Focus on Defense & Congress: Time for more base closures

If you could remove 50 channels you never watch from your cable subscription and save $10 a month, you would do it, right? The Pentagon has a similar problem.

According to a Defense Department study released in October, it now has 19 percent more infrastructure than it needs. Roughly one in every five installations the Pentagon owns is idle, yet we — the nation's taxpayers — still pay to secure and maintain those facilities. This excess capacity will not be filled in the future — not even under plans being considered to rebuild our shrunken military. It's time to cut it loose.

Experience proves that the best way to shed excess military infrastructure is through a process called Base Realignment and Closures (BRAC). Congress can authorize the process to begin at any time. But for the last seven years, it has denied the Pentagon's pleas to start a new round.

When Defense Secretary James Mattis testified in Congress on the department's budget request, he told lawmakers a new round of BRAC likely would save $2 billion each year in maintenance costs. Previous BRAC rounds already are producing more than $12 billion of savings every year. Additionally, Mattis noted, a new BRAC round would help the department improve its readiness and lethality by better locating our forces and right-sizing infrastructure and its associated costs. So, why won't Congress act?

Excuses range from parochial desire to protect bases in individual members' districts to claims that the Pentagon has provided insufficient data documenting the magnitude and costs of the excess. Moreover, a lot of members still have not gotten over bad experiences with the last BRAC round in 2005, which focused heavily on establishing joint bases — facilities that host units from two or more service branches to foster integration and interoperability among the branches. However, joint basing led to much higher implementation costs than expected and has been absent from all Pentagon proposals for a new BRAC round and from all the congressional proposals since 2010.

Congress has all the power in this discussion. It can further reduce cost overruns' likelihood by limiting actions to those that save money in five years, or by establishing specific goals — e.g., reducing 5 percent of Defense infrastructure. Unfortunately, lawmakers did none of that in the 2018 defense authorization bill. Instead, they once again denied the Pentagon the authority to reduce idle infrastructure, forcing the department and the taxpayer to continue to pay for its upkeep.

Congress can — and should — resolve all its reservations about BRAC in the next defense authorization bill. All it will take is a willingness to work with Pentagon brass. The leaders of the armed services committees understand the need for a new BRAC round. All of them, Democrats and Republicans, are committed to improving how the Pentagon runs.

Congress and the Pentagon are expected to be good stewards of tax dollars, and BRAC is a step in that direction.

Delaying it will just represent another missed opportunity to save and grow stronger.

Frederico Bartels is a policy analyst specializing in defense budgeting at the Heritage Foundation's Center for National Defense.