Defense Communities 360 Headlines

The Navy is still cleaning up the former Naval Air Station South Weymouth 16 years after the installation located outside of Boston closed, but officials believe the effort could be completed in about three years. So far, the Navy has spent $66 million on the effort and it estimates finishing the job will require an additional $25 million, reported the Boston Globe. While remediation could be completed in 2016, monitoring will be required at some sites for decades …

Industry needs to take the lead in reaching out to military veterans by either developing its own targeted hiring initiatives or relying on other companies’ best practices, according to a report Monster.com and Military.com released Tuesday. Private sector companies, including Boeing and J.P. Morgan, have launched veteran recruitment programs and veteran affinity groups that have successfully attracted thousands of veterans …

The Government Accountability Office is expected to review how the federal government prepared for and carried out sequestration, following a request earlier this month by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). Ryan asked the congressional watchdog agency to monitor agencies’ compliance with the across-the-board spending cuts and “to review how agencies determined what constituted a ‘program, project, or activity’ for purposes of the sequester …

Defense communities generally would be better off if the Pentagon launched a base closure round sooner rather than waiting, due to the threat that the services would try to conduct a “backdoor BRAC” in the absence of a scheduled round and because of the benefits the BRAC process provides communities, Anthony Principi, chairman of the 2005 BRAC Commission, said in a recent interview. If no BRAC round is on the horizon, the services may try to trim the number of civilians or realign military personnel at some installations, as long as they don’t exceed statutory limits on such changes …

A final vote in the Senate on a fiscal 2013 continuing resolution is scheduled to take place Thursday and likely would be followed by a vote by the House, allowing Congress to avert the possibility of a government shutdown before the start of its recess. Once the Senate passes the stopgap spending measure needed to keep the government running for the last six months of the fiscal year, the House is poised to approve it as well …

The lack of a state-led program in Texas to prepare its 15 military installations for future BRAC rounds leaves its defense communities at a disadvantage compared to other states, according to a commentary in the Corpus Christi Caller. Last week, Capt. Rob Bennett, commanding officer at Joint Reserve Base Fort Worth and chair of the Texas Commanders Council, told the Veterans and Military Installations Committee of the Texas Senate that the state’s focus has been reactive, providing funds for communities hurt by base realignments and closures …

The Connecticut’s Office of Military Affairs participated in a groundbreaking earlier this month at Naval Submarine Base New London for a $3.5 million diver support facility paid for by the state. The dive locker, which will replace an existing facility that is almost 100 years old, is the latest in a handful of projects the state has funded at the submarine base in recent years to strengthen its standing in a future BRAC round …

The Pentagon’s plan to shrink the Army’s active duty end strength from 570,00 soldiers in fiscal 2010 to 490,000 soldiers by FY 2017, along with possibility of greater reductions forced by sequestration, are the primary drivers behind the service’s argument that it needs a base closure round to trim excess capacity. But in her testimony delivered last week to the House Armed Services’ Readiness Subcommittee, Katherine Hammack, assistant secretary of the Army for installations, energy and the environment, also cited improvements in the efficiency of the service’s industrial base as another factor driving the Army’s need for a smaller footprint …

The Senate voted on Monday to limit debate on a fiscal 2013 continuing resolution needed to avert a government shutdown after March 27, setting up a final vote on the measure as early as Tuesday. The motion to cut off debate came as the chamber was unable to reach an agreement to trim the number of proposed amendments to be debated on the floor. Lawmakers had introduced almost 100 …

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel on Monday directed senior leaders to reconsider the strategic guidance that the Pentagon developed last year to determine if it needs to be adjusted following the arrival of sequestration. President Obama unveiled the strategy in January 2012 that had been crafted to accommodate $487 billion in spending reductions over the following decade. But now that DOD faces the prospect of absorbing an additional $500 billion in cuts through fiscal 2021 …