Guest Post by Morbo
During the 2004 elections, Senator Majority Leader Bill Frist stood outside Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota and promised residents that they had nothing to fear by tossing Tom Daschle out of office and replacing him with John Thune. Frist said he would see to it that Ellsworth remained open.
The Pentagon has just released a long list of military bases to be closed. Ellsworth is on the list. As Nelson Muntz from “The Simpsons” is fond of saying, “Ha, ha!”
Of course Ellsworth is a long way from closing. As soon as the list was released, senators and House members began vowing to fight the closures. Several more steps must occur before any moth-balling takes place. Frist might save Ellsworth (and Thune’s job) yet.
That’s too bad. It seems obvious that decisions like base closures should be based on the needs of the military, not political pressure campaigns emanating from communities that have grown accustomed to riding the federal gravy train. The Armed Services are not a welfare program for depressed farm-belt states.
Judging by the way some Americans act, you would think military pork was a God-given right. The fact is, the needs of the military do change. Old problems fade away, and new challenges arise. Our military exists to defend America, not provide jobs in the middle of nowhere in South Dakota.
For a White House as partisan as this one, it’s no surprise that some have charged that some of the closings are motivated by politics. A recent New York Times article mentioned a report that noted that blue states stand to lose more than 24,000 military and civilian jobs while red states gain nearly 12,000.
Yet there are some surprising red state targets on the list. States don’t come any redder than Mississippi, yet that state is slated to lose Pascagoula Naval Station.
The base closings will hit affected communities hard, but they’re probably necessary. The Times put it well in a recent editorial:
By closing and consolidating facilities it no longer requires, the Pentagon would free about $5 billion a year for the additional personnel and equipment it needs very badly…. [T]he Pentagon deserves credit anytime it musters the courage to redirect money from areas that are politically popular but militarily redundant.
Of all forms of pork, the military type is the worst because it’s ruinously expensive. When a member of Congress slips a rider into an appropriations bill to earmark $400 million to build yet another bridge in Peoria, that is at least a one-time expenditure. By contrast, military pork is like Niagara Falls: It just keeps flowing. As The Times noted, the Pentagon has spent $2 billion to build the C-130J transport aircraft, even though the vehicle “cannot airlift troops and equipment into combat areas, cannot be used in search-and-rescue missions and does not operate well in bad weather.” Too many members of Congress, it seems, represent districts that have a stake in this piece of aircraft, so we keep cranking them out. (Reading this description, would you let your son or daughter ride in one?)
Red state folks in the heartland seem to believe they are more patriotic than the rest of us French-loving, anti-war peaceniks. Here’s their chance to prove it by looking beyond narrow parochial interests and accepting what’s right for the country. Using political pressure to force the Pentagon to keep an obsolete military base open just because it provides an economic boost to an otherwise desolate area of your state isn’t patriotic. In fact, it’s the exact opposite. After all, the Pentagon might be able to use the money saved by closing the base to do something really radical — like buy proper armor for our troops in Iraq.
Residents of red Midwestern farm states are also prone to lecturing the rest of us on the value of hard work and good old-fashioned ingenuity. Given that the red states win overall with this closing plan, I have a simple message to South Dakotans: Let Ellsworth go, and pick yourself up by your boot-straps. Quit demanding that the federal government subsidize an outmoded Air Force base. Stand on your own two feet. Stop your carping. You sound a lot like welfare queens with tractors.