Military base closure effort starts

Journal of Business, Jul 01, 2004 by Parish, Linn

The next round of U.S. military base closures and realignments is months away, but the foundation for those actions is being laid now.

The U.S. Department of Defense is of gathering information on all domestic military installations, including Fairchild Air Force Base, and will continue to do so throughout this year and the first half of 2005 as part of the base realignment and closure (BRAC) effort, says Fairchild spokesman 1st Lt. Matthew Hasson.

Already, Spokane-area advocates of Fairchild have done much research on the base, says Rich Hadley, president of the Spokane Regional Chamber of Commerce. Through an effort headed by the chamber called Forward Fairchild, those advocates are laying a foundation of their own for arguments not only to keep the West Plains base open, but to move there operations from installations elsewhere that might be closed.

That effort will come later, though.

Right now, the Defense Department is gathering quantitative information about each base with the goal of making baseclosure recommendations unfettered by politics or special interests, Hasson says. The process is set up so that all bases are treated equally, he says.

Military personnel have been ordered across all ranks not to communicate with the civilian community about BRAC. Hasson is the only person at Fairchild who's authorized to talk about the process, and he says his knowledge is limited. "This is so far above our heads, it isn't funny," he says.

What he can say, though, is that Fairchild currently is fielding rounds of questions, called data calls, from the Defense Department about various characteristics of the base. The questions are quantitative-in other words, they involve information that's capable of being measuredand have definitive answers, such as how many buildings are located at Fairchild, or how many active military personnel are stationed there?

Fairchild has responded to one data call and currently is working on the second round of questioning, Hasson says. The Defense Department will issue as many data calls as it feels are necessary to evaluate all military installations fairly, he says.

Some of the questions will be about the community at which a base is located. Since Fairchild personnel can't communicate with community members about BRAC, Hadley says the chamber has made a lot of general information about Spokane available on its Web site in hopes that Fairchild and the Defense Department will use the site as a resource.

The questioning follows the Defense Department's approval in February of selection criteria that will be used in making recommendations for closure and realignment. In March, the department completed a military-wide infrastructure inventory and force-structure plan that estimates a 24 percent excess capacity in the Air Force specifically, and the Armed Forces as a whole.

Sequence of events

According to a BRAC schedule included in the Defense Base Closure Act of 1990, as amended through the National Defense Authorization Act of Fiscal Year 2003, the Defense Department is scheduled to send out data calls until mid-May 2005.

Nethercutt's support. The House version of the bill, however, has to be reconciled with the U.S. Senate's version, and it's unclear whether the amendment will survive that process. President George W. Bush has said he doesn't support delaying the BRAC process.

Assuming the schedule in the Defense Base Closure Act remains intact, here's how the sequence of events will unfold.

A couple of steps in the BRAC process are to take place before all the data calls are completed, according to the schedule.

In February 2005, the secretary of defense must submit any revisions to the force-structure plan and infrastructure inventory done by the department.

By March 15, the president must send the U.S. Senate nominations for the appointment of a Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission, which will have nine members.

Right after the mid-May 2005 deadline for data calls, the defense secretary must submit a list of military installations recommended for base closure and realignment.

By July 1, the comptroller general will complete a detailed analysis of the secretary's recommendations.

The BRAC commission there will study the reports from the defense secretary and the comptroller general and submit its findings and conclusions to the president by early September 2005.

Within three weeks of receiving the BRAC commission's conclusions, the president will decide whether to approve the commission's recommendations. If he approves them, they will become binding after 45 legislative days-or days in which the U.S. Legislature is in session-unless Congress enacts a joint resolution of disapproval.

If the president rejects the commission's recommendations, the commission will have until Oct. 20, 2005, to revise them. The president will decide whether to approve the revised recommendations by Nov. 7, 2005. If he opts to reject them again, the BRAC process ends with no realignment or closure action moving forward.