Members of Congress may have thought the Sept. 11 attacks lifted the threat of closure to local military bases, but Defense

Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the attack merely made closures more urgent. “The imperative to convert excess capacity into warfighting ability is enhanced, not diminished,” he said. No doubt he is right, but the question remains how to do it.

Sen. Susan Collins was among a minority of members on the Senate Armed Services Committee this week who voted to keep a provision that would have removed the Base Realignment and Closure Commission from the Defense appropriation bill. Instead, she has suggested that the Defense Department merely identify in its budget bases it no longer needs and Congress, apparently, will take care of it. The gridlock in that process is exactly why BRAC – created as an independent commission that would essentially dictate which bases would close – was created.

But BRAC hasn’t worked, either – so far. It was political from the beginning and lost support in 1995 when President Clinton saw a potential loss of votes in California if more bases closed there and tried unsubtly to influence the process. Last June, Under Secretary of Defense Dov Zakheim acknowledged the failure of BRAC when briefing Congress about the 2002 budget. He characterized the supposed impartial process this way: “It’s a boon. You hire a lobbyist, then he lobbies the city council and he lobbies the governor, he lobbies the senator – or she. I mean, there has grown up a kind of industry around BRAC.”

Instead of this version of BRAC and instead of expecting to receive a list of base closures to fight over, Congress would serve the process best by going back to the beginning of BRAC and changing the public perception of what it should and should not be expected to do about stopping a base closure. Former Rep. Tom Andrews of Maine 1st District tried to keep out of the way of the process when Loring closed suffered for it in the next election. But part of that was because Maine’s three other members of Congress -armed with some good arguments – were fighting to keep the base, so the public expectation was that BRAC wasn’t a final decision but one to be debated and defeated.

When Congress gets more serious about national defense, when it sees military effectiveness as more important than local economics, a process like BRAC can be refashioned to work. Even the most flagrant vote-grubbing politicians would have trouble contemplating the 6,500 dead from the Sept. 11 attack and ask first what was in it for them.