Forget about the 25,000 or so jobs that would be lost if the Groton Sub Base closes. Don't think about our inability to duplicate a facility like Groton if and when the type of conflict it was built for threatens us again. Push aside the fact that the bottom line savings here over 10 years for closing Groton and every other facility that the government is looking at this time around is only about $50 billion, or a mere $5 billion a year, which amounts to some 10 or 15 percent of the just passed, pork-laden highway bill. What we should focus on though is that this base closing exercise provides a valuable lesson about big government and why it never gets thingsó especially big thingsó right.
Every four years the top strategic minds in the country put together what was the Quadrennial Review, but is now called Project for Defense Analysis. These best and brightest are charged with looking at our current capabilities and measuring them against their perception of our future threats and adversaries. Their specific recommendations allow for how we more efficiently and effectively align our troop strength, their dispositions, the needed equipment, and a number of other things. It's war-gaming at the highest level, and these are the people who study, analyze and recommend, hopefully to deter, but ultimately to win the conflicts we're confronted with and in the process strengthen our relative position in the world.
Today we are in a great debate about which of our military bases should stay open and which should be closed or reduced in size. Congressionally driven, the process focuses on efficiency and costs, good things in and of themselves, but less good when considered without context. This process, which is called Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC), comes out with its recommendations and law immediately, places them on a fast track to implementation.
BRAC's report is out there right now and three months after Groton and all the other bases around the country they are trying to close or realign are irretrievably committed to that closure and realignment, out comes the PDA report, a product of four years of analysis and study. It all sounds so backwards to us.
Because this is government, we'll do this once more for clarity. A big time powerful commission mandated to recommend base closing and realignments comes out with its report a few months before a four-year study of overall strategy and commitment is presented. The irrevocable rush to judgment on the base closings happens before anyone knows what's inside the strategic report that deals with present and future strategic threats to the country.
Here's the valuable lesson that we ought to learn from this: big government often doesn't get it right and is often unaware of what it's doing. This is the proverbial right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing.
Congress and the Bush Administration just took us through another strategic evaluation focused on our intelligence and security agencies. The commission that did that study looked specifically at what went wrong in our intelligence agencies prior to 9/11, and it tried to answer the question of what happened to our ability to discern the threat to our country prior to that date. What they found is that we had all the information that we needed at the time, but it was all spread out in disparate parts of Washington in different agencies. There was no one to put it together so it could make sense. This seems very much like what we're seeing now. Here we have two studies looking closely at the same thing from different perspectives. Something tells us that we'd be better off if they could work together instead of apart.
It is wistful to think that we could change all of this while we're in the midst of it and we can only hope that we are not ill-served by the outcome. With that in mind, we wish Sen. Lieberman, Gov. Rell, and all of our Congressional delegation who are lining up behind them well. We especially hope that Rep. Simmons, whose district is affected the most, gets some traction for his arguments to keep Groton alive.
But mostly we wish for some way to bring common sense to the process and have everyone working together. Those involved, who are undoubtedly well-meaning and committed, should be allowed to do their work in the right sequence next time. We need our comprehensive strategic study and analysis done before things are recommended, not afterwards.

–nrg

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