Quote:

---

Let’s suppose you’re a typical American family, with kids that have largely grown up and flown the coop, leaving you and your spouse empty-nesters. Well, maybe not complete empty-nesters. You had a rather large brood, and before you consider downsizing, you need to check out to see how many kids are actually still living at home. So you conduct a bunk check, seeing who has moved out and who has still failed to launch.

As the Pentagon shrinks, it logically wants to do the same thing.

But get this: Congress has barred the U.S. military from seeing how many empty bedrooms – oops, make that surplus posts, bases, hangars, piers and runways – it has.

Because…if the Pentagon doesn’t know how much excess infrastructure it has, there’s no way it can ask Congress for permission to shutter more bases. Ain’t democracy grand?

Some in the Defense Department don’t think so. “We have been precluded under recent [annual defense-spending authorization laws] from spending any money to do the kind of analysis that can provide a highly-specific answer” regarding how much wasted space the Pentagon has, Army Secretary John McHugh said Tuesday. “But we have pretty good analysis from about a decade ago that showed at the time that the Army was about 20% over-structured.”

Amid tough economic times, and a shrinking military budget, Congress is in no mood to let the Pentagon close additional bases. Over the past 25 years, more than 350 military installations have been closed by so-called Base Realignment and Closure commissions, or BRACs (pronounced “brack”). But it has been nearly a decade since the last BRAC round, and the Pentagon wants another in 2015 to shed its excess real estate.

Under the BRAC process, the Pentagon recommends bases to be closed to a special commission, which can tweak the list before sending it on to Congress for a final up or down vote on the entire list (in the good ol’ days, Congress — believe it or not — actually made tough decisions on its own without handing them off to such subcontractors). But military bases and the jobs they provide voters, have become cherished pets of Congress. Lawmakers have no interest in a sixth BRAC round.

“While base closures and realignments often create socioeconomic distress in communities initially, research has shown that they generally have not had the dire effects that many communities expected,” the Congressional Research Service reported last year. But no one actually believes that.

When Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee two weeks ago, he said lawmakers “need to look at our domestic footprint” and launch a new round of base closings.

No way, Congress countered. Things have gotten so bad on the BRAC front that Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who chairs the armed services committee, referred to the Pentagon claim of savings as an “allegation.” More at http://nation.time.com/2013/05/02/base-motives/#ixzz2SABAt5aw

---