Base benefits don’t add up

NOW THAT the Base Realignment and Closure Commission has taken some military bases off the chopping block and left others on, President Bush must decide whether he agrees -- a decision Congress can override. The panel’s job was to assess the Pentagon’s argument that closing some of the military’s 3,000 bases would strategically refocus national security and provide cost savings. Its decisions came after intense lobbying by community leaders, congressional representatives and military experts.

In Washington and in places where base closings mean job losses -- such as Ventura, Calif., and Forest Park, Ga. -- the proceedings have been encased in flawed assumptions about what military bases do for and to surrounding communities. These flawed suppositions are symptomatic of the nation’s failure to question and understand the military’s role in our society.

A prevailing, but invalid, assumption is that a military base equals economic benefits. Well-funded military public relations offices pepper local newspapers with figures -- sometimes in the billions of dollars -- purporting to represent the money the Pentagon showers over regions with bases each year. But such figures are deceiving.

First, adding in soldiers’ salaries, construction contracts and supply costs, the balance sheets neglect to point out how much of that money was first extracted from the community in taxes (the Pentagon now rakes in over half of all discretionary tax dollars, according to the Center for Defense Information). They also fail to calculate the cost in lost local property taxes, from which federal property is exempt. As a result, many base communities struggle with dramatically poorer schools and other inadequate services in comparison with neighboring cities. They also have more than their share of people needing social services, such as veterans dealing with injuries and military spouses suffering from domestic violence (at rates the Miles Foundation estimates are up to five times higher than the civilian population), and the third of female veterans who have been victims of rape or attempted rape.

Some costs are more invisible but often deadly: the environmental damage borne by military families and those beyond the fences. California continues to deal with the toxic legacy of its many closed bases, such as Ft. Ord, where heavy metals and explosives taint soil and water. Navy operations in the San Diego area have left a soup of battery acids, PCB-contaminated oil and other pollutants. Even more egregious is the damage abroad, as in the Philippines, where children around the former Clark Air Force Base were born with deformities, which studies and a 1992 General Accounting Office report suggest were caused by military toxins. Who dares put a price on that?

Further, the economic impact figures do not reveal whose pockets the Pentagon dollars flow into and out of. Jobs on bases are increasingly low paying because government jobs with good benefits and pay were cut with privatization. Most jobs created near military bases are in retail, the lowest-paid category of work in the United States today. Instead of flowing to large numbers of local workers, most Pentagon tax dollars land in the hands of a few military contractors and local business owners.

In much the same way that the Pentagon has misrepresented the benefits of bases, it’s also misrepresented the benefits of closing the bases. The commission has said that the Pentagon radically underestimated the costs of environmental cleanup and conversion of base land to local control.

Worse, the money theoretically will just be invested in another billon-dollar contract with companies such as Halliburton and General Electric, under the guise of cost savings through privatizing of military services. Why are we shifting money from one leaky pot to another? Will this plan make any of us safer? Can we ask instead: What else should we be doing with this treasure to improve the quality of human life?