[House Report 107-436]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
107th Congress Rept. 107-436
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
2d Session Part 2
======================================================================
BOB STUMP NATIONAL DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION ACT FOR FISCAL YEAR 2003
_______
May 6, 2002.--Ordered to be printed
_______
Mr. Stump, from the Committee on Armed Services, submitted the
following
SUPPLEMENTAL REPORT
[To accompany H.R. 4546]
This supplemental report shows the additional views of the
Honorable Gene Taylor, submitted May 2002, with respect to the
bill (H.R. 4546), as reported, which was not included in part 1
of the report submitted by the Committee on Armed Services on
May 3, 2002 (H. Rept. 107-436, pt. 1).
This supplemental report is submitted in accordance with
clause 3(a)(2) of rule XIII of the Rules of the House of
Representatives.
ADDITIONAL VIEW OF HON. GENE TAYLOR
I am greatly disappointed that my amendment to repeal the
FY2005 BRAC round was not adopted by the House Armed Services
Committee. With our nation's focus on the ongoing war on
terrorism, this is not the time for another round of base
closures. The Defense Department claims tremendous savings from
previous BRAC rounds in 1988, 1991, 1993, and 1995. In fact, a
recent GAO report estimates those savings as $16.7 billion
through 2001 and $6.1 billion in annual recurring savings
thereafter. However, GAO characterizes these estimates as
imprecise and rough approximations, and since DoD has not
accurately tracked its BRAC savings, the report does not
contain a breakdown of the purported savings by service, let
alone a list of savings by installation. Furthermore, DoD has
yet to inform the Committee of any weapon system for which
procurement has been made possible through BRAC savings.
The strain on our communities with military installations
over the previous four BRAC rounds was immense, and we are
about to put all of those lucky enough to survive the previous
rounds through the whole process again. BRAC impacts the entire
community. It impacts the longtime base employee just a few
years short of retirement who wonders if he'll have to forego
the retirement pension which he has almost earned or uproot his
family and relocate to take another Government job. It impacts
the small business owner who relies upon income from military
personnel and their families from the base. It also impacts the
local government that spends valuable time and money trying to
save their base.
Most troubling is that some of our decisions in previous
BRAC rounds have not proven to be very smart. We have already
given away so many bases that we are now faced with building
new installations for the basing needs of new weapons
platforms. In fact, we may soon have to buy additional land to
build an outlying airfield on the east coast to accommodate the
new F/A-18E/F Super Hornets for the Navy which are likely to be
based at either NAS Oceana, Virginia, MCAS Cherry Point, North
Carolina or MCAS Beaufort, South Carolina. It's likely that
none of these bases will have the air traffic capacity for all
of the Super Hornet squadrons, and even if the squadrons are
split between two of the bases, a new outlying airfield will
probably be necessary.
The difficulty that the Navy is having in basing the Super
Hornets on the east coast pales in comparison to what that
service will face when it tries to find a home for its Joint
Strike Fighter (JSF) squadrons which will begin to join the
fleet in 2010 to complement to the Super Hornet. The most
disturbing aspect of this dilemma is that the Navy had another
jet fighter base at NAS Cecil Field near Jacksonville, Florida,
but that installation was closed in the 1993 BRAC round. The
480 Navy-variant JSF's that will be procured will produce even
greater pollutants and noise than the Super Hornet. When NAS
Cecil Field was ordered to be closed, nobody in DoD saw the JSF
on the horizon though the JSF program was initiated just a year
later in 1994. At that time, perhaps few could have predicted
the impact of new and stricter environmental limitations on
aircraft basing decisions. As difficult as it is to base the
Super Hornets for the Atlantic Fleet, the struggle to find a
home for 200 or more JSF's at an existing east coast
installation might just be impossible. The problem is further
compounded by the Marine Corps' need to base half of its
planned procurement of 609 JSF aircraft somewhere on the east
coast. We face a very real possibility of having to build a new
base to house the JSF operational squadrons at what will be an
astronomical cost. The Navy needs a base near the ocean to
facilitate aircraft operations and training. The BRAC savings
that DoD likes to boast of in their pursuit of further base
closures could be significantly wiped out by the real estate
acquisition alone. Then one must consider the cost of
constructing up to four runways of 8000 feet or more, several
hangars and maintenance facilities, dozens of office buildings,
hundreds of family housing units and huge barracks complexes,
and all the support functions and facilities infrastructure to
service a small city. The best option might be to re-open NAS
Cecil Field, but that base has already been given away to the
City of Jacksonville and developed for both residential and
industrial purposes.
If DoD is already faced with basing shortages as a result
of overzealous efforts in previous base closure rounds, it
makes absolutely no sense to pursue BRAC in 2005 or for many
years after that. DoD argues that it has 23% excess
infrastructure capacity, but the services will not or perhaps
cannot tell us which bases are excess. Given our understandable
inability to predict all of our future defense requirements, it
even makes sense to keep a reasonable amount of excess base
capacity. Otherwise, as Congress is asked to authorize the
construction of new bases, it will find itself wishing that
other BRAC installations like NAS Cecil Field had not been
closed.
Gene Taylor.