Solon Economou

Meet the kiss of death

The kiss of death--that's me--to military bases. Fort Monmouth NJ, Fort Monroe VA, Fort Eustis VA are all on the base closing list. Those three bases are where I served most of my active duty time.

Parts of the old Fort Devens MA, Westover AFB MA, and Fort Knox KY will be closed, reduced, or realigned, whatever that means. I served there, too. I must be the kiss of death for military bases.

I logged onto the Department of Defense's BRAC report web page to see what other mayhem I may have inadvertently caused just by being there. But if you've ever tried to get any real, direct, concise, easily located information out of a government report, you'd know why I just gave up trying to wade through the red tape and rigmarole.

Of course, I also spent a lot of time in the Pentagon on weekly visits riding rickety, overaged, Vietnam-era Huey helicopters, which gave me much-needed prayer time wondering when the "Jesus bolt" would pop out and we'd all go hurtling to our deaths without even the benefit of auto-rotation. But my kiss of death apparently did not extend to the hallowed halls of the Pentagon.

Some of the base closings make sense, but many don't. There's an old saw in the military that says, "Reorganization creates the illusion of progress. So when you can't show progress, reorganize." And that's what Rumsfeld and the Pentagon boys trying to keep their stars still glued to their shoulders are doing.

When I was serving on the General Staff at the Army's Training and Doctrine Command and some genius came up with the idea to once again reorganize, I did more eye-rolling then than ever before or since in my life. But, boy, it kept a lot of idiots busy thinking they were making some kind of progress.

Locally, of course, we're reeling over the closing of Otis. Much has been written, said, reported about the pros and cons of closing it. Much of it centers around cost. Give me a break--we've been reorganizing for years. Have military costs ever gone down? Most of the reorganizations, if not all of them, have eventually ended up costing us more money. And how many wars have bean-counters won, anyway?

Much of the controversy over Otis and other bases centers around mission-orientation. Missions have generally been oriented toward the cold war; now they must be oriented toward rogue states and terrorists. And therein lies our biggest problem.

We, the greatest and most powerful nation on the planet, sit and wait to find ourselves reacting to outside threats instead of acting and forcing outside threats to react to us. We have to take the initiative and prepare for all eventualities, not just the latest and nastiest like the oil-soaked, robed butchers of the Middle East and their bloodthirsty minions.

Does anyone really think that ex-KGB officer Vladimir Putin is looking forward to allowing true democracy in his part of the world? Have you listened to him talk lately? Maybe old Vlad envisions himself molding a new Mother Russia with himself cast as another Peter the Great or Ivan the Terrible . But in neither case is democracy a factor.

We can't realign our entire defense structure to focus only on the latest threat, like little kids reacting to the latest bogeyman, when old threats can pop up again just like those groundhogs in the carnival games. And we've got to do some implied heavy threatening of our own lest these enemies of freedom, wherever and whoever they are, entertain any ideas of stepping out of line.

Our Otis F-15s are heading for New Jersey and Florida. Will they be able to help the Northeast USA effectively from there? I doubt it. I guess Rumsfeld and the Pentagon boys could have done worse -- at least they didn't decide to put them in a cornfield in Omaha.

What happens if an old threat rears its ugly head again? Do we run around like chickens with our heads cut off and re-re-reorganize? We have to prepare for all eventualities, not just the latest craze in crazies.

Personally, I think it was a great mistake to put Otis on the chopping block, and not just for our local economy, but for our national defense. In fact, I would like to see the base retained and additional squadrons added.

I believe in a lot of visible power, scaring the hell out of any potential enemy, even if we never use it. In fact, that would be the greatest deterrent to our ever having to use it. I don't mind a few extra tax dollars going to this use. Don't we waste billions already on totally inane pork-barrel projects and on social engineering experiments that, at the very best, eventually come to conclusions that even a kindergartener with a little common sense already knows?

I expect that Messrs. Kennedy, Kerry and Delahunt will do everything within their power to keep Otis a viable part of our defense structure. I'll be keeping a close eye on them and on the genuineness of their efforts.

But there is another reason Otis should be kept open. I never served there. That alone should be reason enough.

posted by Solon Economou @ 9:34 AM