Terminator might have scared Rummy. The service Labs were consolidated, White Sands people going to Aberdeen and Hansom's orphaned bits and pieces being sent to Wright Pat and Kirtland. Somehow the Brac came up with enough stuffing to plump back Hanscom to a net gain. So in general I think that USAF was done well by this Commission with most future systems and R+D being the criteria by which the decisions were made. Now USAF will have to sleep in the bed it has been proposing for some years.
Tom, I would imagine LA AFB escaped due to the large Aerospace Corp. / USAF team there. If you try to move that R&D work, you run the risk of having senior Aerospace personnel opt out, breaking up some significant institutional knowledge.
Full disclosure: my husband joined the scientific staff of Aerospace after his USAF career but before moving up to teach at West Point. While active duty he was assigned to LA AFB and worked closely with Aserospace personnel. I also worked as a SETA and program management contractor with several of the SDI and other space-based program offices there.
Robin- Most of the aero.org folks I work with would gladly move somewhere out of LA. The USAF people at LA AFB move every few years anyway. The question then becomes, where? Incidently, best I can tell, LA AFB does no R+D. Aerospace does some, but the principal work such entities as SMC do is to get programs from the R+D stage to actual operational systems. The rationale for having a physical presence in LA is anachronistic, pertaining to a time when service reps needed to colocate with the industrial contractors in order to insure program execution and oversight. That isn't the case anymore, and due to high costs of doing business in LA, will probably continue to become less true in the future.
Could you provide a little clarification on "if you look at the bases that are NOT recommended for closing, you'll see that no base which can support large training operations is on the list." Are you saying that there aren't any bases that can support training on the BRAC list or there aren't any bases left that can support large training operations? Hawthorne Army Depot can support large training operations but they are on the BRAC list. The data on the BRAC list is incorrect about the depot and misleading at best. The number of jobs that would reportedly be lost is only about 1/2 of the actual number. Which still wouldn't be that many jobs in a large community--however it would lay off about half the workforce in our little town. Still not a huge problem, if there were other towns nearby. There are not. The closest town is 70 miles away. However the BRAC list figured the economic impact on the Reno/Sparks area - 135 miles away....not a realistic daily commute. We realize the military's best interests need to be put ahead of a community's best interest. However, it is hard to see how the closure of Hawthorne Army Depot could be in the military's best interest. We have more storage space available than any other depot. When the bases overseas close, where do they think they will store the weapons shipped from them until they are demiled? We also have new state-of-the art demil facilities and equipment. The equipment is built into the buildings and would probably not be something to be moved. Additionally, they took several years to get proper EPA permitting. Another state may not even permit them, there are less polution factors where we are now, than if the failities were in a metropolitan area.