While scrambling to find ways to save money under mandated budget cuts, the Pentagon has come to Congress three years in a row to ask for the authority to close bases.
The Pentagon says it has 24 percent excess capacity in the 557,000 facilities it pays to manage and sustain, expensive overhead it needs to shake off.
The unused space, outgoing Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said, costs the department “billions of dollars every year, money that could otherwise be invested in maintaining our military’s edge.”
But the Department of Defense may not have the excess it thinks it has, and many in Congress are convinced the upfront costs of base realignment and closure (BRAC) make them more costly than the savings they generate.
First, the 24 percent excess capacity figure is 10 years old and is based on an analysis that the department performed before the last 2005 BRAC round.
Called a “parametric capacity analysis,” it means that the Department of Defense takes an inventory of all of its facilities and compares it to a baseline to determine if it has excess. To prepare for the 2005 round, DOD used a baseline of the facilities it had in 1989.
So to determine if the Defense Department is right-sized for its current mission, it is comparing its footprint to its 1989 self.
What’s more, the Government Accountability Office found in a 2013 report that in choosing 1989 as a baseline, the department “did not attempt to identify any excess capacity or capacity shortfall that existed in 1989; hence it is uncertain to what extent DOD’s estimates of excess capacity may be overstated or understated.”
In other words, no one knows whether the Pentagon has 24 percent extra room or not.
Undoubtedly there is room for savings among the Pentagon’s 562,000 facilities. But it will be a hard sell to persuade Congress that a BRAC round is the best way to achieve them.
In another examination of BRAC, this time in a 2014 study, GAO found that the Pentagon does not have a complete inventory of its property and it has incomplete data on whether the buildings are fully used, said GAO Director Brian Lepore, who oversees GAO’s work on BRAC.
The Department of Defense agrees it does not have an accurate accounting of its excess — it argues there’s even more than 24 percent now, because it shut down about 3 percent of its facilities in the 2005 round, and personnel reductions will leave it with less end strength than it had then. Heading into the 2005 round, it had 1.43 million personnel on active duty. This year, it will register 1.31 million.
There’s nothing stopping the Pentagon from conducting another analysis of its infrastructure to see if it can get a better estimate of its excess, except funding and manpower.
Additionally, few lawmakers think BRAC saves the money it proposes. Just the fear of a round can be a highly politicized, expensive and contentious process as lawmakers and an army of lobbyists spend years fortifying the bases in their districts with construction projects they may not need, in the belief it will insulate the installations from closure.
Once a BRAC process starts, it requires billions in costs to shift and consolidate facilities, in the anticipation that it will generate long-term savings. The savings from the 2005 round are still under debate. The process cost billions more than anticipated, and it will be another decade before its actual long-term savings can be accurately measured. A 2012 analysis by the GAO found that BRAC’s 2005 costs grew 67 percent — from $21 billion to $35 billion to implement — largely because of construction costs to consolidate, close and shift missions.
These issues are why House Armed Services Committee Chairman Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, is hesitant to consider a new round.
“It’s pretty hard to see what those numbers are based on,” Thornberry said, asking whether the excess and savings are real or whether the Pentagon “just pulled it out of their hip pocket.”
