Portland Press Herald April 17, 2005
Are Maine bases essential to U.S.?
By Tom Bell
For more than four decades, Brunswick Naval Air Station and Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery were on the front lines of the Cold War against the Soviet navy.
Portsmouth Naval Shipyard refueled and overhauled our submarines. BNAS sent planes to track down theirs. And the two nations played hide and seek above and below the ocean.
Now, with terrorism the major threat against the United States, the Pentagon is scrutinizing the nation's 425 domestic military bases. The goal is to trim a quarter of their capacity. The Pentagon plans to deliver a list of proposed base closures to a nine-member review committee by May 16.
Maine's two bases are at risk. And the Kittery shipyard is in bigger trouble than BNAS, according to interviews with military analysts and an examination by the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram of other bases that perform similar functions.
Specifically, the newspaper posed this question: What's the military value of Maine's bases compared with their competitors?
The answer: Both bases are at risk of closure or cutbacks. But while the shipyard may be heading toward obsolescence, BNAS may be poised to take on a new role in the war on terror.
Congress directed Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to ensure that military value is the primary consideration in choosing which bases to close. That means the Pentagon must decide whether Maine's two bases provide enough value to the nation's defense to justify the $900 million spent annually to operate them.
Local advocates and politicians from Maine and New Hampshire are fighting to convince the Pentagon that the bases are vital to the nation's security. At stake are thousands of jobs and millions of dollars that the bases pump into the economies of southern Maine and coastal New Hampshire.
Only a handful of people in the Pentagon know if BNAS and the Kittery shipyard will make the list. And industry analysts say it's hard to predict what will happen.
As it pores over data, the Pentagon is doing the kind of cost-benefit analysis used by corporate America, analysts say. In the quest for greater efficiency and greater profits, many companies in recent years have decided to close field offices (or buy up other companies) and consolidate services.
A key phrase that often appears in Pentagon memos is "jointness" - the ability of a base to provide many defense functions for more than one of the armed services, said David Sorenson, author of the 1998 book "Shutting Down the Cold War: The Politics of Base Closure."
FAR FROM MILITARY THREATS
This is a problem for Maine. Both the shipyard and BNAS are relatively isolated from other military installations, and their missions are more narrowly focused than others.
They are competing against bases like Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Virginia and Jacksonville Naval Air Station in Florida. Those bases are larger, have multiple missions and are situated in the center of large military complexes.
Moreover, Maine is seen as a poor location for a base, said Loren Thompson, a defense industry analyst for the Lexington Institute, a public-policy research group in Arlington, Va.
Due to the shift in the global security environment, he said, Maine's two bases have seen a decline in military value for a generation. Both were placed in Maine because, historically, the main threat to America came from Europe. But Navy forces today are operating mostly in the northern Indian Ocean and the western Pacific.
"If Canada was an aggressive power, Maine might be a critical military outpost," Thompson said. "But as things stand today, Maine is about as far as you can get in this world from urgent military threats."
The loss of the bases would deal a serious blow to Maine's economy. But arguments about the bases' economic importance won't carry much weight with the Pentagon, said Winslow Wheeler, a senior fellow at the Center for Defense Information.
While military planners will take into account the economic impact of bases in remote regions where a base is the only major employer, he said, BNAS and Portsmouth Naval Shipyard are located in regions that have healthy economies.
Both face cuts, Thompson predicted. It's possible that one or both could be closed.
"We don't know all the facts coming into play in an internal deliberation," he said. "But what we do know does not portend to a good outcome."
LOBBYING FOR THE BASES
As the May 16 deadline approaches, the local lobbying effort on behalf of bases is intensifying. Last week, supporters of Portsmouth Naval Shipyard delivered to Congress nearly 10,000 letters of support. On Saturday they plan a series of rallies in towns bordering the shipyard.
Such efforts are a waste of time and energy, Sorenson said. People can't change the factors that would put their base on the closure list. The best thing communities can do is plan for a base to be closed, he said.
"If you have no plan, the real estate values drop to the floor," he said. "People start looking for ways to leave. If you have a good plan in place, you avoid the panic."
Whatever happens next month, people in southern Maine and seacoast New Hampshire better start getting their plans ready, said John Pike, a military scholar at GlobalSecurity.org. Portsmouth Naval Shipyard - owned and operated by the U.S. government for more than two centuries - won't survive the decade, he predicted.
"I would get ahead of the curve on this one," he said.
© Copyright 2005, Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc.
