Base Closings Denied; Military Seeks Own Cuts

A Senate panel Thursday voted down another round of military base closings, effectively killing the proposal’s chances for this year and raising the odds that the Pentagon will begin starving some bases of resources since it cannot kill them outright.

Despite a vigorous advocacy campaign by the Pentagon, the base-closing proposal died on a 9-8 vote in the Senate Armed Services Committee when Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), a former supporter, changed sides. The proposal is expected to come up later on the Senate floor, but it is given little chance there and opposition in the House is even stronger.

Pentagon officials, strapped for billions of dollars to fund weapons purchases and troop readiness, have warned that without further closings they might be forced to cut back operations at less-important bases--or even try to close them on their own initiative. One official likened such efforts to “dropping a nuclear bomb on a community,” especially since affected areas would not automatically receive federal aid to rebound from the economic blow, as has been the case with congressionally authorized closures.

Military officials have not said which bases they might seek to squeeze or close, and, despite its losses from previous rounds of closures, California is home to 56 of the 259 major U.S. military installations that remain. In previous rounds, Point Mugu Naval Air Weapons Station near Oxnard, China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station northeast of Los Angeles and Beale Air Force Base near Sacramento have been mentioned as possible closure targets.

Thursday’s defeat of the base-closing proposal--and the Pentagon’s warnings about what could come next--reflects how, after four rounds of post-Cold War base closings, the choices now are all difficult and painful.

The vote “really backs the Pentagon into a corner here,” said Erik Pages, a vice president of Business Executives for National Security, a private group in Washington that backs closings. “It increases the chances that to save money the Pentagon is going to do something really innovative here--or, from the opponents’ perspective, really threatening.”

Defense Secretary William S. Cohen, who has made additional base closings a priority, said in a statement that “even though we knew this would be a difficult vote, the outcome in the Senate Armed Services Committee was nevertheless extremely disappointing. Not providing the department with the ability to reduce billions of dollars in wasteful spending on unneeded bases will deprive the men and women in uniform of the resources essential to fulfilling their mission.”

One of the measure’s authors, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), said that he was “disappointed, but not surprised, that the committee took a predictably parochial approach.”

The proposal could still make it through Congress in 1999, when--in contrast to this year--there is no pressure because of an upcoming election.

The committee vote took place in closed-door deliberations on the defense authorization bill after days of complaints from GOP members that the White House has continued to meddle with arrangements made during the last base-closing round.

In 1995, President Clinton enraged Republicans by promising to provide compensating private aircraft-maintenance jobs at McClellan Air Force Base near Sacramento when the military leaves the facility in 2001. Republicans called this an attempt to build support for his reelection in vote-rich California and said that it violated the rules of the nonpartisan commission that handled the base-closing decisions. And this week, GOP critics have alleged that a newly leaked Air Force memo shows the White House has continued to try to throw contracting business toward McClellan to make good on Clinton’s 3-year-old pledge.

To placate critics, the proposal’s advocates in the Senate proposed a new approach to the commission that would oversee the base shutdowns.

Their proposal provided that there would be only one base-closing round (Cohen had sought two), but not until Clinton left office, in 2001. The president would name members of the base-closing commission but would have no chance to veto their recommendations, as he previously could do, and only the commission could push the private sector to provide replacement jobs at a threatened base.

This proposal won the support of Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), who had opposed a new base closing round when legislation came before the Senate last year. But supporters’ hopes were dashed when Warner swung the other way.

In their push for new base closing rounds, Pentagon officials have repeatedly warned that they might otherwise be forced to even more painful--and less efficient--alternatives.

Last month, Cohen said that the Defense Department could allow some facilities to deteriorate so that “repairs would go unmet. You’d have a loss of morale on the part of people who were there both in the civilian and military work force. And ultimately, a community would be the major loser since you’d have no assistance coming from the federal government to help with redevelopment.”

F. Whitten Peters, the acting Air Force secretary, warned that he has the authority to close bases on his own, though that would be equivalent to “dropping a nuclear bomb on a community.” And Gen. Michael Ryan, the Air Force chief of staff, has floated a plan to consolidate support personnel from smaller bases into larger ones, forming a network of more efficient “superbases.”

If Pentagon officials move forward with such steps, they are likely to set off a huge outcry from the affected communities.

But some elected officials, citing the pressures of a time when defense spending is falling in real terms but the demands of overseas deployments are rising, argued that the military needs to make some of the moves it has threatened to show how desperate circumstances have become.

“I hope the secretary does take some of these steps,” said Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), who voted for the proposal. “That’ll make it clear how real the stresses are.”