Pentagon Land Grab?

Case by case, the Pentagon probably can justify much of its plan to own nearly enough real estate to cover Indiana. But there are good reasons for not rushing to expand various forts and bombing ranges just yet. One is that nobody knows what U.S. military forces of the future will look like and how much land they will need for war games. Another is that the leftovers of target practice, including unexploded bombs and shells, ruin land for other purposes for so many years that Congress will want to look before the military leaps.

All of this was explored in recent hearings before Rep. Bruce F. Vento (D-Minn.), chairman of the subcommittee on national parks and public lands. The Pentagon was there to explain why it wants to add 3.4-million acres of Interior Department land to the more than 20 million acres it already has.

The Army, for example, got by on 4,000 acres for battalion-scale tank-and-infantry maneuvers during World War II. It needs 80,000 acres now, it says, because tanks are faster, fire farther and must travel more widely dispersed than they used to, because when they cluster they are easier targets for modern anti-tank weapons.

The argument that faster aircraft require larger bombing ranges seems less solid, because no matter how fast they are traveling, they are supposed to hit targets, not miss them by wider margins because of their speed.

An unusual coalition of ranchers and environmentalists turned up to denounce the plan. Ranchers oppose many of the expansion plans, because they lease land from Interior for grazing that would be turned into bombing ranges. Environmentalists complain that some of the land that Interior would turn over to the Pentagon is still in the running for protection as wilderness area. Vento and other subcommittee members did not denounce, but they seemed skeptical about the idea. With good cause.

A report by the chief investigative body of Congress, the General Accounting Office, examined the way the Army decides how much more land it needs and where it needs it. The office looked only at a proposal to add 82,000 acres to the training grounds of Ft. Riley, Kan., unrelated to the Vento hearings, but some of its conclusions have a bearing on the larger Pentagon plan. One is that the way the Army determines its needs leaves a lot to be desired, including the fact that alternatives to buying more land are studied only after the decision to buy land has been made.

Another is that nobody can tell at this point what priority the Army and other services will give to land under Pentagon budgets that everyone acknowledges will be tighter than in the past, and under troop reductions that may result from negotiations between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Soviet Union.

The subcommittee is mulling over what it learned in the hearings and has not yet decided whether it wants further testimony. We think that it should, if only to pursue one of the more intriguing questions raised at the hearings. “Why,” the National Wildlife Federation wanted to know, “do both the Navy and Air Force need to develop separate electronic warfare training areas? . . . Why are we developing separate bombing ranges for the Air Force and Air National Guard in Idaho and Montana . . . ?” Why, indeed?