The Gazette April 17, 2005
Air Guard braces for closing list
Hundreds of local jobs at stake in military cuts
By Sylvia A. Smith
WASHINGTON – Closing the Air National Guard base in Fort Wayne would throw hundreds of people out of a job, squeeze the airport operations and reduce the job pool for the area’s defense contractors.
On the other hand, consolidating Indiana’s two Air National Guard bases – and putting it in Fort Wayne – would create jobs, bolster the airport and make the area a more attractive place for defense contractors.
No one knows how Indiana will fare as the process for reducing U.S. military bases lurches from one secretive benchmark to another, but anxieties are on high alert in the weeks before the Pentagon publishes its list of which of the nation’s domestic bases it wants to close.
“I’m very concerned,” County Commissioner Marla Irving said. “I may even be more concerned than other people because of being involved in government and knowing we have to cut back wherever we can. I’m extremely concerned.”
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has said he wants to reduce 20 percent of the military’s capacity in the last phase of the Pentagon’s effort to reconfigure the military’s Cold War-era force structure and save $6.5 billiona year.
Four previous rounds of base closings between 1988 and 1997 mothballed 97 major installations and hundreds of smaller ones, including several in Indiana.
In this round, for the first time, National Guard and Reserve units are being included in the mix as the government marches through its base closure and realignment process.
Gov. Mitch Daniels said one of his top priorities is trying to make the case that the state’s major military facility – Crane Naval Surface Warfare Center southwest of Bloomington, which employs 4,000 people – isn’t on the list Rumsfeld is scheduled to announce May 16.
But northeast Indiana’s military, economic and government officials are focused on whether Rumsfeld’s list will include the Fort Wayne Air National Guard base, the other Hoosier Air National Guard base (in Terre Haute), both or neither.
“It’s something that really affects the community,” said Torrance Richardson, executive director of Fort Wayne International Airport.
More than 300 full-time jobs are tied to the Fort Wayne Air National Guard facility, and the base estimated it injects $54 million a year into the regional economy. But closing the base would ripple beyond those people and that budget.
Northeast Indiana is dotted with businesses that produce goods for the military, and the base provides a pool of potential employees. Members of the Guard are well-trained and often have security clearances – two qualities that defense contractors value, said Rob Young, executive director of the Fort Wayne Allen County Economic Alliance.
“A lot of our defense contractors are engaged in very high-end communications and weapons programs,” he said. “Should we lose the Air Guard base, it could have – could have, not will have – an impact just in those kind of instances alone on the kind of contractors we have here.”
The departure of the base could be a kick in the teeth to the airport.
Richardson sketched a worst-case scenario:
If the Air National Guard decamped from Fort Wayne, the airport would lose the $18,000 a year the military pays toward the airport’s operation. That’s not a significant part of the $2.46 million maintenance and operation costs, but the Guard’s absence would mean less plane traffic, which might prompt the Federal Aviation Administration to curtail 24-hour operations.
If that happened, it would put a crimp in the Kitty Hawk cargo operation, which is largely after dark, and the 400-employee business might decide to relocate. Kitty Hawk pays about half of the airport’s operation and maintenance costs, which means the expenses would be shifted to the five commercial carriers that fly out of Fort Wayne.
In addition, the military personnel who fly into Fort Wayne as passengers on the commercial planes would go elsewhere, reducing the carriers’ business at the same time their local costs are increased.
The economic effect of a base closure on its host community is only one of eight criteria the Pentagon said it is using to evaluate its properties, but the process and information has been closely guarded. Even members of Congress aren’t privy to what the Defense Department is doing.
“It’s kind of like the election of the pope,” Rep. Mark Souder, R-3rd, referring to secrecy at the Vatican.
What members of Congress do know, however, is that after a base is on Rumsfeld’s list, it will be almost impossible to get it off.
After Rumsfeld submits his list to a nine-member commission May 16, five of the nine members would have to vote to remove a facility from the roll; seven votes are required to add a base. The commission will present its recommendations to President Bush.
