Talking turkey about ‘jointness’

Sorry on Thanksgiving to again be focused on Pentagon spending, but it seemed timely to talk turkey about “jointness.”

More fat can be trimmed to help yield bigger savings.

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A Government Accountability Office report last week said the Defense Department — under the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure program, known as BRAC — planned to consolidate 26 military installations into 12 joint bases “to take advantage of opportunities for efficiencies . . . and elimination of duplicate support services on bases located close to one another.” That meant consolidating bases operated separately by the Army, Navy, Air Force or Marine Corps.

The Defense Department estimated in 2005 that it could “save about $2.3 billion over a 20-year period,” saying that “the installations either shared a common boundary or were in proximity to at least one other installation, and performed common support functions,” the report noted.

But within four years, the savings as projected by the GAO in a 2009 report had dropped to $273 million, and in its newest report, the figure is $249 million.

Why? The answer has its roots in 2005. In good military tradition, the joint base program first required the office of the secretary of defense to decide which military branch would be the lead for delivering support services at each joint base.

And there was another issue. As the GAO reported, the Defense Department in 2005 had no common framework for identifying support functions on military facilities. In fact, there wasn’t even “a common terminology across the military services in defining” those functions.

We are talking about some 48 “support areas,” such as airfield operations, grounds maintenance, custodial services, and even child and youth programs. There also needed to be common standards for providing the services.

Today, there are 280 joint base common standards — from fire protection, security, chaplain and legal services all the way to “establishing the acceptable waiting time for ensuring that 100 percent of eligible children are placed within the base-run child development program,” says the newest GAO report.

It took three years to work out these very detailed details.

One “landscaping and ground maintenance” standard said that “the joint base is to maintain the grass height at 2 to 4 inches and accomplish necessary trimming, edging, pruning, and landscaping to maintain healthy vegetation and a professional appearance,” the 2009 GAO report noted. For law enforcement, it was that “90 percent of law enforcement investigations be completed within 30 days,” according to the most recent GAO report.

Implementation was carried out in two phases, with five joint bases established in October 2009 and the remaining seven bases established in October 2010. But by 2009, it became clear to the GAO that “instead of decreasing, support costs at the joint bases are expected to increase.”

Turned out the new Defense Department common standards were costing more than the individual military services had provided, and thus “implementing joint basing will result in additional administrative costs and the loss of some existing installation support efficiencies,” the GAO reported three years ago.