Bases: No Longer Loaded

Congress is about to take itself out of the game that Washington has played with surplus military bases since sometime soon after the nation found itself with its first empty Army stockade.

Analysts say that the move will mean direct savings of at least $2 billion a year. There will be indirect savings, too, because it will be harder, if not impossible, for the Pentagon to bully members of Congress into voting for gold-plated defense programs by threatening to close bases in their districts unless they play ball.

Congress has not closed a military base since 1977--a fact that the Reagan Administration has turned to its advantage in efforts to tag Capitol Hill as Washington’s big spender. But it is one thing to sit in Washington and think globally and rationally about military investment. It is quite another matter when the closing of a military base means hard times for a region and its voters go looking for revenge at the next election.

In effect, Congress is getting out of the game by passing the buck for any member who may lose a military base in his or her district over the next few years. Under a bill approved by the House of Representatives this week, choosing bases to close would be the job of an independent commission. The commission could produce a list of up to 20 major bases and up to 30 small installations that it thinks should be closed in the next few years. The sequence that Washington would follow once the commission had drawn up its list is as complicated as some arms-control agreements. If the plan worked as it could, it would in fact be an arms treaty of sorts.

The list would go first to the secretary of defense, who would have 15 days to accept the entire list or reject it. The no-substitutions feature is designed to prevent the executive branch from turning the base-closing game into a form of solitaire. After that, Congress could spare one base only by voting in both the Senate and the House to spare all of them--an unlikely turn of events. Because the President could veto bills rejecting the commission’s list, Congress could wind up having to cast a two-thirds vote to save all of the bases --an even more unlikely outcome. A conference committee now will work out minor differences between the House bill and a Senate version approved earlier this year.

Congress has seen base closings as political poison for years despite analyses showing that as often as not a community is better off after a military base has been converted to private use.

But when the services are hounding Congress for money, they don’t dwell on the good news; they concentrate on the specter of vengeful voters. In “Wild Blue Yonder,” author Nick Kotz’s devastating account of the way the Air Force kept its B-1 bomber project alive for 30 years, base-closings are feature attractions in the weapons array. In one case an Air Force general told a civic luncheon in a Michigan town near an Air Force base with a $78-million annual payroll that the region could lose its base and its payroll if its two senators did not stop sniping at the bomber. “Those states with B-1 opponents,” he said, will be the first to be cut.”

If the new measure puts an end to that approach to defense decision-making, it will be a notable achievement. Savings of $2 billion in real defense costs would come under the heading of a bonus.