Next Round of Military Base Closings May Favor West, South

The new round of military base closings expected to begin with a Pentagon announcement this week is shaping up in part as a struggle between base advocates in the Northeast and the Sun Belt.

The process for consolidating more than 400 major U.S. military facilities is being influenced in part by the potential threats posed by North Korea and China, a consideration that favors the West Coast. And decisions also are being driven partly by the need for locations that allow troops to train relatively unfettered on sea and open land, favoring the South and West, at the expense of the Northeast, defense analysts and Capitol Hill policymakers said this week.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and West Coast lobbyists who have joined in the scrum on Capitol Hill have made training space and national security threats a centerpiece of their campaign to keep endangered Pacific bases in business. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who has declined to discuss base closures with Schwarzenegger or any other governor, is expected to reveal his list of proposed closings to Congress on Friday.

West Coast bases are expected to lose some tasks, and it remains unclear whether California will continue to lose a greater proportion of bases than other regions, as it did in earlier base closing rounds dating to 1988. But in some cases, Pacific bases are expected to gain troops and tasks as the Base Realignment and Closure Commission downsizes other bases and transfers their functions elsewhere.

Some Pentagon insiders and officials close to the commission, which will take up the list Rumsfeld produces, say the West Coast argument appears to have had some influence.

“A lot of the commissioners are saying we have too much base structure on the East Coast and not enough on the West Coast,” military analyst Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute said. “When Rumsfeld says he wants the basing system to be better matched to future threats, he means that he wants the military to be closer to where it’s actually going to be used.”

Thompson predicted San Diego would gain jobs from the new round of base closings, along with Hawaii and Washington state. He said the upper Midwest and Northeast were likely to lose jobs related to the military.

A May 3 report to the commission by National Intelligence Council Chairman David Gordon that described growing potential military threats from Asia -- notably North Korea and China -- reinforced the pitches of lobbyists who insisted western bases needed to remain as the first line of defense in the Pacific.

A southward migration of bases would continue a trend from four previous rounds of base closures that began in 1988. Eighteen states that have banded together in a Northeast-Midwest coalition saw active duty military personnel drop 41% -- as high as 92% in New Hampshire -- compared with a national average of 24%.

But for California, anything other than massive losses would mark a reversal. The number of active duty troops in California has dropped 40% since 1988, from 206,495 to 123,948. California absorbed 24 of the 97 major base closures in past rounds. Nearly half the related job losses from those closures were in California, according to the governor’s office.

Schwarzenegger recently sent a 50-page report on California bases to President Bush and followed up Thursday with a call to White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr., pointing out California’s advantages.

“The threat from the Pacific Rim, California’s vantage point on the West Coast, is one of them,” said Vincent Sollitto, a spokesman for the governor. “Others include some of the larger swaths of land -- air, sea training facilities -- and access to technology, particularly around the L.A. Air Force base.”

The Los Angeles Air Force Base, whose air space is hemmed in by a crush of residential and commercial buildings in El Segundo, is considered among the state’s most vulnerable bases.

Any gain for the South or the West is likely to come at the expense of the Midwest and Northeast, lobbyists from those regions fear. Eastern lobbyists argue that additional cuts in their areas could result in military vulnerability and a drop-off in enlistments.

“For many years the trend toward military spending has been toward the South and West,” said Dick Munson, executive director of the Northeast-Midwest Institute, a nonprofit regional interest group in Washington. But if the Pentagon continues to slash bases in the Northeast, he said, “I think the military then abandons the Northeast as a place to recruit.”

Availability of land and access to water account more for the geographic shifts than rising threats in Asia, said Steve Grundman, a former deputy undersecretary of Defense for installations during the Clinton administration now with CRA International, a Boston consulting firm.

“What’s driving the geographic movement of forces to the South and particularly the West is the need for elbow room,” Grundman said. “Forty years ago it might have been possible to station an armored division in New England. These days, given the range and lethality of the forces, those don’t make very practical training and basing areas.”

After Rumsfeld introduces his list, the commission can alter it. Previous panels changed 15% of the Defense Department’s recommendations in past rounds.

Bush can then send the list back to the commission with recommendations or certify it and send it to Congress, which can approve or reject the list but cannot change it. If the list is approved, closures could begin as soon as the beginning of next year.