The Army calls them “enduring communities.” After the Bush administration announced its global base realignment plan, the Army said that in Europe it would largely consolidate its forces at seven such communities, each of which would include multiple bases. Five enduring communities were to be in Germany, one was in the Belgium/Netherlands/Luxembourg region, and one was in Vicenza, Italy. As part of the consolidation, in 2006, the Army asked Congress for $610 million in military construction—“MilCon”—funds to build a new base in Vicenza, at an old airport called Dal Molin. The Army said an elite rapid reaction brigade, the 173rd Airborne, was divided between Vicenza and two bases slated to close in Germany. The Army needed to build a new base to unite these forces. Other bases in Vicenza, Army officials said, were, “for the most part, oversubscribed.”1
Texas Republican senator Kay Bailey Hutchison was one of only a few congressmembers to question the request at the time. During the hearings, she asked why an airborne brigade would consolidate on a base lacking an airfield or any means of getting aloft. (In fact, the planned construction at Dal Molin would destroy the existing runway that had served small numbers of U.S. aircraft since the mid-1950s.) To deploy, soldiers would have to travel two to three hours northeast from Vicenza to Aviano Air Base. Why, Hutchison asked, would a “rapid reaction” brigade be placed in such an unfavorable location? Why was the 173rd not consolidating around Aviano?
“My question is,” Hutchison said to Army representatives, “have you thought this through?”
“We have thought it through greatly,” Assistant Secretary of the Army Keith Eastin insisted. He said land acquisition costs at Aviano and other locations were prohibitive, while Dal Molin would come gratis. (Most, if not all, of the land for bases in Italy comes free of charge from the Italian government.)
“Ever since Hannibal, I do not think it has been particularly good to have part of your force on one side of the Alps and the other part on the other,” Eastin said, referring to Vicenza and the two German bases. “So the intention is to bring it all in one place, that place being south of the Alps, which operationally I am told … significantly eases the ability to deploy from having to get only one clearance for airspace from one country rather than several, which would happen up in Germany.”
Offering few other questions, Congress soon approved the Army’s funding request. But seven years later, in the spring of 2013, the Army made a surprising announcement. With most of the $610 million allocated for the Vicenza construction already spent, and just weeks after it had started moving into the nearly completed base, the Army said it wouldn’t be putting the entire 173rd brigade in Vicenza after all. Although consolidating the brigade in one location had been the justification for building the base in the first place, the plan was now to have two of the brigade’s six battalions stay in Germany, moving to another base there. Only about one thousand troops and an equal number of family members—roughly half what had been planned—would relocate to Vicenza.
Not long after the announcement, a Senate Appropriations Committee report expressed pointed “concern” about the change in plans: “This decision is in direct contravention of the [consolidation’s] original purpose.”2
A CONSTELLATION OF BASES
Most tourists think of Italy as the land of Venetian canals, Roman ruins, Florentine palaces, and, of course, pizza, pasta, and wine. With little or no mention of bases in the tourist guidebooks, few think of Italy as a land of U.S. bases. But Italy’s fifty “base sites” give it more American base locations than any country in the world except Japan, Germany, and South Korea.
Located near the foothills of the Southern Alps in Italy’s affluent Veneto region, Vicenza really has no equivalent today in the United States. The city remains both wealthy and an industrial center. Vicenza’s factories produce gold jewelry, high-end bicycle components, and even roller coasters and other rides for amusement parks like Brooklyn’s Coney Island. The city revolves around a Renaissance-era center dominated by the architecture of Andrea Palladio, Vicenza’s most famous son. Influenced by ancient Rome, Palladio’s work has shaped architecture from Constantinople to London to Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello.3
Today, Vicenza has a golden hue, especially at night when its streetlights glow on three- and four-story Renaissance-era buildings painted in tones of amber, cream, peach, and canary yellow. In the city’s historical center, the narrow streets and alleyways are mostly still paved with cobblestones. The stones fit loosely together in cascading arcs emanating from the Corso Palladio, the city’s main street. Dominated by walkers and bicyclists, it is framed by arcade-covered sidewalks lined with chic cafés and gelaterias, fancy chocolate and perfume shops, and the window displays of high-end boutiques.
