The media pundit's pundit. Written by NYC insider Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine covers news, media, journalism, and politics.
Armed pork
: I find the whining by both sides over Rumsfeld’s base closings to be most unseemly:
Hey, every American industry has gone through restructuring. There’s no reason why the U.S. military should not restructure given the changing nature of its business. And I don’t give a damn whether the base in your state or your state or your state closed, senator or congressman.
It’s one country. It’s our money. It’s your waste. Enough.
Now if only we could apply this same logic to other government agencies we could reduce the size of government overall. What a novel idea.
Yes, these bases will be closed so that new bases can be established in Afghan. and Iraq.
Consider this a form of outsourcing.
I was going to write something then realised I should be drunk somewhere.
Jeff:
I understand why individual Senators wouldn’t want a base closing from their states, there is some painfull economic dislocation and it doesn’t help at election time. Both sides do it so no party is clean. I do find it a tad more silly for any democratic pol who has used the phrase milatary industrial complex as a way to point out how defense spending is out of control. One way the milatary has shielded themselves from cuts has been to spread out the facilities to as many states as possible so closing bases has been historically hard to do. Of course this has led to waste and been part of the sums that some dems claim we should be spending on children and the elderly. I am not an expert but the base closings suggested seem to hit both parties hard. It would be funny to look up and see if any of the Dems that are howling now have ever used the MIC line to bemoan milatary spending. Like most pols, right or left, spending is pork unless it is in your state.
Base closings have been pork issues since the end of WWII. We built bases to accommodate the training and housing for 15 million troops in those years. The military has beeen shrinking ever since. The military is a favorite target of budget cutters, but “NIMBY”. Congress will strut around bragging about every base closing they saved. It is tiresome political grandstanding by both parties. We stand to lose 4 bases here in Georgia. They are all unnecessary, but you can bet your boots that at least 2 will be “saved”!
Ordinarily I’m all for saving on Pentagon waste. But without a draft, with recruiting on the skids, with our troops still dying over there, the more geographically and economically dispersed our domestic military infrastructure the better.
Public support of the military is no stronger anywhere than in communities surrounding these bases and facilities. Right now we need all we can get.
We save $50B over 20 years. How long does it take to spend that over there? And many over there still don’t like us or want us.
At least here we get guaranteed goodwill. Some pork is worth more than other pork.
This is one case where I sympathize with the politicians somewhat. I hate it when they name things after themselves, or build roads to nowhere. But this isn’t a pork project that benefits a few unionists, a few construction companies or elites. Base closings affect tens of thousands of people – you can’t just ignore them.
Take a look at Cannon Air Force Base in Clovis, NM, for example. What is Rep. Tom Udall supposed to do? The AFB represents approximately 75% of Clovis’s economy. Closing Cannon will essentially destroy Clovis, a town that has already been decimated by busts in agriculture and petroleum.
Is Udall supposed to dispassionately accept the BRAC’s recomommendations to close Cannon and slap his constituents in the face? Or should he make a valiant yet futile effort to save his constituents’ jobs?
We could have saved over 300 billion dollars by not going to war under false pretenses, more than enough savings to save all the bases many times over. Plus, maybe it would have given us enough resources to actually catch Bin Ladin in Tora Bora.
Time for new management.
I dunno, seems to me that putting all our eggs (ships, airplanes) in fewer baskets (and in a couple cases just one) is just asking for trouble. You’d think those who were so strongly beating on the drums of terrorism preparedness might actually consider that idea.
Add to the fact that some claim that the naval shipyard being closed in Maine is the most efficient one we have, and the preponderance of northeastern bases affected, and one has a hard time keeping off that tinfoil hat urging you to say “hm, looks like retribution for blue states”
To everyone:
The arguments on whether to close a base or not should be about defense needs,and effiency. Once you turn bases into a welfare program you will never be able to close a base,you will never be able to end a weapons program, you will have a permanent spending level that will never go down. whether we went to Iraq or not has nothing to do with base closures. I am not an expert so I don’t know which closures are good or not. But anytime you end a base that is not needed or a weapsons manufacturing facility that is redundant you will have economic dislocation and pain. If your argument is you can’t close because of the hardship you will set up a situation where you are paying out money for a military base that is not needed. If you want to take that money and use it to help with the transition from military function to civilian function ok.But to use the milatary as a jobs program is a poor allocation of tax money. The question should be does the base or wepons program serve a defense need, not whether or not it will be economically painfull. If you use the economic argument you will never be able to close any military base. With that argument we would still have money going into horse calvary divisions.