DOD pushes plan for new BRAC round

The Department of Defense is continuing with its push for another BRAC round.

On Wednesday, John C. Conger, acting deputy undersecretary of defense for installations, told a subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee in Washington that a Base Realignment and Closure round is the best way for the DOD to keep pace with the continual slashing of the defense budget.

"The budget challenges facing the (defense) department are deep, and they extend for many years," Conger told the subcommittee. "We continue to believe that an important way to ease this pressure is with base closure, allowing us to avoid paying upkeep for unneeded infrastructure and making those funds available for readiness and modernization of our forces."

When Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel unveiled details of his proposed five-year Pentagon budget in February, it included a new BRAC round.

If the budget were approved, the BRAC would take place three years from now.

BRAC is a process in which the federal government aims to increase Department of Defense efficiency by closing military installations that are deemed unnecessary.

More than 350 installations have been closed in five BRAC rounds that came in 1989, 1991, 1993, 1995 and 2005.

When addressing concerns about the high cost of the last BRAC in 2005, Conger said those closures were geared toward transformation, rather than efficiency.

Conger said his staff reviewed each of the recommendations from the 2005 round of BRAC and found that the defense department actually conducted two parallel base realignment and closure rounds.

The transformation recommendations "didn't pay back," Conger said.

Almost half of the 2005 round's recommendations were focused on transformation, and they either didn't pay back at all or paid back in seven years or more, he said. The transformation BRAC cost $29 billion and resulted in just $1 billion in annual savings. "In other words," he said, "the reason we were doing those moves wasn't to save money."

The other recommendations, though, were focused on saving money, Conger said. Those paid back in less than seven years and cost just $6 billion out of the overall BRAC cost of $35 billion. They also yielded recurring savings of $3 billion a year.

"(That) proves that when we're trying to save money, we do," Conger said. "That's the kind of round we're seeking to conduct now. It is fair to say that the department needs to save money, now."

Members of Utah's congressional delegation and local military experts have said that Hill Air Force Base, with its F-35 maintenance workload, it being the future destination of three F-35 fighter wings and a bevy of other work critical to future defense, is in relatively good shape if another BRAC were to occur.

Congress would have to authorize another BRAC round before it could occur.

The American Forces Press Service contributed to this report.