It is a stark contrast to the way Vicenza looked during World War II, when hunger was so bad the city’s inhabitants earned a reputation for eating cats. During their occupation of Italy, German troops turned Vicenza, including the Italian Air Force’s Dal Molin airfield, into a major logistics hub. The city and the airfield experienced heavy Allied bombing for months. As German troops retreated, Vicenza saw fierce house-to-house fighting. Allied forces finally pushed the German army out of Vicenza on April 28, 1945. A day later, the German forces in Italy signed their surrender.
Following Italy’s signing of a peace treaty in 1947, U.S. troops withdrew from Italy to Austria. But they soon returned: after Italy joined NATO, the 1951 NATO Status of Forces Agreement allowed U.S. troops to occupy Italian bases in Naples, Verona, and elsewhere. Still suffering from the war and unable to defend itself as Cold War tensions deepened, Italy also gave the U.S. military the rights to operate communication lines across the country and to occupy a large plot of coastal land near Pisa known as Camp Darby. By the mid-1950s, U.S. troops were also relocating to bases in the Italian northeast, including Caserma Ederle, the main base in Vicenza.4
Former army officer Fred Glenn remembered arriving in Vicenza in 1955 and finding sections of the city with bomb damage still visible. “You could still see the ravages of the war that had been visited upon them,” he told me. Caserma Ederle was only two months old, and the officer recalled it being “rather primitive” at that point. “In the sun, it was a dust bowl. In the rain, it was a mud pie.” But engineers quickly went to work, gutting entire buildings, pouring millions into new construction, and upgrading “in every way possible.”
Eventually, there were ten thousand army troops spread between Camp Darby, Caserma Ederle, and nearby bases in Italy’s north. The troops became the Southern European Task Force, primarily a logistical force prepared to receive massive reinforcements to protect Italy in case of an Eastern Bloc invasion from the northeast.5
Today, arriving at the Venice International Airport, one finds a small nondescript office labeled, in English, VICENZA COMMUNITY. The office serves the ten thousand or so English speakers in the Vicenza area, a number equal to almost 10 percent of the city’s population. These are the military personnel, family members, and civilians living and working on and around a constellation of bases scattered throughout the city. Even before Dal Molin’s construction, the installations included a major headquarters, an underground weapons storage facility (which housed nuclear weapons during the Cold War), another underground base, depots, and a large gated housing development known as the Villaggio della Pace, the American Peace Village.
FINAL PREPARATIONS
A few months after the Army announced its decision to abandon the full consolidation of the 173rd brigade in Vicenza, I went on a tour of the newly operational base. Officially, the base was now called “Caserma Del Din,” after Italian officials rebranded it in 2012—seemingly to distance the project from the vibrant “No Dal Molin” opposition movement that had garnered support across Italy. On base, fire trucks were still labeled DAL MOLIN, and many people still used the old name.
From afar, the place resembled a giant hospital complex or university campus. The long, narrow installation is a patchwork of thirty-one boxy peach- and cream-colored buildings with light red rooftops and rows of rectangular windows. A chain-link fence topped by razor wire surrounds the perimeter, with green mesh screens obscuring ground-level views inside. In scope, the base dwarfs everything in Vicenza, dominating the local horizon. It is far bigger than the city’s largest green space.
When I arrived at the entrance gate, carabinieri and private security guards were positioned around six lanes for entering and exiting the base. I found the visitor center next to the community bank. Out front were two Bank of America ATMs—one still wrapped in shipping plastic, another advertising DOLLARS AND EUROS AVAILABLE. By their side sat two empty Rolling Rock and Red Stripe beer bottles.
After my guides signed me on to the base, they took me to the roof of one of the new (and nearly full) six-story parking garages. From the top, you could see the length of the garrison’s 145 acres from north to south. Below, Italian workers were still installing street signs, in English, and finishing the final stages of construction on a few buildings. A bulldozer was flattening dirt for a baseball and softball field.
