Lemonade?

Apparently deciding that $442 billion just doesn't go as far as it used to,

[t]he Pentagon on Friday recommended closing 33 major domestic U.S. military bases and restructuring 29 others, dealing a hard economic blow to many communities across the country[, Reuters reported today]. ...

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld gave the Defense Base Realignment and Closure Commission his recommendation to shut about 10 percent of the 318 major bases in the United States and its territories.

Another roughly 150 smaller military installations, many of them National Guard and Reserve facilities and some as minor as local accounting offices, were picked for closure and about 625 more for realignment, meaning changing staffing levels or mission.

The bases are vital economic engines in many communities, which mounted frantic lobbying efforts to save their local bases, and will now try to convince the commission that the Pentagon erred and to spare ones scheduled to close.

It's been observed that one of the things that has continually kept us from making dramatic changes in our addiction to the military is that the financing and operation of the system is so deeply woven into our communities: People in any position to do anything about it are fearful of pulling on the loose strings of militarism, lest they find the unraveling occurring in their local economy.

Put another way, it's absolutely accurate to call those bases "vital economic engines." They bring in money and they bring in jobs. Not just the jobs of those civilians employed by the base, but those others whose jobs are affected by the business the base does with the local community, all the ancillary services and supplies for which it contracts locally - not to mention businesses that come to depend on the custom of the soldiers stationed at the base. These so-called "ripple effects" mean that the economic impact of a base closing extends considerably beyond the base itself. So its understandable that members of Congress would "fight like hell to change it," as Rep. Rush Holt said about Fort Monmouth in New Jersey.

Fort Monmouth is actually an apt jumping-off place here, because it's part of my old stomping grounds: I would have trouble counting the number of times I was part of a picket line at the main gate of Fort Monmouth, conveniently located on a well-traveled highway (and right by a bus stop). More than once during the time I lived in the area, the base was targeted for cutbacks or closure, with predictable bad effects on a local economy that at the time wasn't doing all that well to begin with. State and federal representatives moved heaven and Earth to "Save the Fort!" But the local peace group I was with took a somewhat different tack:

Those of us who want to reduce the Pentagon's influence on American life are ... put in an incredible position: support the continuation of a military base, performing duties and doing research the nation and the world would be better off without, or advocating throwing 2000 people out of work. An impossible choice, one we refuse to make.

We can refuse because we have an alternative: Don't close the base, convert it.

It's called peace conversion and it hasn't gotten nearly the attention over the last good number of years that it should have. Peace conversion, at bottom, means taking military facilities and investments and transferring - converting - them to domestic civilian uses. Some might argue that it's counterproductive, citing military spending's supposed benefits to the economy. But in fact, military spending is a drag on the economy:

- As the largest single part of the federal budget (apart from self-financed trust funds), it's responsible for the largest part of the deficit, which is financed by borrowing. According to classical economics, that borrowing "crowds out" financing for more productive investments.

- Military spending, according to studies by both the Labor Department and the Congressional Budget Office, produces fewer jobs per dollar spent than many, if not most, forms of spending in the civilian economy, including areas of the greatest need.

The present moment could provide an opportunity for communities facing the economic blow of the loss of a military base to make lemonade by taking steps to strengthen their local civilian economies. In the case of Fort Monmouth, we developed an outline of a proposal for conversion based around the kinds of things that were already done there, much of which revolved around research of one sort or another, and local concerns. We suggested, for example, it could be used as

- a center for renewable energy research (there was already talk of trying to establish such a facility in the state);
- a center for health research (the base contained a major hospital); and
- a center for pollution control and abatement research (always a concern for an oceanfront area, especially one that at the time was facing the prospect of offshore oil drilling).

Other communities now could look at what their local military facilities do and what resources they draw on locally and come up with their own alternatives. They could even propose to the Pentagon that they will drop their opposition to base closings provided that the DOD actively assist them in adapting the base to civilian use and that the closing is put off until the plans are well-established. (The Pentagon actually has such an office; it's called the Office of Economic Adjustment, or OEA. At one point, it could only offer help after a base had been closed but now it will offer small planning grants for communities heavily dependent on military spending. It's both under-utilized and grossly inadequate - the grants max at $175,000 - but it does exist.)

But as we said about Fort Monmouth, "there is no point in minimizing the difficulties involved," which are not only practical, involving planning, construction, job retraining, and more, but perhaps even more importantly, political: Our campaign, while it did get a good deal of publicity, was dismissed as "impractical" while the base was under threat of closure - and "unnecessary" when that danger had passed: The emotional commitment to the status quo is always a major obstacle to change. Still, this is, again, an opening to at least raise the question and perhaps even to disentangle some of our nation's communities from the economic web of militarism.

What is needed[, we said during our campaign,] is not just a cut in the military - although that is justified in itself - but to take those resources and redirect them to meet the social crises facing us in education, in race relations, in our cities, in our hospitals, and on our farms.

What is needed is to take the technological, scientific, personnel, political, and financial resources that have been directed into the military and a militaristic foreign policy and use them instead for the betterment of life for all the world's people. What is needed, bluntly, is peace conversion.

It's indicative both of the size of the task before us and the importance of making the effort that I wrote those words not quite 30 years ago - and I see no need to change one of them.

Footnote One: The OEA's website includes links to some recent documents describing the economic effects of plant closings. The one sentence summary is that the closings do hurt - but communities recover and some wind up better off than they were before. Still, it seems to me that the economic dislocations can and should be minimized by planning in advance for closures rather than by scrambling for answers after they become inevitable.

The documents include a list of some conversion success stories, a chart of jobs gained and lost, a GAO report from January on the work of the OEA, and "From Barracks to Business," a study by the MIT Military Base Redevelopment Project. (All of those are in .pdf format. Warning: The last one is a very large file.)

Footnote two: In the list Defense Secretary Rumplestiltskin presented, "New England was the hardest hit region and the South was the biggest gainer."

Well, waddaya know about that! Thank God for coincidence, eh, Rumpy?