Texas Base’s Rebirth Shows Military Holding Its Ground : Pentagon: Carswell is being remade into a naval air station. Other facilities targeted for closure are being kept open under new marching orders.

The big B-52 bombers have already vacated nearby Carswell Air Force Base, a sprawling 3,200-acre complex that now looks like a military ghost town.

Home to much of the nation’s now-outmoded strategic bomber force since World War II, Carswell is finally shutting down, one of the victims of the Defense Department’s drive to close unneeded military bases as it seeks to live with a declining budget.

But the residents of this town, whose economy has profited handsomely from Carswell’s presence, are not so dejected as those in many military-dependent U.S. communities. That’s because Defense Department officials have found a nifty solution for what to do with this redundant Air Force base: They are turning it into a naval air station.

On Oct. 1, Carswell will reopen under the imposing name of Naval Air Station Ft. Worth/Joint Reserve Training Base. A sophisticated aviation complex with 12,000-foot runways and myriad high-tech appurtenances, it will serve as a training installation for thousands of Reserve pilots from the Navy, Marine Corps, Army and Air Force.

Carswell is not unique. Elsewhere around the country, the Defense Department has converted a naval shipyard into an Army “debarkation center” and transferred administrative offices to other former military bases.

Defense Department officials concede that merely shifting outmoded bases from one military use to another could erode the savings they had hoped to achieve. Carswell’s payroll, for example, will stay at 55% of its Cold War peak, and the government is spending $126 million to remodel the base for multi-service use.

Critics charge that replacing Carswell with a Reserve facility--rather than selling it to the community or private firms for conversion to commercial use--is only a ruse and does not accomplish the Defense Department’s purpose of cutting back its own expenses.

“Keeping the base open like this means you still have to foot the bill for the most expensive part of the base, such as eating and training facilities,” said Keith Cunningham, an analyst with Business Executives for National Security, a defense monitoring group.

But Carswell’s hometown boosters remain unabashed. Although Derrick A. Curtis, executive director of the Carswell Redevelopment Authority, sees the irony in the situation, he insists that the reincarnation makes good sense from the military’s viewpoint.

While Carswell itself will not be dismantled, Curtis says, consolidating the Reserve facilities here will enable the military to close parts of other installations--in Dallas, Detroit, Memphis, Tenn., and Glenview, Ill. “They’re still saving some money here,” he said.

The issue has taken on broad significance because the White House, toying with the idea of delaying part of the scheduled 1995 round of base closings until after the 1996 campaign, is battling with the military over how fast and how far the shutdowns should go.

Senior military officers, who have been banking on savings from base closings to protect the Pentagon against further cuts in equipment purchases, are pushing for a full-scale round of shutdowns in 1995, no matter what the political pain.

“We really need this,” Adm. Jeremy Michael Boorda, the new chief of naval operations, told reporters in a recent interview. With the defense budget declining, he said, “there’s not enough money to maintain infrastructure that we no longer need.”

But the White House has been under pressure from lawmakers to defer some of the shutdowns--particularly in states such as California, Texas and Florida, which are expected to be key battlegrounds in Clinton’s reelection campaign.

Defense Secretary William J. Perry has vowed to keep the base-closing process on schedule, but he has hinted that part of the 1995 round of shutdowns may be put off if the economic hardships--and presumably the political pain--prove too severe.

While some 70 major bases have been officially earmarked for eventual closing or revamping, only about a dozen have actually been shut down so far. The rest have been relatively small installations, where the savings will not be very significant.

Moreover, many of the larger bases that have been closed are now being replaced--as Carswell is--by Reserve installations or other military-related operations.

There are these examples:

* Charleston, S.C.: Hit hard last summer by the announcement that the Navy will shut down its shipyard and other facilities there, it is becoming home to a new Army “debarkation center,” thanks in part to pressure from its congressional delegation.

* Ft. Dix, N.J.: Ordered shut by the Defense Base Closing and Realignment Commission during the 1991 round of base closings, it still exists in force, filled with relocated facilities from the various services.

* Rickenbacker Air Force Base, Columbus, Ohio: Ostensibly closed during the 1970s, it was immediately reopened as an Air National Guard facility. The base-closing commission later ordered it shut down in 1991 but then reversed itself two years later. The base is still operating today.

* The naval air station at Moffitt Field, Calif.: Ordered closed in 1993, it is being turned over to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration for use as an air base. While the new base will not be a military installation, it will still be part of the federal budget.

And earlier this month, the Pentagon announced plans to “consolidate” its Defense Finance and Accounting Service into 25 sites around the country, including 20 military installations, many of which are outmoded and had been targeted for closing.

“The reason they do this is obvious: It’s a political bone that they can throw to the congressmen and local political leaders in the affected communities,” Cunningham said. “And you wonder why the services don’t have any money?”

Michael Klesson, director of the Center for Economic Conversion, which also tracks base closing operations, agrees. “This isn’t base conversion,” he said. “This is just a transfer from one government agency to another.”

To be sure, not everything about the base closing effort has been political legerdemain. Although few big bases have been closed so far, the law allows up to six years from the time that a base is targeted until the day it shuts down.

Many of the delays so far have stemmed from bureaucratic problems, some of them associated with environmental cleanup. Some 35 bases are slated to close this year alone, with dozens of shutdowns set for 1996 and beyond.

Also, the services themselves lagged in proposing specific installations for shutdown, many until last year’s round of base closings, when they finally realized that they must cut infrastructure sharply or suffer a squeeze on the rest of their budgets.

As a result, many of the bases earmarked in the early days were “easy” choices that did not entail much savings. Last year’s hit list was far larger than those that had been proposed during the 1988 and 1991 rounds, and next year’s is expected to be even larger.

Finally, while purists may decry it, the law specifically allows the Defense Department to use discarded bases for consolidating some of its other operations or to turn them over to other government agencies. Indeed, federal agencies have first claim to any such property.

Even so, experts say critics have a point when they fret that postponing part of the 1995 round of base closings could damage the process permanently by placing economic and political considerations above military needs and by injecting more politics into the system.

The base closing procedure--in which the Pentagon submits a list of proposed closings based on purely military requirements and those recommendations are then reviewed by an independent commission--was designed to protect the process from excessive political pressures.

Before the new procedure was put into place, lawmakers had intervened so vigorously that the Pentagon had been unable to shut down any of its bases. Cunningham warns that if the process is disrupted now, the entire effort could become paralyzed again.

Meanwhile, Carswell, which got rid of its B-52s and shut down officially as an Air Force base only last Sept. 30, is busy getting ready to take on dozens of Navy F/A-18s and F-14s, Army C-9s and C-130s, Air Force F-16s and Army helicopters in its new role as a Reserve base.

To the Redevelopment Authority’s Curtis, the important thing is not whether the Air Force base is being replaced by a Reserve installation or turned over to investors for commercial use.

“It’s not happening as quickly as we would like,” he conceded, “but you want a bird in the hand, no matter which one it is.”