Near the parking lots sit the large brigade headquarters, two six-hundred-soldier barracks, the fire station, a fitness center, a multimedia entertainment facility and heated swimming pool, and a large cafeteria. Next to the small PX there’s a minimart, a Subway, and an Italian-style coffee bar. Elsewhere on base, there are rows of buildings for various brigade units, rehabbed buildings from the old Italian Air Force base, a motor pool, an indoor shooting range, and a natural-gas-powered energy plant. Designed as a “walking base,” rather than a sprawling Little America where frequent driving is required to get from one building on base to another, the installation was quiet and had little vehicle traffic in the middle of the workday. (The cars in the nearly full parking garages belonged to people commuting to work on the base.) According to the Army, Dal Molin was the first base campus to receive LEED Green Building certification.6 The Army expects that it will eventually receive LEED Gold.
Unlike many U.S. bases, which resemble extravagant imitations of suburbia abroad, Dal Molin is quite utilitarian. There will be no families living on this base—just single soldiers. The new hospital, two new schools, and other amenities for family members are across town at the Caserma Ederle and the American Village. Beyond the estimated $610 million in construction across Vicenza, the Army was also planning to lease up to 240 made-to-order homes being built in surrounding communities—a plan to house troops and families suddenly called into question by the Army’s decision to leave one third of the 173rd brigade in Germany.
CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER
Given the strategic interest in consolidating south of the Alps, the decision to keep the 173rd brigade divided between Italy and Germany is perplexing on purely military grounds. The 173rd is supposed to be designed for rapid reaction to military emergencies. As the Army’s Keith Eastin explained to Congress in 2006, keeping the brigade divided between bases in the two countries means the two battalions staying in Germany would almost surely face significantly longer deployment times than the four battalions in Vicenza.
The original consolidation idea becomes even more curious militarily given that Dal Molin and other bases in Vicenza do not have significant training areas. When I visited Vicenza, a military official (who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak publicly) told me training opportunities are “extremely limited” at Dal Molin and the Caserma Ederle. Some training, he said, takes place on Italian bases near Aviano, but “most of the training areas are in Germany.”
It’s a well-known problem that the 173rd in Vicenza “has inadequate training areas in its immediate area and must conduct most of its high-intensity training six hours north in Germany,” a 2012 article in the Armed Forces Journal explains.7 In fact, the only place in Italy for the 173rd to train as a brigade would be on the island of Sardinia, off Italy’s west coast, which is even farther from Vicenza than the German training areas.
This raises the question: Why would the Army want to move soldiers from Germany to Italy, only to send them back to Germany on a regular basis for training? Even if the new decision to maintain a split basing arrangement means that only four battalions will be making the nearly nine-hundred-mile round-trip to get to the training areas, transporting two thirds of the 173rd brigade to Germany on a regular basis clearly adds to the new base’s effective total cost.
I contacted Bruce Anderson, a spokesperson for U.S. Army Europe, and asked him why the Army had decided to keep the brigade split between Italy and Germany given that consolidating the 173rd was the explicit justification for creating the base. Anderson replied in an email that European troop reductions had opened unexpected space in Germany. Moving two of the 173rd’s battalions within Germany rather than to Italy, he said, means the Army will save on moving costs, on transportation costs when the battalions need to conduct regular training in Germany, and on closing costs for the two bases being vacated in Germany.
I repeatedly asked Anderson and other Army public affairs officials by telephone and email whether the Army had performed a cost analysis supporting these claims. I asked whether such an analysis had been shared with Congress, and if I could see the cost data. I received no response.
In Anderson’s initial email, another detail caught my eye. “Experience over the last six years,” he wrote, “has shown that, while full consolidation is optimal, the Brigade functions quite well and benefits from training with other units in Germany.” Apparently being “split based” wasn’t such a problem after all.
I mentioned to another U.S. military official in Italy that a cynic might say the Army never intended to consolidate the 173rd brigade in Vicenza in the first place and had merely used the idea of consolidation as a pretext to secure congressional funding for the new base at Dal Molin.
“I don’t disagree that that optic is there,” that official (who also asked to not be named) replied. He suggested, though, that the change in plans may have been motivated by a desire to hang on to the Army’s “crown jewel” in Europe, the more than 57,000-acre Grafenwoehr training area.8 New troop reductions at Grafenwoehr meant that there was going to be a lot of extra room there, and perhaps the Army felt a need to make conspicuous use of that space, especially since Congress had invested more than $700 million there since 2000. Placing part of the 173rd brigade in Grafenwoehr accomplished that goal.
