News

Base's fate shaped over past year
By Celeste Calvitto, Journal Staff Writer

A proposal to consolidate the nation's B-1B Lancer bombers in one location was advanced within the Pentagon more than a year ago, eventually leading to the recommended closing of Ellsworth Air Force Base.

Among the thousands of documents released over the past several weeks by the Department of Defense are minutes of meetings in April, June and September of 2004 laying the groundwork to consolidate the B-1 fleet. Other documents show that in October, Dyess Air Force Base in Texas had been identified by the Air Force as the recommended repository for all of the nation's B-1 bombers, including the 29 at Ellsworth. On Nov. 4, that recommendation was presented to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

The documents are being reviewed by lawmakers and consultants nationwide from states that have military installations on the list. The officials are in search of clues to the rationale used by the DOD to develop its recommendations for base closings and realignments.

The minutes are from meetings of the Air Force Base Closure Executive Group, the committee charged with making the Air Force's recommendations to the Department of Defense. The Nov. 4 report is from the Infrastructure Executive Council, which presented the recommendations from each branch of the services to Rumsfeld.

Minutes from that meeting show that Rumsfeld "stressed to everyone the extreme sensitivity of scenario information and reminded them to be extra careful to protect this information from premature disclosure … not all scenarios will become candidate recommendations."

The current members of South Dakota's congressional delegation, Gov. Mike Rounds and the Ellsworth Task Force believe the recommendations were still being worked on until the May 13 announcement that Ellsworth was on the base-closing list.

Although members of North Dakota's congressional delegation have said they were aware well before May 13 of the status of their state's military bases, South Dakota's political leaders said they did not have such knowledge about Ellsworth. Other than rumors that Ellsworth was targeted, they said there had been no indication of the final outcome before the announcement.

Former Democratic Sen. Tom Daschle — who lost his re-election bid in November to Republican John Thune — said this week, "I doubt that anyone knew of the status of fleet consolidation in the Pentagon's internal considerations.

"There were rumors to that effect but no acknowledgement that it was under active consideration," Daschle said.

However, Daschle said that because of the rumors — which he said he had heard "over several years" — he was not surprised.

"We were disappointed that some of the rumors we had heard were accurate," Daschle said.

Kyle Downey, Thune's communications director, said this week that "in the few days leading up to it, we'd heard some unsettling rumors that proved to be true on May 13."

Rounds said that as late as a month before the announcement, when he led a delegation of local officials and task force members to meet with undersecretary of defense Philip Grone, "there were no whispers that we were aware of that Ellsworth might be on the list."

Rounds said rumors "started to surface about a week before the release of the list" that it might contain F-16s moving from Joe Foss Field in Sioux Falls and that Ellsworth might be closed. "But we had no advance information, absolutely none," he said. Joe Foss Field ended up "gaining action."

Pat McElgunn, director of the Ellsworth Task Force, said the recommendation was unexpected in light of the reduction of the nation's B-1 bomber fleet and consolidation at Dyess and Ellsworth in 2001 and 2002.

"Their approach was to reduce them (B-1s) and benefit from the concentration of resources at those locations," McElgunn said. "There was never another indication that they were looking at a singular operating location until they made the announcement on May 13."

"We knew another BRAC round was coming up, and we were preparing to make the base as strong as possible, but there were never any signals that Ellsworth was on the chopping block," Julianne Fisher, communications director for Sen. Tim Johnson, D-S.D., said Monday.

Russ Levsen, communications director for Rep. Stephanie Herseth, D-S.D., said her office "did not have any specific information" before May 13 that the base would be closed or that the fleet would be consolidated.

Recent history aside, South Dakota's top lawmakers and the task force are looking ahead.

At Herseth's request, they met with the two Air Force officials who presided over the Air Force Base Closure Executive Group. That meeting was before last week's regional hearing in Rapid City of the Base Realignment and Closure Commission — the panel charged with taking an independent look at the DOD recommendations.

And because some of the DOD supporting documents were released too late to be useful at the June 21 BRAC hearing, the task force is still supplying the BRAC Commission with more information to support its pitch to remove Ellsworth from the list while continuing to drive home the main points made at the hearing.

On Sept. 8, the BRAC commission will submit its analysis of the DOD list to President Bush. By Sept. 23, Bush must either forward the report to Congress or return it to the commission for further evaluation. If the report is returned to the commission, it has until Oct. 20 to resubmit its report to Bush. He then must approve it and submit it to Congress by Nov. 7. Congress has 45 days from the day it receives the report from Bush to reject the report in full, or the report becomes law. Should Bush fail to approve or transmit either the initial or revised BRAC Commission recommendations by the deadlines, the BRAC process will be terminated.

Contact Celeste Calvitto at 394-8438 or celeste.calvitto@rapidcityjournal.com