More than one-fifth of the military’s infrastructure is a waste of taxpayer dollars, according to a Pentagon report provided to lawmakers this week.
The report from Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work looked at projected force structure in 2019 and found that 22 percent of military infrastructure is unneeded. The report is meant to back up the Pentagon’s request in the fiscal 2017 budget proposal to do another round of base realignment and closures.
“As the Department of Defense leadership has repeatedly testified, spending resources on excess infrastructure does not make sense. Therefore, we urge Congress to provide the department authorization for another round of BRAC,” Work wrote in a letter to the leaders of Capitol Hill’s armed services committees.
The Army has the most excess infrastructure, with 33 percent being unneeded, according to the report. Air Force closely follows with 32 percent, followed by the Defense Logistics Agency with 12 percent and the Navy with just 7 percent.
The report created support for base closures by some members of Congress, including Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee.
“In this current budget environment, rather than waste money on excess infrastructure, we need to locate potential efficiencies and ensure taxpayer dollars are spent wisely,” Smith said in a statement.
But closing bases always meets resistance on Capitol Hill because lawmakers want to protect jobs in their districts. Some members of Congress have also expressed concerns that a new wave of base closures would face similar problems as the last one in 2005, which saw costs to close facilities skyrocket over what was predicted.
The Pentagon, however, said last month that it had learned its lesson and wouldn’t repeat those mistakes.
“We think a future BRAC round would have a much different financial ramification,” Jamie Morin, the Pentagon’s director of cost assessment and program evaluation, said during an event at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “We just need to move forward on this to enable a whole bunch of cost take-out, to drive more combat capability out of each taxpayer dollar.”