Even if the consolidation idea wasn’t a cynical way to win congressional funds, it seems that the decision not to consolidate was, at the very least, a cynical way to avoid possibly losing a prized base and to cover up the embarrassment of spending hundreds of millions on unnecessary and underutilized facilities. Either way, military necessity does not seem like the primary motive.
And it gets worse. Remember that the Pentagon’s insistence on spending more than half a billion dollars on new construction in Vicenza hung on the idea that a new base would solve the problem of having the 173rd brigade divided between Italy and Germany. As I looked further, I realized that this “problem” was entirely of the Army’s own making. The 173rd brigade had been deactivated after the Vietnam War, and reactivated in 2000. After that reactivation, the 173rd spent about six years being based entirely in Vicenza—meaning that for the first half decade or more of its most recent life, there was no split-basing problem at all.
Several sources, including State Department cables released by Wikileaks, show that the Army first asked the Italian government about building at Dal Molin in 2002 or 2003, if not before.9 (This broke a promise made to Italian officials in 2000 to respect established troop limits in Vicenza and “build up and not out.”)10 In April 2005, the Italian government gave permission to build at Dal Molin. And it was only in 2006, around the time that the Pentagon sent Congress its first Dal Molin funding request, that the Army expanded the 173rd by adding four separate battalions in Germany to the two in Vicenza, thus creating the split-basing problem for the first time.11
In other words, the split basing of the 173rd appears to be a “problem” created by the Army itself, years into the planning for a new base, and just when the Army needed a justification for funding.
SYSTEMIC PROBLEMS
The money that taxpayers have poured into the Dal Molin base reflects broad and long-standing problems in the military construction system overseas. These problems include providing Congress with incomplete, misleading, and at times even fictional information to create budget justifications most likely to secure congressional funding.12
When the Navy was asking Congress for money to build a base on Diego Garcia in the late 1960s and early 1970s, for example, officials tried different justifications over the course of more than half a decade until finally securing Congress’s agreement to provide MilCon funds. After suffering repeated congressional defeats, Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird gave the Navy simple instructions to downsize its initial funding request: “Make it a communications facility.” Obligingly, the Navy soon submitted to Congress a proposal for a $17.8 million “communications facility.”13 However, a closer examination of the Navy’s budget shows that half the cost of the “communications station” was for dredging Diego Garcia’s lagoon and building an eight-thousand-foot airstrip at a facility that featured a mere $800,000 worth of communications equipment. The officially “austere” project featured the construction of a seventeen-mile road network, a small nightclub, a movie theater, and a gym.14
Under the guise of a communications station, in other words, the Navy was asking for the nucleus of a much larger base, with a design that allowed for ready restoration of previously envisioned base elements.15 Although the Navy usually characterized the base as “limited” or “modest,” officials always had grander visions for a large harbor, an airfield, and a coordination center for submarines patrolling the Indian Ocean. As one Navy official put it, “The communications requirements cited as justification are fiction.”16 Before Diego Garcia was even operational, officials were already planning to ask Congress for more money to expand. And expand it did, as Diego Garcia became a billion-dollar base within a decade.17 At other base locations, too, once the military overcomes initial congressional opposition, the first round of MilCon funding often becomes a slippery slope to much larger expenditures.
