I've heard many reasons "not" to BRAC China Lake,. Including
realigning Dam Neck, Barking Sands, Indian Head, etc, and putting ALL
weapons testing/building here. Many reasons for this, one of them
being the Land, it is huge! And the Navy actually owns it.

If that doesn't work, how about this one?

Making China Lake a divert field for the shuttle? If something
happened on the final to Edwards, they could just do a little swing
and pop in right here!

(I don't know how possible that would be, or how true, but I had heard
there was a study on it)

On Sat, 22 May 2004 07:00:49 -0500, "John Carrier"
wrote:


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.

Possible, even probable. But you never know. The Navy had a thing out in
the late 90's claiming there was a 21% excess capacity in the Naval Air
Training command and I think that was based on BRAC data calls.

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.

True. I was intimately familiar with the content of the data for TRACOM and
browsed all of the rest for any NAS or AFB. There were some instances of
transposed numbers (birdstrike data ... they were THOROUGH!) and a couple of
gross misrepresentations (a CNATRA staffer intentionally changed a formula
multiplier because he KNEW the FAA algorithm was wrong). The USAF
perspective was slightly different, but generated very usable data.

But the old adage "Figures lie and liars figure" is very appropriate to the
process. The Navy installed their data into a weighted matrix to generate a
military value for each base. You'd think that was intended to determine
the lowest military value and then nominate the base. Not so. The Navy
rule was that the average military value of the bases remaining after
implementation of their proposed scenario must be equal or higher to the
average value for all the bases examined in a particular category. A base
could be a comparative "winner" in the value matrix and still become part of
the proposed closure scenario. This happened in 1993.

The 1995 rules were essentially unchanged. The Navy group, which did not
get its entire plan approved by the commission in 1993, attacked the issue
somewhat differently. They kept fiddling the value matrix (documented in
the minutes) until the numbers fell out the way they wanted (that's my
assumption, but it seems pretty obvious the results were reverse engineered
to produce the desired outcome). How bad was it? Well, one base got credit
for an aerial target on which even practice ordnance could not be expended.

The Navy has a long history (perhaps shared by the other services, but my
experience doesn't allow that comparison) of generating and manipulating
data to justify/support a decision. The decision has very little input
(except in the form of the data calls) from the operational side of the
Navy. CNO, his deputies, the CINCs, type commanders, etc don't weigh in.
The process was within DON, headed by a super grade civilian and staffed by
a mixed bag of civilians and military temporarily assigned to the BRAC
group. I met several of the military types, good folks for the most part
(albeit there was a Helo captain who hadn't seen the light of day for a
decade or more) but utterly ignorant about the majority of issues they were
analyzing. They existed to staff the master plan of the big boss. In most
part, they succeeded.

Given the nature of the current DOD (my way or the highway), I think we'll
see a similar process in 2005. Rumsfeld's inner cadre has a vision (I've
finally found a document describing it) of a "transformation" in military
affairs. I think there's also a vision about the infrastructure that they
believe is needed to support it. I suspect there's already a pretty good
idea of which bases conform to this vision and which don't. And I believe
that the BRAC group within DOD will be directed (perhaps subtly) to massage
the data to support that vision.

There's no list, but you're on it.

R / John