The Pentagon on Monday promised that a new round of base closures would go better than the one initiated in 2005, asking lawmakers to allow the department to free up money by getting rid of excess infrastructure.
The leaders who wrote the Pentagon’s budget for fiscal 2017 said base realignment and closure, or BRAC, is an important part of cost savings.
While many criticized the 2005 closures for not yielding savings sooner, Jamie Morin, director for cost assessment and program evaluation, said the Defense Department wasn’t happy with how the previous effort went either and had come up with ways to make this round different.
“We think a future BRAC round would have a much different financial ramification,” Morin 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.”
The Pentagon asked lawmakers this year to do another round of base closures in 2019. The need to close excess infrastructure is so dire, they said, that the department will act without Congress where it can. The fiscal 2017 budget request asked for $4 million to begin planning the base closures.
Morin said the department has 20 to 25 percent more infrastructure than it needs in most of the Pentagon’s mission areas.
Mike McCord, the Pentagon’s comptroller, acknowledged that another round of base closures is “one of the most challenging” cost-saving proposals in the fiscal 2017 budget request.
Lawmakers are often against closing bases in their home districts, and have pushed back on efforts to close infrastructure in the past.
Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said this year that he would be open to another BRAC only if the Defense Department performed a new audit of what bases it didn’t need, saying that the Pentagon is still using 10-year old numbers.
“I’m not saying we won’t do another BRAC, but I am saying if we’re going to do it, we’ll do it on better data than a 10-year-old estimate that obviously is outdated in a number of ways, not only in what our bases are but what our threats are,” Thornberry said in January at the National Press Club.
He also pushed back on the Pentagon’s assertions that the 2005 BRAC was an unusual situation and that a future round of base closures would cost less.
“My point is, we don’t have any extra money laying around. We better be darn careful we know that we have something that we don’t need because once we give it away, especially if it’s a training range or flying range or something, we’ll never get it back,” he said.