An April 2013 Senate Armed Services Committee report also revealed other systemic problems. For example, upon returning bases to host countries, the Pentagon negotiates payments for the “residual value” of the returned facilities. Since 1991, the U.S. government has received more than $920 million in such payments. Legally, the Pentagon is required to get these as cash settlements, and is allowed to accept payments via in-kind contributions only as a last resort if cash negotiations fail. Yet more than 95 percent of these settlements, and all of them since 1997, have in fact come as in-kind payments. Despite the law, the military’s negotiators now don’t even discuss possible cash settlements. The law also requires the Pentagon to notify Congress before beginning in-kind negotiations; the Senate Committee found that the Pentagon simply “does not comply with that requirement.”18
What’s more, if in-kind contributions are to be used, the law also requires the secretary of defense to certify that these contributions replace future funding requests—in other words, that if it were not for the availability of in-kind payments, the military would have asked for future MilCon money for the project. But after reviewing twelve MilCon projects for which in-kind payments were used, the Senate Committee found that none had been considered for future funding requests. In other words, the military was specifically directing in-kind payments toward projects “unlikely to be included” on a list of funding priorities for Congress. As a result, the committee found, in-kind funding has gone to “questionable projects,” including a $6 million furniture warehouse and $200,000 in sunroom additions for senior officers’ homes.19
Perhaps most egregiously, the Pentagon has—without notifying Congress—asked for and accepted $60 million worth of advance in-kind payments from the German government for facilities the military plans to return to Germany in the future. The Senate Committee concluded, “There are serious questions as to whether the solicitation and expenditure of an advance is consistent with fiscal law.”20
In South Korea, U.S. forces have similarly used Korean in-kind payments for construction without the authorization or notification of Congress, and with limited or no review by the Army, the Pacific Command, or the Pentagon. Among the projects planned by U.S. Forces Korea is a $10.4 million museum for the Army’s 2nd Infantry Division. Officials described the museum as a “command requirement.”21 Elsewhere in South Korea, the Army has proposed a lease-build housing plan that would likely cost $755 million more than standard overseas housing allowances. Again, the Senate Committee had “questions about the legality of the plan.”22
“A LIFE OF ITS OWN”
“Once an American overseas base is established, it takes on a life of its own,” concluded a rare congressional investigation into the little-noticed expansion of bases abroad since World War II. “Original missions may become outdated, but new missions are developed, not only with the intent of keeping the facility going, but often to actually enlarge it.”23
These words describe well what’s happened in Vicenza, at Soto Cano in Honduras, and at many other bases around the globe. The words are more than four decades old. For eight months in 1969 and 1970, Walter Pincus—now a Pulitzer Prize–winning Washington Post columnist who writes about military, intelligence, and foreign policy issues—traveled the globe on behalf of the Senate Subcommittee on U.S. Security Agreements and Commitments Abroad, compiling a remarkable look at the sprawling base nation that was already taking shape.
If central casting called for an old-school reporter, they would have to look no farther than Brooklyn-born Pincus. When I met him for coffee near the Washington Post headquarters, he was wearing gray flannel trousers, a tie, and a slightly frayed white-striped shirt with its collar splayed open past the lapels of a blue blazer. His hair was stark white, his eyebrows bushy. When he walked, he teetered back and forth due to a damaged right leg.
Pincus’s research took him to twenty-five countries hosting U.S. troops in Europe, Asia, and Africa. The subcommittee’s hearings ran for thirty-eight days. All were closed to the public. The hearing transcripts and the subcommittee’s final published report, which Pincus helped write, totaled 2,442 pages—not counting deletions requested by the Pentagon and State Department.
“We took away that we had bases all over the place,” Pincus told me. He saw how the leaders of undemocratic governments like having American bases because they help keep local regimes in power. As Pincus saw it, overseas bases have a “commitment side” and a “corrupt side.” The commitment side meant the United States would defend you. But the corrupt side, Pincus said, meant “we will also defend the regime that got us in there,” because the regime’s removal would threaten a base’s existence.
Pincus said his time in General Francisco Franco’s Spain was particularly telling. “I kept asking, ‘Why do we keep Morón [Air Base]?’” The answer, he was told, was that it was a “key base” for exercises.
“So what the hell are we exercising with Spain?” he asked. He discovered that the yearly exercises practiced saving the dictatorial government from insurgents. Pincus also realized that the exercises were, not coincidentally, timed to end around the start of one of Spain’s biggest festivals, the Feria de Sevilla. The good weather in southern Spain also didn’t hurt. This, Pincus said, was the “perk side” of overseas bases.
Spain also taught Pincus about the perks of the PX system, where one can buy cheap tax-free goods. Overseas, Pincus saw that the military isn’t the only one to benefit from the PXs. The Air Force was flying its jets directly over the Spanish capital, Madrid, but they got away with it because high-ranking Spanish officers were allowed to use the PX and the Officers Club. State Department Foreign Service officers shop at the PXs, too, and, Pincus said, it “corrupts them” just as it does local leaders. For many, the PX becomes another reason not to look critically at the need for a base. (To this day, Foreign Service officers and their family members in Luxembourg, for example, drive hours to and from Germany to get better deals at the PXs on bases there.)
