Deviations compared with explosions

The standard for getting your favorite military base and its thousands of jobs off the Department of Defense closure list is to show DoD “deviated substantially” from the eight criteria established by Congress. The phrase must have been used 20 times over a half dozen Base Realignment and Closure Commission hearings this week.

There was substantial deviation from military-value criteria at an Air Guard station in Connecticut and at another in Nevada. Cost interpretation for leased office space in Virginia deviated substantially from the criteria, as did mission capability for an air base in Massachusetts. In Maine, DoD seemed not to have gotten within shouting distance of seven of the eight criteria for the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, messed up the facilities score for Brunswick Naval Air Station and not only deviated but got lost entirely somewhere on Route 1 when applying cost criteria to the Defense Finance and Accounting Service in Limestone.

According to the hearings, the Pentagon got every one of its closure decisions wrong, an astounding performance.

But are all those deviations really substantial or is a substantial deviation expecting to sit down in Scotland to discuss world poverty and greenhouse gas emissions then discovering that a part of London is being blown up? I am guessing that it is the latter and that all the finely honed DoD calculations and the even finer state responses don’t especially matter next to predicting and stopping attacks that kill scores and wound hundreds or thousands.

In May 2003, Sen. Olympia Snowe was trying to talk her Senate colleagues out of the current BRAC round by reviewing 20 years of military threat assessments, comparing them to actual events. She mentioned the 1983 Marine bombing in Lebanon, TWA flight 847 in ’85, Berlin disco bombing, Pan Am 103. She asked them to consider how the military responded to these growing threats of terrorism. “The most enduring concern for U.S. leadership is that the Soviet Union remains the one country in the world capable of destroying the U.S. with a single devastating attack,” she said, noting that this is what the military planned for even as the Soviet Union was collapsing.

She went on to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, the 1995 Tokyo subway attack. “Still there was no mention of terrorism, no mention of asymmetric threat, and no references to homeland security.” You know what came next, in 2001.

BRAC is supposed to save money but it is also about shaping a military that is prepared for the challenges of the coming decades. When state delegations stand before the commission and report that their particular bases should have received 15 percent more credit for, say, their cost-efficiency yet the nation fails to appreciate the slowly rising threat of as deadly a force as terrorism, substantial deviation becomes a very high test.

As Connecticut was ending its turn before the commission this week, Sen. Joe Lieberman said he felt like a defense attorney arguing his case in court. But a more suitable BRAC court would have had a prosecutor (from the firm of Rumsfeld & Omniscience) to cross-examine the senator’s assertions. Witnesses would be called, responses demanded and the public would have gotten an immediate sense of whether DoD really did screw up as often as states claimed.

You got a sense of how much better this process could be under a court-like structure when one of the commissioners pressed Sen. Snowe about the Navy choosing to close Portsmouth over Pearl Harbor’s submarine yard. Didn’t it make sense, as the Pentagon claimed, he asked, to preserve the yard in the theater where the expected demand for submarines was greater, the Pacific?

“Once they’re torn apart” in dry dock, the senator responded, “they aren’t going anywhere.” She explained submarine travel time between the Pacific and Portsmouth was a month, but Portsmouth could do work in nine months that took Pearl Harbor 23 or 24 months to accomplish; the submarines would be back in service far quicker if they traveled to Portsmouth, a clear military advantage.

The response vividly counters the argument by the Pentagon and should help Portsmouth’s case. It seems substantial, where disputes over which metropolitan statistical area the DoD put a community in, whether base cleanup will cost $400 million or $800 million or whether the payback time on a closure is six years or 11 years do not.

States must be allowed to make their cases, and the BRAC commission has been patient and polite about that. The commission itself must count the beans. But tougher direct questions focused on what matters – an effective, forward-looking military that doesn’t bankrupt the nation – would not only give the rest of us a chance to put our own state base gains or losses into perspective, it would create an understanding about what threats Defense believes it is facing.

We’d know what to make of all those deviations, and be able to separate the substantial from the merely irritating.

Todd Benoit is the editorial page editor of the Bangor Daily News.