June 19, 2017 9:59AM

The Consensus in Favor of BRAC

By Christopher A. Preble

Today a broad coalition of more than 40 different scholars from over 30 different think tanks and academic institutions have issued a letter calling on the relevant House and Senate committees to grant the Pentagon authority to reduce excess military infrastructure. Simply, we need another Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) round. The full letter can be found here.

All of the signatories, myself included, signed as individuals, not as representatives of their respective institutions. But the breadth and depth of the coalition reflected in their affiliations, from the Center for American Progress and Peace Action to Americans for Tax Reform and FreedomWorks, shows just how much support exists for a process that has helped the military to deal with its excess overhead in five rounds beginning in the late 1980s through the mid‐​2000s, and that could do so fairly again.

The letter stresses points that I have made elsewhere (e.g. here, here and here). The Pentagon has repeatedly requested authority to close unneeded or underutilized bases. It estimates its capacity exceeds its needs by over 20 percent, and that is true even if the U.S. military remains at its current size, or grows modestly. The Obama administration asked Congress to approve BRAC, as has the Trump administration.

The objections to BRAC focus too narrowly on the economic harms that can come to communities affected by a base closure, without seeing the opportunities created when underutilized property is made available to redevelopment. There is pain. No one disputes that. But it is possible for communities to recover from a base closure, some have done so very quickly, and most emerge with a stronger, more diversified economic base after a military base is closed.

We conclude:

BRAC has proven to be a fair and efficient process for making the difficult but necessary decisions related to the configuration of our military’s infrastructure. In the absence of a BRAC, defense communities are hurting. Although members of Congress have blocked base closures with the intent of helping these communities, they are actually making the problem worse. The time to act is now. Congress should grant our military the authority to eliminate waste, and ensure that vital defense resources flow to where they are most needed.

Read the full letter.