Politics of Base Closures
Base closing is a game of politics. It is easy to see what the impact is to the politicians or there careers but. There is big money in services at military bases.
Reading the Marine Times online you can see a political spin if you know how to look.
The Pentagon asked on Friday to shut down 180 installations across the country in the first round of base closings since 1995, and the fifth since 1988.
This round is the biggest yet, with recommendations that fall heaviest on National Guard and Reserve facilities, commercial office space and a handful of large, politically sensitive bases.
180 installations! that is a lot of facilities.. What do they do? Many are small offices with very few staff. Others are large bases with thousands of staff and support structures. Some enable training for future wars, many have too many restrictions these days to provide any training other than drill, this was caused by the extreme environmentalist or cities that grew to close.
“Our current arrangements, designed for the Cold War, must give way to the new demands of the war against extremism and other evolving 21st Century challenges,” Rumsfeld said.
The EVIL leader of Defense Department only wants to put people out of work. Then all he will do is make the excuse that “it is to match our current threats. If you are a leftist that is you thought process. But here we know different.
Even before the list was released publicly at a Pentagon news conference, lawmakers were reacting - often angrily - to a list that would close 33 major bases and dozens of smaller facilities.
Looking at the large bases that are being impacted you can see that while they are large they still focus on old world tactics and many of them have far reaching constraints on their use. This is caused by the extreme groups that happen to be more left than right.
Collectively, Rumsfeld’s plan would result in a net loss of 29,005 military and civilian jobs at domestic installations. The plan would involve pulling 218,570 military and civilian positions out of some U.S. bases while adding 189,565 positions to others.
The politics behind this is two fold. First it is to make the changes in the force structure that will enable the best ability of our military in the future. Second it is also to REWARD or PUNISH the representatives based on how well or poor they supported the DOD project requests. This is often the only way the military has to influence the support for wanted programs. The threat of a base closure in a senator’s state can cause a lot of unhappy constituents. That is a lot of unemployment coming. That is not to mean that the politicians has their hands tied behind there backs. Just that the revenue from the federal government is noticed by lots of people.
With the popular belief that if you are/were in the military you must be republican, you might think that the DOD would focus on the blue states or areas. You would be wrong in most cases. This might show that the military is more in the middle than it is skewed right or left, but maybe it is skewed more by support of the programs it really wants. Situation awareness is really the key to how the DOD changes its formations. It knows who is bad and who is good.
So it is all politics with self preservation as a good motivation. After all why would the military ever say that it doesn’t need this or that?
Cross Posted at The Wide Awakes
Cross Posted at Flight Pundit