If he forwards the proposal to Congress, lawmakers would have 45 minutes to reject it in toto. If they don’t act, the list would become official. Members of Congress can neither add nor subtract a base from the list.
Through it all, lawmakers are conflicted, Souder said.
“They want it both directions: a more efficient military and to protect their bases,” he said.
Souder said his strategy has been to try to make it less likely that the Fort Wayne facility is on Rumsfeld’s hit list by modernizing the Guard base and the airport, on the logic that the military would place more value on updated facilities.
Over the past several years he has asked for and received about $39 million for airport and base improvements – $26.8 million for base upgrades and $12 million to build a new air traffic control tower.
If the competition came down to Fort Wayne versus Terre Haute, Souder said he wanted Fort Wayne to have a leg up because of better facilities, a longer runway and a more modern air traffic control tower.
The 122nd Fighter Wing, based at the airport, has 17 F-16 jets. There are 29 other fighter wings nationwide, including one at Terre Haute. If Rumsfeld’s 20 percent reduction goal were applied to that statistic, six of the wings would be eliminated.
There are other, somewhat contradictory wrinkles the Pentagon is aware of that will influence a decision on how many Air National Guard fighter wings it needs, military experts said. One is the citizen-soldier nature of the Guard, which argues for having bases scattered around the country; the other is equipment, which suggests that as the Air Force replaces F-16s with more sophisticated jets, it will need fewer of them.
“The military logic for having (Air National Guard bases) spread around the country is airline pilots live all around the country and airline mechanics live all around the country. You want to have Guard facilities that they can report on weekends that are in convenient driving distance,” said John Pike, director of Global-Security.org, a military think tank.
“On the other hand, all aircraft experience attrition, and the F-16 is no exception. They crash. Several of them crash every year. As a result, the Air Force has fewer F-16s, and it knows it’s going to have fewer F-16s in the future,” Pike said. “So the one possibility I foresee for downsizing in Guard units is the possibility you’ll have one unit inactivated so that its aircraft could be spread around other units to take into account attrition.”
The Fort Wayne Air National Guard base’s cheerleaders are hoping those factors will weigh in on the local base’s side, and they say the Pentagon should also consider that:
•The airport isn’t hemmed in. Richardson said there are 90 acres adjacent to the Guard property that the airport owns and are available for expansion of the Guard facilities.
•Fort Wayne is easier to get to than more remote places where there are Air Guard units. Five commercial airlines service Fort Wayne, for instance. Terre Haute doesn’t have a commercial airport.
•The airport’s newly built 12,000-foot runway is one of the longest in the country and is long enough to handle any type aircraft, including military tankers. The military hangar was recently rebuilt.
•While military recruitments elsewhere are down, in large part because of uneasiness about the Iraq war, “they have absolutely no trouble getting recruits here,” Irving said. The Fort Wayne Air National Guard is nearly 5 percent over its end strength.
Communities around the country are trying to ensure that the Pentagon overlooks their bases when developing the list. Many, including the Fort Wayne region, hired lobbyists, sent community delegations to Washington, taken their case to members of Congress and their local newspapers.
On behalf of the National Guard, three lawmakers have tried an additional approach. House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., and two other Illinois lawmakers contend it’s illegal for the Pentagon to even consider Guard facilities for closure.
“Federal law prohibits the closure or relocation of Army National Guard installations or Air National Guard bases without the consent of the governor of the state,” Hastert, Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., and Rep. Ray LaHood, R-Ill., wrote to Rumsfeld last month.
They asked him to make sure that any consideration of the National Guard facilities in the base closure process “be stopped immediately.” There is no indication that he agreed.
Meanwhile, communities wait.
“We know it’s out of our control, and that’s one of the scary things about it,” Richardson said. “The process is taking place outside of our arena, and we know the decision may be already made, and we don’t know what that is. … The problem is you can’t really be proactive. You’re waiting to be reactive.”
© Copyright 2005, Journal Gazette and wire service sources
