Air Force Chief Drops Bombshell Threatens To Close Bases Himself
With the Clinton administration and Congress at odds over another round of base closings, the acting Secretary of the Air Force threatened Friday to close bases on his own if lawmakers don’t cooperate.
Republicans on Capitol Hill have accused Clinton of interfering in a 1995 decision by the Base Closure and Realignment Commission to close McClellan Air Force Base near Sacramento, Calif., and Kelly Air Force Base near San Antonio.
Since then GOP members and many Democrats have said they would balk at more base closings - events that frequently prove politically difficult for lawmakers when military facilities in their districts are shuttered.
Acting Secretary Whitten Peters did not name any specific bases that might be shuttered, but he said mounting Air Force budget problems make more closings necessary. Not acting to eliminate unnecessary facilities would hurt weapons plans and make life harder for personnel, he added.
“I have another way of closing bases, and it is truly ugly,” said Peters. “I can close bases without BRAC right now, and the result would be (leaving behind) runways left pockmarked, buildings which are rundown, no economic redevelopment and no significant environmental cleanup.
“I can do that today, but that is essentially equivalent to dropping a nuclear weapon on a community, and that is not what we ought to be doing. We ought to be looking for a fair way to do it that provides for economic development and provides for environmental cleanup.”
Such talk is the toughest to date from the Clinton administration. The president, in his 1999 defense budget, asked Congress to consider planning for base closing rounds in 2001 and 2005. The administration estimates it can save taxpayers $3 billion by closing more bases.
But lawmakers complain Clinton’s promise during the 1996 presidential campaign to privatize Kelly and McClellan amounted to his injecting politics into the BRAC process. GOP members say they don’t want another BRAC but instead would like the Pentagon to find another system of closing bases.
Peters made his comments at the Air Force Association’s 1998 Air Warfare Symposium in Orlando. Hundreds of top Air Force officers have gathered here to discuss the future of the Air Force and, most admit privately, play a little golf or visit Walt Disney World.
Peters said the four previous rounds of base closings, the last coming in 1995, produced cumulative savings of $5.6 billion.
“To put that in perspective, $5.6 billion equates to a three-squadron wing of F-22s and Joint Strike Fighters,” Peters said in his speech to the AFA membership here Friday.
He added the Air Force at present has too many runways for its people to operate effectively.
“We need to consolidate forces on fewer bases so that when we deploy part of a base to, say, Southwest Asia, there are still enough folks at home to run the base,” he said. “Unless we do this, we will continue to have our men and women who are left at home working routine 12-hour days. We must stop such overwork if we are to improve retention.”
Retention of Air Force personnel was foremost on the mind of many of the symposium’s speakers over the past two days.
The difficulty the Air Force has had convincing fighter pilots to resist the lure of a growing airline hiring trend has been well publicized. But Richard Hawley, commander of Air Combat Command, said he has also had problems keeping other key personnel.
He said, for example, only 33 percent of F-16 crew chiefs were reenlisting, a number the Air Force would like to see at 50 percent or higher.
Hawley said he was opposed to spending billions in pursuit of battling new non-conventional threats that may never arise.
“We need to pursue capabilities that deal with terrorists and other asymmetric threats to our well being. But must it come at the expense of those forces that have deterred nuclear war for nearly 50 years and those forces who have made large scale conventional conflicts with the United States unthinkable?”
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