'Joint bases' is the name of the game in BRAC '05.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.
• Position: Base realignments and closure

Details on the Bush administration's plan to dose scores of military bases by 2005 will begin to surface next month, when a top-level panel of military and civilian defense officials is due to outline its recommendations to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

The panel's report primarily will address what, if any, military facilities that now are owned by individual services can be turned into "joint" bases that would be shared by more than one organization. Potential candidates for consolidation include military pilot-training schools, laboratories, health care and medical treatment facilities.

Unlike previous rounds of base realignments and closure (BRAG), the 2005 e1vent will target facilities that are "single purpose," rather than joint, sources said. And while the services heavily managed past BRAG rounds, this time the center of power is the office of the defense secretary.

The administration wants to slice at least 20-25 percent of its real estate, claiming that this "excess infrastructure" costs billions of dollars a year to maintain and is draining resources from higher-priority accounts.

The 30-member panel working on the initial proposals is made up of top military and civilian leaders from the Defense Department, the Joint Staff and the services.

The group can be described as a "board of directors ... through which all recommendations will flow to the secretary of defense by the spring of '05," said Raymond DuBois, deputy undersecretary of defense for installations and environment.

The defense secretary, DuBois told reporters, views the 2005 BRAG as a "singular opportunity, perhaps the last best chance in a generation, to reshape our infrastructure to optimize military readiness."

If the 2005 BRAG moves forward as planned, several hundred installations would be scrutinized for possible shutdowns or realignments. 'All installations are going to be judged equally," said DuBois. 'All installations are on the table."

In the previous four BRAG rounds (in 1988, 1991, 1993 and 1995), the Defense Department closed 352 facilities, including 97 major installations, and realigned 145.

The administration's aggressive advocacy of base closures is founded on the premise that the Pentagon could save more than $6 billion a year by shutting down facilities that no longer are deemed useful to the military mission.

Congress only agreed to endorse a BRAG round if it was timed so that it would not interfere with the 2004 elections. Under the plan approved by lawmakers in late 2001, the defense secretary will submit a list of proposed closures and realignments to a nine-member BRAG Gommission by May 16, 2005. The commission (whose members must be confirmed by the Senate) would have until September 8 to revise the list.

As was the case in the other four BRAG rounds, both the president and Congress will have to accept or reject the entire list.

"The earlier BRAG rounds were essentially service-centric," said DuBois. The services independendy "wrestled with their own BRAG analysis, and at the end, presented them to the secretary of defense."

Rumsfeld wanted his office to take over this time around. At first, the services rejected the idea. After a year's worth of negotiations that began in February 2002, the service chiefs agreed to support a centralized Pentagon-driven BRAG.

"My sense is that, from here on out, all the services are on board with this process," said Paul Taibi, a policy analyst at Business Executives for National Security, a think tank that supports base closures.

"The approach taken by the secretary is exactly the right approach," he said. "If you want the BRAG to accomplish what it can accomplish, you need to make the decisions from a joint perspective.

In the past, each service was expected to bear a certain percentage of the cuts. That approach is inefficient, Taibl said, because it fails to take into account potential cross-service consolidation of facilities. "Maybe everyone shared in the pain, but it wasn't done from some kind of integrated, strategic plan."

Under Rumsfeld's current plan, "the damage won't be...