Posts Tagged ‘defense authorization bill’

While senior officials for the Navy and Marine Corps acknowledged at a hearing Tuesday of the House Armed Services Committee that they don’t expect to eliminate much infrastructure if a BRAC round is launched in 2015, for the most part they did not go along with the ranking member’s ploy to convince his colleagues to authorize more base closures. Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) asked the witnesses if it would be accurate to characterize their needs in a future BRAC as making changes around the edges versus “closing huge, major bases in the middle …

The top officials for the Navy and Marine Corps told lawmakers Tuesday that they do not expect to cut much spare capacity if a new base closure round goes ahead in 2015. “We in the Navy have taken previous BRAC rounds very seriously,” Navy Secretary Ray Mabus told the House Armed Services Committee. “We’ve shed most of our duplicative and overlapping bases and services …

The chairman and ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee said they oppose the Pentagon’s request to conduct a round of base closures in 2015, a stance which presents a formidable barrier to the Pentagon’s pursuit of a new BRAC round. Committee Chairman Sen. Carl Levin last week said he would not support DOD’s request, continuing his opposition from last year. On Tuesday, though, Levin added that he didn’t believe DOD was serious about its request because it failed to include any funds in next year’s budget to carry out a BRAC round …

Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, said at a hearing Friday that he is a “strong supporter” of another round of BRAC, making him the rare lawmaker who has publicly backed the Pentagon’s request to hold a new round in 2015. DOD needs to pare down its infrastructure following a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan and to adjust to a drop in defense spending, Smith said during a committee hearing on the Air Force’s fiscal 2014 budget request …

At a House hearing Friday primarily focused on the Pentagon’s request to hold a round of base closures in 2015, lawmakers were not particularly vociferous in their opposition to BRAC, but the DOD witnesses still found themselves needing to convince a skeptical appropriations subcommittee about the rationale for a new round. In characterizing the extent to which the military has spare capacity at its installations, Katherine Hammack, assistant secretary of the Army for installations, energy and environment, painted the most vivid portrait when she described her service’s reliance on attrition to trim its end strength by 80,000 soldiers by 2017 …

Reports of BRAC’s death have not been greatly exaggerated, at least according to the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. On Tuesday, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) said he didn’t expect the Obama administration to request new base closure rounds in its fiscal 2014 budget request since Congress already made it clear last year that it was opposed to authorizing additional BRAC rounds …

The Air Force on Thursday released its plan to carry out the force structure changes mandated by the fiscal 2013 defense authorization bill. The changes primarily reflect the compromise plan for eliminating and retiring aircraft from the Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve that the Air Force proposed last November after lawmakers and governors rejected the service’s original proposal for scaling down its force structure …

The Readiness panel of the Senate Armed Services Committee will be joined by two other subcommittees this June in holding an open markup of the defense authorization bill. Last year, the Readiness panel — which is responsible for installation policy, including BRAC — was the only one to hold an open markup, but this year the Airland and Personnel subcommittees will be open as well, the committee announced last week. The full committee markup will remain closed. The committee’s six panels will mark up their sections of the annual defense policy bill June 11-12, with the full committee starting its markup on June 12.

Because the White House has not yet delivered its fiscal 2014 budget request, the Pentagon witnesses at Thursday’s hearing of the House Armed Services’ Readiness Subcommittee were able to argue the merits of holding additional base closure rounds, but they were unable to say whether the administration would be requesting one more rounds as part of the new budget proposal. “We will be treating the administration’s position on future BRAC rounds as pre-decisional,” John Conger, acting deputy undersecretary of defense for installations and environment, said at the outset of his prepared remarks …

It came as no surprise during Thursday’s hearing of the House Armed Services’ Readiness Subcommittee that Republicans and Democrats both were adamantly opposed to a looming request from the Pentagon to hold one or more new BRAC rounds. Possibly the only reason to think the mood in Congress had changed since lawmakers last year rejected the administration’s request for two rounds is the arrival of sequestration. The administration’s primary argument to revisit the issue is that a scaling back of force structure …