Panel Handles a Task That Congress Couldn’t : Military: Commission managed to keep politicians at arm’s length. But it was unable to establish a clear list of criteria to guide future decisions on base closures.

It was billed from the beginning as “an experiment in open government,” an effort to rise above purely political considerations in deciding which military bases should be shut down as America’s armed forces shrink to post-Cold War levels.

And while the Defense Base Closures and Realignment Commission was unable to remove politics from the process completely, it managed to keep the politicians at bay long enough to prepare a list of recommendations.

That prospect, said Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams, is what persuaded Defense Secretary Dick Cheney to put aside his initial misgivings about ceding critical management decisions to an independent commission composed of representatives of the public and private sectors.

“Cheney’s ideal would be if Congress would let us do what we want,” Williams said. “But at least this has worked--it’s been the first thing to work in years. So, if you have to have Congress in it, this is probably the best and most effective way to do it.”

The seven-member commission was created to make the tough calls on specific bases. Its recommendations, if endorsed by Bush, can be accepted or rejected by Congress in their entirety--but cannot be modified.

The commission chairman, Jim Courter, a former congressman from New Jersey, clearly understood the political forces that have doomed past efforts to shut bases. Over and over again, he promised that the commission’s deliberations would be immune from charges of political taint.

Such charges, lodged so often by lawmakers on the receiving end of base closures, probably will not stick this time, said Lawrence Korb, who was the Reagan Administration’s senior defense official in charge of military installations. But that does not mean the deliberations were not political, he said.

“It looked every bit as political as the normal decision-making in government is,” Korb said, adding that arguments in public among committee members seemed to take on political overtones.

While the commission satisfied its primary objective of doing the dirty work that Congress could not complete, it was unable to establish a clear list of criteria to guide future decisions on base closures, according to observers of the process.

“I don’t get the sense that they set for themselves very clear criteria,” Korb said. “Commissions are supposed to ensure that criteria are met. But if we didn’t have these criteria to give them, then we shouldn’t have had a commission.”

Throughout its deliberations, the panel fulfilled Courter’s prediction that it would engage in a “free-wheeling discussion” in which the rules were largely invented along the way. Over the course of 28 hearings in Washington and other cities, the seven commissioners were uninhibited about airing their disagreements over the guidelines and the limits that they would recognize in deciding whether bases should be closed or preserved.

Could they shut bases even if the action promised no meaningful savings for the taxpayer? How much did local economic impact count in comparing two similar facilities? Should facilities be preserved against the off chance that they might be needed in some future crisis of unknown proportions? Did they have jurisdiction to consolidate the largely civilian Army Corps of Engineers?

These questions and others were debated, some producing heated exchanges. But few of the vital issues were resolved, either by votes or by consensus. And in the final polling, the commission members had only their consciences to guide them.

“I don’t think we’ll totally understand their decisions either way,” said Dick Martin, military adviser to a group of supporters of Castle Air Force Base in Merced. “The discussion and dialogue has been on the record, but . . . exactly what appeared to be persuasive with each commissioner was not revealed.”

Martin, interviewed shortly before the panel began its final deliberations Sunday, said the decision-making process has been difficult to fathom. “When we’re asked how we’re doing for the folks at home, we tell them we could win 7 to 0. Or lose 7 to 0,” he said. “We don’t know. It’s just not predictable.”

With the Pentagon planning to reduce the size of the nation’s military structure by 25% over the next five years, additional closures and realignments are inevitable. A 1993 base closure commission already is envisioned to take up a new round of cuts, and the commission members on Friday forwarded several nonbinding recommendations to their successors.

But analysts and observers said that unless the next commission is given the kind of guidelines that this one lacked, the underlying rationales for its decisions are likely to be just as elusive as those adopted Sunday.

As the panel began casting its final votes, Commissioner James C. Smith II defended its work as “very systematic.” But he conceded that even if there had been a detailed list of criteria guiding the process, “You’d never end up taking the subjectivity out of it.”