Guam is America’s unsinkable
aircraft carrier in the South Pacific, the fulcrum of the fabled
Pacific “pivot.” It’s also kind
of a mess.
With a GDP per capita less than a third the US average, an
earthquake-damaged harbor, geriatric generators that black out the entire
island roughly twice a year, drinking water periodically contaminated with
sewage, a fire department with three working ambulances for a population of
160,000, and a police department so short-staffed it’s started deputizing
unpaid civilians, according to a Government Accountability Office report due
out today, Guam is closer to the Third World than to California economically as
well as geographically.
That’s not just a development problem, it’s a national security
issue. The Defense Department, which already owns more than a quarter of the
island, plans on bringing in 5,000 more Marines and their estimated 1,300
dependents. DoD and GAO agree that the island’s infrastructure isn’t ready to
receive them. What they disagree on is the cost to get it ready. The last three
defense budgets requested, all told, $400 million for public infrastructure in
Guam over 2012-2014, with more costs to come, but GAO doubts that that’s all
necessary.
There are two big problems here, one that’s merely difficult to
fix and the other nigh-impossible. The first is that the Pentagon’s still
rewriting its Guam plan. The original goal was to relocate 8,600 Marines and
9,000 dependents from Okinawa to Guam by 2014, but disagreements over cost-sharing with the Japanese led the
Defense Department to scale the move down to 5,000 Marines and 1,300
dependents. (Mathematically minded readers will notice that the
Marine-to-dependent ratio in those two plans is radically different: My guess
is this is because the current plan includes a higher percentage of young,
unmarried Marine Corps riflemen).
That’s a 64 percent reduction in the number of people moving,
but you can’t just cut the cost estimates by 64 percent and call it a day. A smaller
force gives you more options about where to put it, such as US bases on the
island that generate their own clean water, which could bring the needed
infrastructure investments down more than 64 percent. But some costs are
fixed – assuming that you decide to do them at all– such as upgrading water
treatment plants.
That kind of costs brings us to the second, almost insoluble
problem: How do you disentangle what’s needed purely to support the military–
i.e. what Congress feels the Pentagon should pay for – from what’s needed by
the civilian population? You can’t even draw a neat line between the two
groups, because adding more Marines and their families also requires adding
more civilian contractors who will work on base but never live there.
The relocation would also mean a temporary upsurge in
construction workers, many of them from off the island, and, besides all the
other public infrastructure the influx would require, Guamanian officials say
they lack the health labs to test the newcomers for communicable diseases. Then
you get into messy issues like landfill sites: The main Air Force and Navy
bases have almost filled theirs up and are starting to send their trash, for a
fee, to Guam’s waste disposal site, which by the way is in court-ordered
receivership for environmental violations.
Congress has been deeply skeptical of the Pentagon’s cost
estimates and Japan’s pledged contributions, so it keeps legislating restrictions on what the Defense
Department can spend to move forces from Okinawa to Guam, leading to what one thinktank study called a “logjam.” As Congress’s
accountant/attack dog, the GAO has challenged DoD on costs in the past,
and the report due out today is just the latest installment in a long and
dreary story.
So what does the GAO study (which we got in advance) actually
recommend? The report’s title, as usual, is little help: “Further Analysis
Needed to Identify Guam’s Public Infrastructure Requirements and Costs for
DoD’s Realignment Plan.” (Pro tip: GAO always thinks “further analysis
is needed.” If your house was on fire and you were trying to get out, GAO would
tell you to first make sure that your escape plan met best practices and that
you had perfected your knowledge-based systems analysis. In this case, GAO
wants the Defense Department to revise its estimates for Guam – which the
Pentagon is doing – before it asks for any more money and to write “an
integrated master plan” for all the forces reshuffling around the
Pacific – which the Pentagon is not doing.
That’s
precisely the kind of long-term planning that the last two years of sequestration, government shutdown, and general legislative chaos have made
impossible. Now that the budget deal has – we hope – stabilized the situation for
the next two years, maybe everyone can get back to business.
The original post can be found
at: http://breakingdefense.com/2013/12/guam-not-ready-for-5000-more-marines-gao/
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