Pentagon criticized in BRAC report

WASHINGTON – A federal commission approved all but 14 percent of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld’s recommendations for closing or consolidating U.S. military bases – but it also took issue with the plan in a final report sent to President Bush.

The nine-member panel said the Pentagon overestimated savings by $30 billion and that some of the proposals for streamlining the Army, Navy and Air Force might have made the services less efficient.

Also, the commission questioned whether the restructuring should have been postponed until a major review of the national defense strategy was finished.

The president now must decide whether to accept the panel’s plan. Last month, Bush, using the commission’s nickname, told reporters: “In order for the process to be nonpolitical, it’s very important to make it clear that the decision of BRAC will stand, as far as I am concerned.”

Bush could reject the report altogether or send it back to the commission for more changes.

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman would not say whether Rumsfeld, who has expressed reservations about some of the commission’s changes, will recommend approval or rejection of the report.

Overall, the commission signed off on roughly 86 percent of what Rumsfeld recommended. That’s on par with previous years, when commissions changed only about 15 percent of what the Pentagon proposed.

After Congress receives the report from the president, lawmakers have 45 days to block it. The report will become law unless the House and the Senate pass a joint resolution objecting to it. That has never occurred in previous base-closing rounds.

Along with changes at hundreds of smaller facilities, the Pentagon had recommended closing 33 major bases. The panel approved 21 of those closures, including Maine’s Brunswick Naval Air Station, but proposed scaling back forces at seven of those bases rather than shutting the doors entirely. In the most high-profile decisions, the panel decided to keep open five major facilities, including the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, that the Pentagon wanted to scrap.

The Pentagon has claimed its plan would save about $49 billion over 20 years, but the commission said in its final report that the Pentagon wrongly attributed most of the savings to the relocation of 26,830 military personnel to other facilities.

Agreeing with an earlier assessment by the Government Accountability Office, the commission said taxpayers would not see actual savings simply by moving personnel from one base to another. Those workers’ jobs would have to be eliminated for savings to be realized, it said.

If the personnel “savings” were not included, the commission said, the Pentagon plan would save only $19 billion.

While the Pentagon aimed to increase “jointness” among the service branches by streamlining operations and support across the Army, Navy and Air Force, “very few of the hundreds of proposals increased jointness, and some actually decreased or removed joint and cross-service connections,” the panel said in the report.

It said Rumsfeld’s recommendations “will not move the ball across the jointness goal line” but that the commission’s changes “will help move the ball down the field.”

The commission also said the completion of the coming report on national defense strategy, called the Quadrennial Defense Review, “may have better informed and assisted the commission in making its final decisions.” The panel suggested that future rounds of base closings should be done only after such major strategic reviews are finished.