“The Pentagon also takes care of Congress,” Pincus added. When members of Congress visit overseas bases, the military organizes everything, including a light schedule of three meetings a day plus “dinner and shopping and all that shit.” These are the people who “are supposed to be doing oversight,” he said. “And it’s infectious.” During Pincus’s own investigation, he had to break away from his handlers and set up his own meetings by calling around the base. Eventually, the military stopped providing him with base telephone directories.
The result of all this, according to the final subcommittee report that Pincus helped author, is that “within the government departments most directly concerned—State and Defense—we found little initiative to reduce or eliminate any of these overseas facilities.”24 What’s more, for State Department and Pentagon officials, closing a base is hardly a way to boost a career. “It is only to be expected that those in embassies abroad, and also at overseas military facilities, would seek to justify continued operations in their particular areas,” explained the subcommittee report. “Otherwise, they recommend a reduction in their own position.”25
The result has often been a series of rotating rationales to justify a base’s continued existence and, often, expansion. A large number of decades-old bases have remained open, often with vague or dubious justifications. “Arguments can always be raised to justify keeping almost any facility open,” the subcommittee concluded. “To the military, a contingency use can always be found. To the diplomat, a base closing or reduction can always be at the wrong time in terms of relations with the host country and other nations.”26 (At a psychological level, too, we can understand that few people would want to see something they’ve worked on declared “superfluous.”)
These perpetual tendencies toward inertia and expansion have also meant there’s every incentive for base officials to always suggest that their base needs more money. In the Pentagon, like most other bureaucracies, those controlling budgets generally try to spend every cent allocated to them, for fear of losing funding in the next fiscal year. One former Army cost analyst described to me what he called a “pathology” of unnecessary spending. “There was never a question of saving any money,” said Bill Witherington (a pseudonym). “I had it said [explicitly], ‘If we don’t spend it … we won’t get any more next year.’”
The Pentagon generally keeps any unspent funds at the end of the fiscal year, he said. So “commanders would say, ‘Well, gee. We’ve got some money. What could we spend it on and then ask for more next year?’”
“If you didn’t spend the money,” I asked, “what would have happened?”
“That never happened,” Witherington replied. “There was a wink-wink, nudge-nudge that the money will be committed and there will still be [unfunded] ‘requirements’” left over. There was “never an instance” when money was left over, he said. “That would have been a career ender.”
“INCONSISTENCIES, GAPS, AND CALCULATION ERRORS”
Despite the tendency of bases to take on lives of their own, the global transformation plans launched by the Bush administration and carried out by Andy Hoehn and others succeeded in closing more bases than were shuttered at any time since the first four years after the end of the Cold War. Many of the closures have been in Europe, where more than a hundred fifty bases have closed since 2001 and tens of thousands of troops have been withdrawn, mostly from Germany and Britain.
And yet, at the same time the military has been closing so many bases and returning them to host nations, there has simultaneously been an enormous construction boom on American bases around the globe.27 “The largest military construction budget since World War II will buy some of the largest facilities in the Army’s inventory and some of the most modern anywhere,” noted a 2008 article in Soldiers magazine.28
While the Global Defense Posture Review envisioned billions in construction and other spending to carry out the transformation it recommended, it’s hard to account for all the MilCon expenditures by looking at those realignment plans alone. The expansion of total MilCon funding worldwide has been breathtaking, almost tripling in constant dollar terms from $13.6 billion in fiscal year 2002 to $33.6 billion in fiscal year 2009, and reaching highs not seen since World War II.29 That $33.6 billion, which doesn’t even include almost $1 billion in additional MilCon funding in the military’s separate war budget,30 is almost double the previous postwar high, reached during the military buildup in Vietnam in 1966.31 Since the start of the war on terror, the Pentagon has engaged in major construction in South Korea, Japan, Guam, Australia, and elsewhere in Asia; in the Marshall Islands; in Afghanistan and elsewhere in Central Asia; in Iraq and every other Persian Gulf nation except Iran; in eastern Europe; and increasingly in Africa and Latin America. In total, between 2002 and 2013, the military has received more than $30 billion in MilCon funding at bases overseas, with another $92.6 billion going to “unspecified locations” domestic and abroad.32
The MilCon spending in Europe is particularly striking given all the base closures taking place on the continent. In Italy, in addition to Vicenza, the Pentagon has spent almost $300 million since fiscal year 2001 on construction at the Sigonella Naval Air Station in Sicily. In Germany, in addition to Grafenwoehr, the Army is now spending around $500 million to move its European headquarters from Heidelberg to Wiesbaden. A Government Accountability Office report found that the Army’s estimate of money saved by this move was inflated by almost double, and that construction delays have further eaten into any potential savings. “The original analyses,” the GAO added, “were poorly documented, limited in scope and based on questionable assumptions.”33 This at a time when more and more critics are questioning why the Army is in Germany and Europe at all.
