WASHINGTON — The new round of military base closings expected to begin with a Pentagon announcement this week is shaping up in part as a struggle between base advocates in the Northeast and the Sun Belt.
The process for consolidating more than 400 major U.S. military facilities is being influenced in part by the potential threats posed by North Korea and China, a consideration that favors the West Coast. And decisions also are being driven partly by the need for locations that allow troops to train relatively unfettered on sea and open land, favoring the South and West, at the expense of the Northeast, defense analysts and Capitol Hill policymakers said this week.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and West Coast lobbyists who have joined in the scrum on Capitol Hill have made training space and national security threats a centerpiece of their campaign to keep endangered Pacific bases in business. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who has declined to discuss base closures with Schwarzenegger or any other governor, is expected to reveal his list of proposed closings to Congress on Friday.
Base closings -- A May 11 article in Section A about possible military base closings said that the Los Angeles Air Force Base's air space was hemmed in by residential and commercial buildings in El Segundo, implying that aircraft take off and land at the base. In fact, the base is a complex of buildings and has no runways.
Some Pentagon insiders and officials close to the commission, which will take up the list Rumsfeld produces, say the West Coast argument appears to have had some influence.
"A lot of the commissioners are saying we have too much base structure on the East Coast and not enough on the West Coast," military analyst Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute said. "When Rumsfeld says he wants the basing system to be better matched to future threats, he means that he wants the military to be closer to where it's actually going to be used."
Thompson predicted San Diego would gain jobs from the new round of base closings, along with Hawaii and Washington state. He said the upper Midwest and Northeast were likely to lose jobs related to the military.
A May 3 report to the commission by National Intelligence Council Chairman David Gordon that described growing potential military threats from Asia -- notably North Korea and China -- reinforced the pitches of lobbyists who insisted western bases needed to remain as the first line of defense in the Pacific.
