In Final Slap to Pentagon, Bases Are Spared in S. Dakota, New Mexico

Continuing to defy Pentagon proposals, the military base closure commission Friday spared South Dakota’s B-1 bomber base and rejected the proposed shutdown of a major Air Force base in New Mexico.

Ellsworth Air Force Base was kept open after feverish lobbying by South Dakota lawmakers, while New Mexico officials claimed a “partial victory” from a compromise that keeps Cannon Air Force Base open at least through 2009. The Pentagon recommended both bases be closed, eliminating or shifting more than 6,600 military and civilian jobs.

The panel’s action came in a day of setbacks for the Pentagon, which also was on the losing end of a federal court decision in Pennsylvania that could derail another part of the base closure plan approved Friday. U.S. District Judge John R. Padova ruled that the Defense Department had no authority to shut down an Air National Guard base without the approval of Gov. Ed Rendell. If upheld and applied nationally, the ruling could bar the Air Force from carrying out its plans to consolidate Air National Guard bases nationwide.

The independent Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission ended three days of meetings Friday, rebuffing parts of the Pentagon’s restructuring plan. The Pentagon had been seeking $48.8 billion in savings over 20 years. The commission’s changes on large installations alone would force the Defense Department to forgo at least $4.7 billion in projected savings. The panel is not required to find cuts to make up the difference.

The base closure commission acted on recommendations submitted by the Pentagon in May, and its report will be sent to President Bush. Without changing individual recommendations, Bush may accept them or send them back to the commission. Congress is due to receive the finished report by Nov. 7.

In each of the most politically controversial base closure recommendations, the panel overturned the Pentagon at least in part. The nine-member panel voted to spare the Naval Submarine Base New London in Groton, Conn.; the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, Maine; Ellsworth and Cannon air bases; and several others.

“The more high-profile a recommendation by the Pentagon, the more likely [the commissioners were] to change it,” said Jeremiah Gertler, a staffer for the commission during previous base closings and now a military analyst for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.

Past base closure commissions have agreed with the Defense Department’s recommendations about 85% of the time.

“So far, this commission is going along 66% of the time,” Gertler said. “But those 33% to 34% where they voted against the department were the big bases.”

The disagreements between the commission and the Pentagon appeared more dramatic in part because, after four previous rounds of base shutdowns, all of the obvious closures had been made, leaving increasingly difficult choices and close calls, said Christopher Hellman of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington.

“The ones that we’re watching are high profile because they were controversial,” Hellman said. “And by and large, the reason that they were controversial was that they’re not slam-dunks.”

Pentagon strategists had sought to close Ellsworth, a hub for nuclear bombers and missiles during the Cold War, and move its fleet of B-1 bombers to Dyess Air Force Base outside Abilene, Texas. But freshman Republican Sen. John Thune and other South Dakota base supporters argued that national security would be threatened by keeping the nation’s entire fleet of B-1 bombers at one site.

For Thune, it was an important battle because he had waged a successful political campaign against former Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle in part by arguing he could do a better job of protecting Ellsworth and its 4,000 jobs.

“This whole decision was about the merits,” said Thune, who had become a regular presence at the panel’s meetings. “It had nothing to do with politics.”

Factors that persuaded commissioners to keep Ellsworth open, they said, were the open air space surrounding the base and their staff’s analysis of the financial impact of the base’s closure. The staff report concluded that although the Pentagon estimated a savings of $1.8 billion over two decades, the plan would have actually cost nearly $20 million. It also found that the Pentagon listed some personnel costs as savings when the employees would have remained on the payroll at other bases and that the Defense Department did not account for the expense of moving the operations.

“We have no savings. We’re essentially moving the airplanes from one very, very good base to another very, very good base, which are essentially equal,” Commissioner Harold W. Gehman Jr., a retired Navy admiral, said during the debate.

The panel’s decision on Cannon, in eastern New Mexico near the Texas Panhandle, marked a middle ground between leaving it open indefinitely and shuttering it entirely, as the Pentagon had sought to do. Rather than closing the base in 2006, the commissioners voted to strip it of its four F-16 fighter squadrons but keep it open through the end of 2009. They ordered the Air Force to look for new missions beyond 2009. But the base would close if no new uses were found.

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson deemed the compromise a “partial victory.” Saying the base affected one in three jobs in the town of Clovis, state officials held out hope that new missions -- and perhaps new political leaders -- would help extend the base’s life.

“We may have another fight in 2010,” said Richardson, a Democrat. “But I believe at that time there will be enough missions to keep Cannon Air Force Base open.”

When deciding on the fate of Pennsylvania’s Naval Air Station Willow Grove, commissioners didn’t take into account Friday’s federal court ruling, approving the Pentagon’s recommendation to close the base. However, they revised the Pentagon plan, preserving the base’s Guard unit.

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Reprieved

The base closure commission voted to keep Ellsworth Air Force Base open.

Ellsworth Air Force Base

Opened: Jan. 27, 1942, as Rapid City Army Air Base as a training site for B-17 Flying Fortress crews.

Named after: Brig. Gen. Richard E. Ellsworth in 1953.

Home to: 24 B1-B long-range bombers, about half of the U.S. fleet.

Economy: Base employs about 4,000 South Dakotans and contributes an estimated

$278 million a year to the state’s economy.

Sources: Ellsworth Air Force Base, Associated Press