Adjacent to Ramstein Air Base in Germany, at the Rhine Ordnance Barracks, the Army is building a new $1 billion hospital to replace the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center as the military’s main European medical facility. The Army said the hospital, which opened in 1953, had reached the end of its life span and could not be renovated to modern standards. Again, the GAO criticized the planning for the hospital, reporting that the Pentagon was unable to offer basic documentation for how it came up with its original funding request of $1.2 billion. The GAO found that the Pentagon’s request was replete with “inconsistencies, gaps and calculation errors in planning documentation.”34
Curious about why the Army wanted to replace what was still a world-class medical facility, I asked a Landstuhl surgeon who had been working there for a decade about the condition of the current hospital and whether there was any need for a replacement. The surgeon, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said he couldn’t comment. Trying another tack, I asked him to tell me about the existing facility. The doctor said it was “top notch” and rated a Level 1 trauma center—the highest possible grade. There aren’t many like it in the world, he said. (Other Level 1 hospitals include the elite Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles and Massachusetts General in Boston.) Landstuhl has since lost the status because, with U.S. involvement in Afghanistan declining, it is now seeing too few patients to qualify.
“Is the hospital deficient or suboptimal in any way?” I asked.
“No,” the surgeon replied. If it were deficient in any way, he explained, it would have had to be repaired immediately to maintain the hospital’s Level 1 status.35
Another justification given for the new facility is decreasing the transit time between the runway at Ramstein and the hospital. So I asked whether, medically speaking, there are any problems transporting people over the fifteen-to-twenty-minute drive between Ramstein and Landstuhl. “No,” the surgeon said, “because they are very close.” In his time at the hospital, he told me, he had seen “no adverse incidents,” and he believed there had never been any such incidents in transit. (Others at the hospital reported the same.) After a seven-to-eight-hour flight from Afghanistan, he said, nothing’s going to go wrong over such a short drive.
As of late 2014, the new hospital was scheduled to open in 2022. The Army estimates that it will take “about 15 minutes” to get there from Ramstein—in other words, little if at all faster than the current transit time.36
I asked Walter Pincus what he made of the billion-plus dollars being spent on the new hospital. He replied, “It implies we’re going to keep fighting.”
A WILLFUL DISREGARD FOR COSTS
While sometimes you need to spend money to save money, it’s hard not to question the logic of spending billions on new and expanded European bases when the military is vacating so much space, downsizing its troop presence so dramatically, and shrinking the size of the entire military by tens of thousands, leaving plenty of excess space at domestic bases, too.37
Some of the bases being closed in Europe actually enjoyed significant construction and upgrades shortly before closure. For example, the garrison in Bamberg, Germany—whose closure Pentagon officials revealed no later than 2006—saw $87.6 million invested in barracks, a fitness center, and a child development center between 2000 and 2003. Over the same period, the Army invested $67.7 million at the base in Mannheim, where closure began in 2007.38
In 2013, the Pentagon was conducting a review of its European bases with the aim of further consolidation. And yet, before the review was even completed, the military had already asked for more than three quarters of a billion dollars in new European MilCon funding for the next fiscal year alone. The Senate Appropriations Committee questioned “the rationale for funding these projects before DOD has determined whether any missions can be consolidated or relocated, or any installations can be returned to the host nation.” The committee was struck, for instance, by $328 million in requested funding for five schools in Germany and Britain, given that “consolidation of missions could change base populations, which in turn could affect the required size or location of schools.”39 Since fiscal year 2008, budget documents show that the Pentagon has already received more than $320 million in funding for school construction in Germany alone. In 2012, the Pentagon opened a new school in Schweinfurt, a base set to close within three years (which indeed closed in 2014).40 When the Pentagon finally announced the results of its European base review in 2014, it said twenty-one facilities would close across the continent. However, none of these was a major installation; most were superfluous recreation areas, depots, small training ranges, radio stations, and water well sites.41
Two recent GAO reports show that both the European and Pacific Commands were making major changes to their basing structures “without the benefit of comprehensive cost information or an analysis of alternatives.” The Pentagon admitted that its combatant commanders, who are responsible for positioning bases and troops and determining the missions of component forces, do not even have access to comprehensive cost data.42 For some of the most powerful people in the U.S. military and the entire U.S. government (their power often exceeds that of ambassadors and other high-ranking State Department officials), costs simply aren’t part of the decision-making process.
