Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry says he wants to review military needs and has vowed to suspend the current Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process if elected.
Utah's three U.S. House members originally voted in favor of delaying BRAC until 2007. But the White House vowed a veto and the state's entire congressional delegation voted in favor of the final 2005 defense authorization bill now awaiting President Bush's signature, which keeps BRAC on track to recommend a list of doomed bases in September.
House Armed Services Committee member Rob Bishop, R-Utah, said that even if Kerry is elected and keeps his pledge to suspend BRAC, the need to eliminate excess equipment and bases and redirect the money to newer technology is pressing.
"Every BRAC brings a great amount of harm, but I have yet to hear anyone say there is not some merit in going through this process," Bishop said from Utah, where he is campaigning against Democratic challenger Steve Thompson for a second term. "If BRAC was stopped, there would be a lot of minds put to rest, but you are still going to have a difficult time funding the Defense Department properly."
Bishop said he has not seen the data call requests sent to Hill Air Force Base leaders; the Pentagon is striving to keep the content of the questionnaires a secret to avoid potentially politicizing what is required by law to be a fact-driven analysis.
"We have to use certified data and the information received from the data calls is what drives the analysis," said Pentagon spokesman Glenn Flood. "Usually they start off with the basics - what do you have there, what is it used for."
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on Wednesday defended pressing ahead with reducing bases and installations at a time when U.S. military missions are increasing.
"If you have a base structure that is pretty much left over from the Cold War, and you have not adjusted it to fit your force structure, then the taxpayers are wasting billions of dollars," Rumsfeld said, according to an interview transcript released by the Pentagon.
Rumsfeld said "something between 20 and 23 or 24 percent" of the current domestic military infrastructure at 425 bases is excess to the Pentagon's needs.
What concerns base boosters are issues surrounding procurement of new weapons systems or missions to replace ones mothballed by BRAC.
For instance, Air Force leaders are discussing plans to accelerate retirement of aging F-16 fighter jets, the mainstay of Hill's combat wings. The service plans to replace the older aircraft with the new F/A-22 stealth fighter now being readied for operational certification and the F/A-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which is in development and won't make a test flight until 2006.
But military budget writers in Congress say spending on those two expensive new fighter programs must be slashed to pay the $6 billion monthly tab to support U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"There's no way you can fund those things," House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., told the trade publication DefenseNews this week. "The cost of this war is eating up everything."
