South Carolina’s military communities are bracing for an uncertain future after Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel on Monday called for deep cuts to the Army in 2015.
While Fort Jackson in Columbia – where more than 45,000 recruits are trained annually – is the obvious target, Charleston’s and other installations also may be in the cross hairs since Hagel also called for a new round of base-closure reviews in 2017.
Still, the decision on rekindling a Base Realignment and Closure Commission depends on Congress, which has delayed the assessments in recent years in the interest of protecting jobs at home.
Read it all from the local paper.
For reasons other than this latest fix, I’ve been spending the last few weeks looking at previous BRAC closures. Savings are questionable, mostly due to the government giving away the properties rather than selling them, the costs of clean up of hazardous materials and ordnance ranges, and the money spent to upgrade other facilities to handle the duties that are reassigned. One point that gets lost in the rush to close is that other than a handful of facilities, once gone there is little to no chance they could be used for military purposes again. That’s a pretty sunny view of the future that I hope holds true.
Before serious reductions in the size of the military, there needs to be a refocus of American foreign policy away from being world policeman. That will take a lot of discussion and changing of traditional thinking. I hope it happens.
#2–Good idea. The Chinese and Irianians can now be world policemen. Since we’ve entrusted them with trillions of dollars of our treasue, I’m sure we can trust them to do no mischief with the world.