A telling illustration of that indifference to financial matters is the Pentagon’s 2013 decision to keep the headquarters for the Africa Command in Stuttgart despite its own analysis showing that moving the headquarters to the United States would save between $60 million and $70 million a year and create up to 4,300 jobs, with an annual economic impact in the United States of $350 million to $450 million. The Pentagon said Africom’s commander decided keeping the headquarters in Germany was more operationally effective. The GAO pointed out that the Pentagon’s evaluation was “not supported by a comprehensive and well-documented analysis” and did “not fully meet key principles for an economic analysis.” The Pentagon agreed in part with the outside evaluation but stuck to its decision, saying it was based primarily on “military judgment, which is not easily quantifiable.”
“We recognize that military judgment is not easily quantifiable,” the GAO responded. “However, we continue to believe that an accurate and reliable analysis should provide a more complete explanation of how operational benefits and costs were weighed, especially in light of the potential cost savings that DOD is deciding to forgo.”43
Repeatedly, one sees the Pentagon making decisions to spend hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars based on incomplete data, shoddy math, little or no attempt to consider cheaper alternatives, and cost analyses that appear to be either incompetent or intentionally manipulated. A long, regular stream of GAO reports provides abundant evidence of the problems. Unfortunately, each report appears in isolation, and they generally portray the problems as unrelated incidents. Rarely does anyone point out the larger pattern: the Pentagon, the armed services, and many of their component parts are spending many, many billions of MilCon dollars with what frequently appears to be a willful disregard for costs and the law and little or no oversight by Congress.
These are, of course, symptoms of the rampant and shameless profligacy in the military budget as a whole and in the entire military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned us about. But it’s time someone said it specifically: MilCon is totally and completely out of control.
“A BUREAUCRATIC MACHINE”
Encouragingly, cuts to the Pentagon budget brought about by Congress’s sequestration process have reined in the out-of-control nature of recent MilCon spending. For fiscal year 2014, overseas MilCon expenditures amounted to around $1.5 billion, with another $2.8 billion at unspecified worldwide locations. Globally, the total reached $10.2 billion.44 While this pales compared to funding for military pay, weapons procurement, and research and development, more money went to military construction around the world in 2014 than to each of the Department of Commerce, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Science Foundation, the Small Business Administration, and the Corporation for National and Community Service.
To get another perspective on why the military has been building so many bases while it’s in the process of vacating so many others in Europe, I talked to the conservative scholar Edward N. Luttwak, who had expressed public support for the new base at Dal Molin and once called any opponent of the base “a dirty commie” who is “purely ideological and negativist.”45
“You could argue,” Luttwak told me, “that instead of new bases you could consolidate” at some of the other bases being vacated. But MilCon for the Pentagon, he continued, is “a bureaucratic machine needing to be stopped by someone in Congress. To say, ‘That’s it … We don’t want to spend money on bases. Goodbye!’”
That would work, he said. “Congress could do it.” But in a system where it “takes enormous energy to get anything done,” he explained, inertia is a powerful force. Once a project is started, officials are “extremely reluctant to stop for anything.” For now, Luttwak said of members of Congress and military leaders alike, “They continue on like blind animals burrowing underground.”
“So did we need a half-billion-dollar base in Vicenza?” I asked.
“No,” he replied, “we didn’t.” In fact, he said, “There’s no need to have troops in Italy. So, yeah, you could close it.”