Dean's World

You could almost taste the shock, immediately scramble to calculate economic and political fall out, and mobilization of local resources due to the announcement by Pentagon leaders that they're going to shut down or relocate some 837 military locations.

Is this a smart move, or an unwise and potentially risky one? Phil Carter, who has the serious blog Intel-Dump, looks at the issue in Slate and warns of some consequences. Highlights:

The Pentagon says the closings will save $48 billion over 20 years. But they will also have one dramatic negative effect. BRAC will separate America's military even further from America's citizenry by consolidating military bases and removing the presence of the military from hundreds of towns across the country.

So is that a bad thing? More:

Today's military bases sit where they do by political fiat and historical accident more than any operational necessity. Most installations trace their origins to the great mobilizations of World War I and World War II, when the military established garrisons across the country to raise the armies of 5 million and 16 million respectively to fight those wars. When the world wars ended, it fell to Congress to decide which bases to retain. It is no accident that today's military finds itself overrepresented in the South and the West.

In his majestic biography of President Lyndon Johnson's senatorial career, Robert Caro recounts how Southern legislators like the legendary Sen. Richard Russell, D-Ga., then head of the Senate Armed Services Committee, were able to keep a disproportionate share of bases in their states during those demobilizations. Everyone recognized then, as they do now, that a base in one's state or district was a political and economic pot of gold.

So there was an element of PORK in it. And:

This year's BRAC shopping list was intended to support the military's transformation from a lumbering Cold War force into a rapid-deployment 21st Century expeditionary force. One of the biggest buzzwords tossed around this year was "joint"—the term which means something can be used by more than one service, e.g., the Army and the Marines. Despite the fact that everyone fights on the same team, service parochialism has long been a source of tension in the Pentagon.

Fair enough. So, aside from parochial economic concerns, why should anyone be concerned from the standpoint of the military?

First, shutting these armories may undermine homeland security efforts, which rely in part on the geographic dispersion and availability of reserve units to respond to domestic emergencies. Local governments depend on reserve centers for use as staging areas and temporary shelters in their emergency plans. The base-closure commission should evaluate this impact before accepting the Pentagon's recommendations.

That IS a vital point. And:

Second, and perhaps more important, this closure will change the relationship between the U.S. military and the society from which it's drawn. Many of these reserve centers, armories, and defense offices play an important role in their communities' lives—reserve armories frequently serve as local meeting halls and polling places, and reserve units often engage in community service projects, for example. When these bases go away, so too will the presence of the military in the lives of the people who reside and work near them.

Initially, reservists may drive hours to drill with units at the new consolidated armory locations, but eventually these reservists will move nearer the big bases or quit the reserves. Either way, communities that today contribute reservists to the military will no longer do so.

Carter points to other factors that are starting to divide the citizenry from the military, such as the elimination of some programs such as ROTC from some educational institutions. He writes:

Such a gap is not healthy for a democracy which vests the ultimate decisions over whether to go to war in its political branches of government. The system breaks when those who serve in uniform carrying out our policies find themselves divorced from the leaders and voters who set those policies. Before the base-closure commission puts the boards up on these 837 bases, it should consider whether the country can handle any further separation between the soldier and the state.

In a time of war and terrorist threats at home Carter raises a vital point: from the standpoint of an infrastructure that can handle terrorism and closeness to the citizenry it might be wise to rethink at least part of these closures. Of course, then the question becomes how you pick and choose which ones.

But is the timing for these closures truly the best?