Washington – The base closing commission voted Thursday to shut down the Army’s historic Walter Reed hospital and move about 20,000 defense workers away from the nation’s capital.
The nine-member commission endorsed much of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s broader plan to streamline support services across the Army, Navy and Air Force. In many cases, it voted to merge programs scattered around military facilities across the country to centralized locations.
Late Thursday, the commission voted to approve its own proposal to close the Galena Airport Forward Operation Location in Alaska, which the Air Force uses to land jets when necessary. The Air Force had wanted to keep it open. The commercial airport there would continue operating.
The panel also approved a Pentagon plan to close Onizuka Air Force Station in California.
Commissioners are to vote on the Air Force’s most contentious base closings today.
The Air Force wants to vastly reconfigure the Air National Guard, a move that states fiercely oppose. It also wants to close Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota and Cannon Air Force Base in New Mexico.
Anticipating the high-stakes votes, the entire South Dakota congressional delegation – Sens. John Thune, a Republican, and Tim Johnson, a Democrat, and Democratic Rep. Stephanie Herseth – attended the hearing, as did Democratic Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico.
The commission signed off on many recommendations to merge education, medical, administrative and training programs, although it made adjustments in some cases. In others, the panel rejected the proposals outright. But those were in the minority. The Defense Department is trying to achieve what it calls “jointness” – the services combining their strengths, rather than working separately – to cut costs and promote efficiency.
Part of that effort was closing Walter Reed, the crown jewel of U.S. military hospitals, and moving much of its staff and services across town to the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., which will be updated and expanded. In a nod to the Army hospital’s century-old heritage, the expanded facility will be renamed Walter Reed.
Some of the old hospital’s personnel and operations also will move to a community hospital at Fort Belvoir in Virginia.
The commission said care at Walter Reed, which has treated presidents as well as veterans and soldiers, is considered first- rate, but it is showing its age.
Former President Eisenhower and Gen. Douglas MacArthur spent their final days on the 113-acre Walter Reed campus, which will be taken over by Washington, D.C.
“Kids coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan, all of them in harm’s way, deserve to come back to 21st-century medical care,” said commission chairman Anthony Principi. “It needs to be modernized.”
The panel also largely sided with the Pentagon on shifting more than 20,000 military and civilian defense jobs from leased office space in Virginia suburbs of Washington to military bases farther away from the capital.
Opponents had argued that such a massive job shift could create traffic nightmares. But the Pentagon said military bases will provide a more secure setting in the aftermath of 9/11, in which one of the hijacked planes slammed into the Pentagon.
