Base Realignment and Closure

Origins of Base Closure

The United States dramatically expanded its military base infrastructure during World War II, leaving it with a surplus of shipyards, army forts, air bases, and a host of other military facilities when the war ended in 1945. The U.S. Department of Defense responded to this excess base capacity by closing hundreds of military facilities prior to 1977, until Congress in that year passed a highly restrictive law that eliminated most closures. The congressional act stemmed from both congressional fears of the political consequences of base closure–related job losses and anger over charges that former presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon had closed bases for political reasons. However, the apparent end of the Cold War in the late 1980s caused Congress to recognize that the shrinking U.S. military did not justify the existing base structure, and thus in 1988, Congress passed the Base Realignment and Closure Act. That legislation created the BRAC Commission, whose members the Senate nominated and the president approved, to preside over four base closure rounds. Those rounds, in 1988, 1991, 1993, and 1995, closed 97 bases and realigned more than 300 other facilities by reducing their size and scope. However, the Department of Defense personnel numbers had dropped by 36% between 1989 and 2003, while only 21% of U.S. military bases closed; so by 2004, the Department [Page 207]of Defense still had 25% excess base capacity and thus requested an additional BRAC round. After considerable hesitation, Congress finally approved a BRAC round for 2005, though Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld changed his estimate of surplus base capacity from 25% to around half that size. Unlike previous BRAC rounds, the 2005 BRAC round closed very few large bases, though it did merge the operation of several colocated bases under the rubric of “joint bases.”

BRAC: The Process

The BRAC creators understood well the political consequences of base closure, and thus attempted to make the process both nonpartisan and transparent. Thus, the 1988 BRAC legislation specified both the BRAC commissioner appointment process and the BRAC base evaluation process. The secretary of defense appointed the BRAC commissioners for the 1988 round, though subsequent rule changes mandated that the Senate nominate six of the nine BRAC commissioners for presidential approval (three were presidential appointments) for the subsequent three rounds. Once formed, the BRAC Commission issued a broad set of closure guidelines, and the Department of Defense, in response to those guidelines, issued a “data call” from each military base. The results of the data calls, covering items like contribution to military missions, cost of facilities, quality of life, and numerous other measures, formed the basis of the military decisions on base closure. The data generated from each service then was fed into a cost-estimating program known as Cost of Base Realignment Actions to systemize the closure and realignment process. Then the Department of Defense derived a preliminary base closure and realignment recommendation from these data and forwarded that list to the BRAC Commission. The BRAC Commission then reviewed the Department of Defense suggestions, though the BRAC rules empowered the commission to add bases that it believed met the closure/ realignment criteria and to remove those from the Department of Defense list that it believed should change status. The commission also held public hearings and selected commissioners visited each base on the Department of Defense list, seeking to maintain process transparency.

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