Pittsburgh Tribune-Review July 30, 2007
911th Airlift base gets Pa. rival
By Brian Bowling
State and local officials say a plan to save a Philadelphia military air base won't endanger funding for a similar Pittsburgh area project, but a defense analyst said it might.
When the Air Force decided to close its reserve base in Moon during a 2005 national restructuring of military facilities, a local task force devised a plan to keep the 911th Airlift Wing in business -- and to expand its mission by designating it as a Joint Readiness Center for military, homeland security and emergency response operations.
An independent commission reviewing Pentagon recommendations endorsed the idea and wrote it into federal law.
Gov. Ed Rendell then championed a similar proposal for Willow Grove Naval Air Station near Philadelphia. In May, Congress passed a defense appropriations bill that starts the process of converting Willow Grove into an inter-agency base handling the types of missions proposed for the Moon center.
Rendell acknowledged that the Philadelphia and Moon proposals are similar but said he doesn't think the Pentagon would hesitate to pay for both projects even though it originally wanted to close both bases. The main difference between the proposals is geographic, he said.
"One is for the Mid-Atlantic Corridor, and one is -- the one out here near the Pittsburgh airport -- is really for the central part of the country," Rendell said during a recent visit to Ambridge.
The original plan for the Moon facility was that it would handle emergencies throughout the country.
Allegheny County Chief Executive Dan Onorato and Michael Langley, CEO of the Allegheny Conference on Community Development, are co-chairing a committee handling development of the local Joint Readiness Center. They said they don't believe the Willow Grove plan will affect that project because the local center is part of a mandate from the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure Commission and was signed into federal law.
John Pike, an Alexandria, Va., defense analyst who operates the GlobalSecurity.org Web site, said the Pentagon would get "slapped down" if it ignored such a mandate, but not if it switched the focus and money from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia.
"Those BRAC decisions don't come from the mountaintop written in stone," he said. "With the passage of time, it's less and less about BRAC and more about business as usual."
That's particularly true for smaller facilities that have less of an impact, Pike said.
© Copyright 2007, The Tribune-Review Publishing Co.
