Panel limits politics in base-closure decisions

By TOM BELL, Portland Press Herald Writer

Copyright © 2005 Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc.

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In Depth: Base Closings Special section on how upcoming military base closures could affect Maine features a blog covering news and analysis from around the country. The section also keeps an archive of local news stories about the Brunswick Naval Air Station and Portsmouth Naval Shipyard. Readers also can add their comments to selected stories and vote in an online survey. Sign up for Blog Updates to be delivered to your e-mail each time the section is updated. To top of story

Who decides which of the nation's military bases should stay open and which should close?

Today, the Department of Defense makes that call for the most part. Congress' influence has been so vastly reduced that it is unlikely to make major changes to the base-closure plan when the Pentagon releases it next month.

Congress also had a limited role in the aftermath of World War II, when the military shut down hundreds of small bases and consolidated them into larger bases - without much public outcry.

But it wasn't always so.

Because the new bases were targets for Soviet missiles, they were often put far from cities. In time, local communities became economically dependent on them. And that's when politics entered the picture.

Nothing illustrates that better than the story of Loring Air Force Base. At the height of the Cold War, Loring was home to B-52 strategic bombers on 24-hour alert against U.S. nuclear attack.

In the mid-1970s, when it was apparent that the Limestone base was vulnerable to submarine-launched ballistic missiles, the Air Force decided to close Loring.

At the time, many members of Congress felt base closures were being used to punish them for their lack of support of the military. Maine Sen. Edmund Muskie, a Democrat, and Maine Rep. William Cohen, a Republican, worked with House Majority Leader Tip O'Neil to protect the Northeast's military bases.

Muskie derided the decision to close Loring as "unsound, inconsistent with our national interests, and an economic injustice to the people of northern Maine."

In the end, President Gerald Ford in 1976 signed into law a bill that empowered the House and Senate Armed Services Committees to review all Defense Department decisions, thus giving Congress the final say on base closures.

The law interjected politics and bureaucracy into what had largely been a rational decision process based on national security interests and military judgment, according to a National War College paper by Lt. Col. Sharon Dunbar of the Air Force. As a result, she notes in her report, no military bases were closed between 1977 and 1988.

In the late 1980s, with the end of the Cold War and the onset of large budget deficits, even Congress had to admit that some bases needed to be closed. But it still wanted to provide oversight of the process. In 1988, it established an independent committee - the Base Realignment and Closure Commission - to review and recommend installations for closure or realignment.

The process was designed to discourage Congress from making any changes to the commission's recommendations. The BRAC Commission also served to provide political cover to members of Congress whose bases were closed. They were able to tell their constituents that they had little influence over the process.

In the four base-closing rounds that began in 1988, 97 major bases and 290 smaller installations were shuttered or consolidated.

Loring closed in 1994. About 6,000 jobs were lost, and the population of Limestone dropped from 12,000 to 2,000.

The BRAC Commission is charged only with vetting the list to make sure the Department of Defense followed its own rules when it put it together.

But in 1995, Dunbar writes, the "sticky fingerprints of politics" returned, when the BRAC Commission recommended - over Defense Department objections - that bases be closed in Texas and California, two battleground states in the 1996 presidential election. Furious, President Clinton tried to keep the bases open but privatized. They eventually were closed.

Since then, the base-closure process has been tightened to limit the influence of the individual armed services and to make it harder for Congress to overrule the Department of Defense.

Past commissions approved about 85 percent of the Pentagon's closure list. This round, however, the commission probably will approve about 95 percent of the list, said Stephen Schwalbe, who is writing a dissertation on base closures as a doctoral candidate at Auburn University in Auburn, Ala.

"Whatever you see on the 16th of May, hold your breath," he said. "That's going to be pretty much it."

Staff Writer Tom Bell can be contacted at 791-6369 or at:

tbell@pressherald.com

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