Cohen to Seek New Round of Base Closures

WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary William S. Cohen will seek a new round of politically controversial base closings--and perhaps another one--to trim the military’s costly inventory of facilities to reflect post-Cold War reality, the Pentagon announced Tuesday.

Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon, announcing Cohen’s plans, said that “reductions in base infrastructure have not kept up” with other military cutbacks since the communist bloc collapsed.

Bacon declined to provide any details of the closing plan. But Cohen said at a meeting earlier this week that he was looking at one or two more rounds of closures to slice unneeded overhead costs, according to a participant.

Cohen, named Defense secretary for President Clinton’s second term, acknowledged that he had resisted closures while he was a senator from Maine, the participant said. But “now I understand the need,” he said, according to the participant, who requested anonymity.

The Times reported last week that Cohen was ready to push for more base closings as one way to free up money to pay for development of new weapons.

Under legislation approved by Congress in 1988, the Pentagon already has gone through four rounds of closings, the most recent in 1995.

The law established a nonpartisan commission to recommend facilities to be closed. In an only partly successful effort to insulate the process from politics, the White House and Congress may accept or reject the list but may not change it. So far, the lawmakers have always gone along.

But the 1995 effort proved extremely controversial because most of the obvious candidates for closure had been disposed of in earlier rounds. At the time, officials predicted that there would be no more rounds because the level of political pain had grown so high.

But Bacon said Cohen has concluded that the military still is spending too much of its budget on facilities, a situation that short-changes new weapons programs.

Cohen made the decision after completing the Pentagon’s sweeping review of the post-Cold War military, Bacon said. Earlier cut-backs have pared personnel by 33% but base support structure has declined by only 18%.

Defense officials acknowledged that the resistance level on Capitol Hill to additional closures seems to be climbing. But Bacon said that lawmakers must bite the bullet.

“Congress will have to go through the same choices that the military faced,” he said. It comes down to whether the government will pay for unneeded bases “or weapons to make our troops more effective in battle.”

Capitol Hill analysts noted that lawmakers who opposed earlier rounds of base closings are now more prominently represented in key committees than in the past. When Cohen first suggested last week that he was thinking about new closures, Rep. Joel Hefley (R-Colo.), chairman of the House National Security Committee’s installations subcommittee, reacted angrily.

“Does ‘over my dead body’ make it clear enough?” he asked.

In California, experts said, three bases mentioned before in the previous closure rounds could be in danger again:

* Point Mugu Naval Air Weapons Station near Oxnard, which has 2,400 military personnel and 5,000 civilian personnel.

* China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station, in the desert northeast of Los Angeles, with 1,000 active duty military personnel and 5,000 civilian personnel.

* Beale Air Force Base, 40 miles northwest of Sacramento, which has 400 civilian employees and 3,400 military personnel.