On 5/21/04 2:49 PM, in article , "John
Carrier" wrote:

Actually the 2 year delay passed the house as part of the 2005 defense
authorization bill just today. The Senate might not like it. It could die
in conference committee. It could be vetoed (several administration reps,
including Rummie, say they will "recommend" veto ... of course the Pres is
silent so far, maintaining his maneuvering room).

I personally think that any normally introspective SecDef would take a good
hard look at what the meaning of "transformational" might be post 9/11, but
I don't think introspection is in Mr. R's vocabulary. That good hard look
might well be reason to delay the BRAC a bit.

The mantra of the BRAC faithful is that we have 25% excess infrastructure in
DoD. Anyone have a source on that number (not a sound bite, but real data
from real analysis)?

R / John


I doubt that the 25% is anything more than an estimate spun by those who
only want to see defense dollars cut... for two reasons: (1) It's a round
number (suspicious). (2) Many of those sound-bite-type bullets are made up.

When BRAC '95 was going on, I got to watch the gathering of numbers for a
few of the data calls at NAWCWPNS up close and personal. The data that
comes OUT of BRAC is fairly accurate--at least from the Navy side. Can't
speak for the blue-suiters, the grunts, or the forces of one. The observers
of the data calls were fairly strict about gathering accurate, reproducable,
and verifiable data.

That having been said, even though these days (for example) Holloman may
have a bounce strip and China Lake may have a bounce strip, the capabilities
and fidelity of the two my be markedly different, so do you really have
duplication of facilities?

Sorry. No hard data, just hard skepticism.

By the way, does any other government agency work so hard to reduce cost and
STILL have problems re-capitalizing their equipment?

--Woody