Sometime between now and May 16, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld will release a list of military bases the Defense Department wants closed, calling them unneeded infrastructure that wastes billions of dollars annually.
Community leaders in affected areas will express shock and anger.
Paid lobbyists will begin pumping out reasons why a new nine-member Base Realignment and Closure Commission should spare particular bases from the final list to be sent to the White House by Sept. 8.
And tens of thousands of military retirees who rely on the bases for medical care, cost-free drugs and discount shopping will wonder whether to pull up roots and move near a base not on the closure list.
The size of retiree migrations from past shutdowns is a mystery. Defense officials who oversee installations say they have no such data. Nor does the Government Accountability Office.
But there’s general agreement among experts that this round of closings will trigger smaller retiree migrations than past rounds.
They point to two health care options enacted since 1995 that should ease the expense for retirees of living far from a base. They are Tricare for Life, the insurance supplement to Medicare for former members of the service, and the increasingly popular Tricare mail-order pharmacy plan.
Experts also cite a boom in commercial discount stores such as Wal-Mart and Price Club, which now compete with military base stores for customers.
Several Arizona cities commissioned a study in 2002 to measure the effect of nearby bases on their economies. The study contractor, Maguire Co. of Phoenix, found it reasonable in conducting its analysis to assume that 25 percent of military retirees living within 50 miles of a base were so “inked to its amenities that they would leave the area if the base closed.
The 25 percent was no more than a guess, the study suggested.
Yet, a professor at Rutgers University, Michael Lahr, used the figure last year in a study for the governor of New Jersey to estimate the impact of base closures in that state. Lahr conceded in his report that he was unable to find any information on the probable proportion of military retirees who would relocate “if all military bases in New Jersey were shuttered.”
Lahr wrote that he was using the 25 percent estimate from Arizona in his own economic models because there “is no reason to believe that New Jersey-base military retirees would behave any differently.”
Sociology professor Mark Fagan at Jackson State University in Jackson, Ala., actually surveyed retirees living in Calhoun County, home of Fort McClellan, in 1995 after the Pentagon released its last closure list. Fifty-four percent of respondents said they would leave the county if McClellan closed.
But when the base finally did close in 1999, there was no follow-up census to learn how many of the surveyed retirees actually moved. Whatever the percentage was, Fagan said, fewer retirees likely would migrate today.
“With Wal-Mart supercenters and with Internet shopping,” he said, the financial impact for retirees of losing base access has gone down.
That doesn’t mean retirees won’t miss their bases, he added.
“These military people are socialized to live together,” Fagan said. “They are conditioned to the pomp and ceremony and status” of being part of a military community that recognizes their careers and rank. “The nostalgia is very strong to be around a base, around that military culture.”
To comment, write Military Update, P.O. Box 231111, Centreville, VA 20120-1111, e-mail milupdate@aol.com or go to www.militaryupdate.com.
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