BRAC accepts USAF/DoD plans for airbase

The Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) commission officially endorsed, without any changes, the Air Force's recommendations for modifications to the force structure at Mountain Home Air Force Base last week, as it wrapped up its delibrations and sent them to the president for his and Congress' approval.

Under the proposed changes, Mountain Home AFB will receive an additional squadron of F-15E aircraft in 2009, and then lose two squadrons, the F-16CJ and F-15C units, in 2011, under the Air Force's proposed schedule to implement the recommendations made by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

The net result of the plan will be an increase of over 500 personnel between 2009 and 2011, and then a final loss, in 2011, of between 528 and 569 military jobs on base, plus about 31 civilian jobs on base.

The final recommendation was not unexpected, and local officials were actually confident in the long-range future of the base.

"If you look at the funding starting to move into Mountain Home AFB at the end of the fiscal year, I'm confident the Air Force has bigger plans for the base," Billy Richey, the governor's military liason said. Noting that an entirely new generation of aircraft are starting to come on line, Richey said that "I feel like the Air Force sees Mountain Home as a great training base. They're aligning us for F-15 training," under the current plan, he said, pointing out that the base and its nearby training ranges are increasingly being used by allied nations as well.

"We're getting more modern aircraft," added Capt. Chillstrom, deputy chief of public affairs for the 366th Fighter Wing, "and it's not like we're going to be losing these jobs overnight. We still have one of the top training ranges in the country," which has been used recently by British and Israeli forces (and the Germans will be coming in October) and other moves in the future may fill the holes on the base that will occur after 2011, he suggested. The separate Overseas Basing Commission, for example, has yet to release its recommendations for return of aircraft from overseas bases, some of which could be assigned to Mountain Home.

The Air Force estimates the civilian economy will lose about 305 "indirect" jobs as a result of the base drawdown in 2011, or about 5.8 percent of the current workforce in the Mountain Home area.

That long-term loss would automatically trigger assistance, immediately, from the Department of Defense's Office of Economic Assistance (OEA), which is designed to mitigate economic losses due to adverse realignment effects. In the mid-'90s, when Mountain Home briefly had no mission assigned to it, it was the OEA's assistance and funding that created the area's current economic development program.

The BRAC commission also made no changes in the other recommendations that had been made for Idaho. In addition to the realignment at Mountain Home AFB, the Naval Reserve Center in Pocatello was slated for closure (about seven jobs), and the Idaho Air National Guard would lose its C-130 squadron but keep its A-10 Thunderbolt II (Warthog) squadron.

The realignments recommended by the Air Force will essentially return the USAF to a system that was in place more than a decade ago in which each aircraft wing was composed of exactly the same type of aircraft, a system that usually results in reduced maintenance costs.

In part, because of the lessons learned by the composite wing at MHAFB, the Air Force had spent the last decade developing "strike package" wings of dissimilar but operationally supportive aircraft.

Specifically, the recommendations, call for bringing 18 operational and three reserve F-15E Strike Eagle fighter-bombers from the 3rd Wing at Elmendorf AFB near Anchorage, Alaska, to Mountain Home AFB in FY2009 to form a pure F-15E wing. Currently, the 391st Fighter Squadron on base flys the F-15E, and has 31 of those aircraft assigned to it.

The 18 older F-15C Eagle aircraft of the base's 390th Fighter Squadron would be redistributed in FY2011 among several bases. Nine would go to the 57th Fighter Wing at Nellis AFB outside Las Vegas, Nev., six would go to the 125th Fighter Wing at Jacksonville International Airport AGS in Florida, and three would be retired.

The 18 F-16CJ Viper (Falcon) aircraft of the 389th Fighter squadron, configured for Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses (SEAD), also would be broken up and redistributed in FY2011, sending nine to the 169th Fighter Wing at McEntire AGS, South Carolina, five to the 57th Fighter Wing at Nellis, and four to the USAF reserve inventory.

The recommendations for this latest and last round of BRACs were based primarily on military value considerations.

In FY2007 Mountain Home AFB also would lose about 20 military personnel when the base-level intermediate maintenance unit for the Low Altitude Navigation and Targeting Infrared for Night (LANTRIN) unit is realigned to Hill AFB in Utah.

The move of the F-16s to the Air Guard Stations reflects the plan to replace those aircraft with the new F-35s, which are expected to begin coming on-line around 2010.

The USAF's F-15C air superiority fighters are being replaced by the new F-22 Raptors, under a production schedule that has been slowed down and reduced considerably by Congress. Currently, Langley AFB in Virginia has one operational squadron of Raptors and Elmendorf has been named to receive the second. A 1998 study had listed Langley, Elmendorf and Mountain Home as the top preferred locations for the Raptors, but no announcement of any intention to move F-22s to Mountain Home has been made to this point.

The nine-member BRAC commission's recommendations now go to the president, who will then send his recommendation for approval or disapproval of the complete package to Congress by Sept. 23. If he recommends approval, Congress has 45 days to enact a resolution of disapproval or the recommendations go into effect. If the president says no to the commission's final plan, it has until Oct. 20 to submit a revised plan. If no plan is accepted by the president and/or Congress, the BRAC process ends.

This was the fourth and final round of BRAC recommendations over the last decade. This round of BRAC was being driven by efforts to save the Department of Defense money by reducing excess capacity at a time when the armed forces are still being slowly reduced in strength following the end of the Cold War. The main criteria being used was military efficiency and capacity of the nation's bases.

In addition to the realignment and closure of bases in the United States, a separate Overseas Basing Commission is currently evaluating changes in the presence of U.S. forces overseas. Although it has already made its recommendations for Army and Navy units, moves reflected in the BRAC recommendations, it has not made any recommendations so far for realignments and closures involving Air Force units overseas.

The Department of Defense is expected to pull out of many of its overseas commitments and change its basing priorities significantly as a result of the end of the Cold War. Many of the bases the United States has maintained overseas were positioned to oppose the Soviet Union, which no longer exists.

In general, the "forward presence" of U.S. forces overseas, that marked American military policy for five decades, is being ended. Because of modern U.S. rapid deployment capabilities, much of the force is expected to be returned to "garrison" status in the United States.