Delay BRAC

With the Base Realignment and Closure Commission ready to consider the latest list of proposed closures from the Pentagon, a new report from an advisory panel urges the Department of Defense to slow the pace of its overseas base closures because U.S. bases may not have enough room for their personnel. The report, sent to the BRAC commission, should slow that process too and force Congress and Defense to rethink its short-term plans.

The Overseas Basing Commission, in an interim report released this week, says “the Commission questions why we would move tens of thousands of service members and their families to locations in the United States before we have programmed budgetary outlays to accommodate their arrival and before local communities are able to prepare services for population expansion.”

At another point in its report, the link to the BRAC process is apparent. In reviewing the transformation of the military, “The Commission repeatedly discovered disconnects between one event and another. … No single entity revealed itself as master of the entire plan. The Commission strongly suggests that the entire effort of transformation be tied together in one overarching design, and that a specific body be assigned responsibilities to both guide and monitor its implementation.”

Maine, of course, is worried that either or both the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery and the Brunswick Naval Air Station will be accepted by the BRAC commission for closure. The economic effects on this state and on New Hampshire would be terrible were that to happen, and state and congressional delegations have tried all manner of ways to persuade the military that both bases remain vital to the Pentagon’s overall strategic plan.

How well their arguments have worked is unknown, but if the Overseas Basing Commission is correct, part of the problem may have been that no one was in charge of the overall strategic plan. Congress can act. It can bring back an amendment that would delay the BRAC process by two years so that the Pentagon could address the lack of coordination confirmed in this new report and make the U.S. base structure more closely align with the nation’s security goals. The amendment failed narrowly last time. With a fair reading of this new evidence, it should pass now.

Certainly, Pentagon officials would tell Congress that it has already considered base structure. But the commission noted a key difference between the current work and the last major military transformation, after World War II, when the process “brought together the best minds the country had to offer, the energies of a collection of federal agencies and organizations, and the deliberations of a focused and bipartisan legislature.”

The current transformation, by contrast, “has been too much the purview of a single agency – the Department of Defense.”

A delay itself wouldn’t save the bases in Maine, nor, given the years of warning for the current BRAC process, even result in more planning for a future here without them. But it would provide time to make the process by which one base survives and another closes more obvious. Maine and all other states would learn early on where their bases fit into the transformation now taking place.

That is reason enough to bring back the delaying amendment and for Maine’s delegation to support it.