Boston Globe
February 14, 2004

Hanscom's vital role in our security

By Marty Meehan

The end of the Cold War and the rise of international terrorism have
transformed the nature of the threats facing our national security, and
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has said he wants to transform our
military to match these new threats. In formulating the criteria for the
next round of base closings, though, the Pentagon seems to have adopted a
business as usual approach that Rumsfeld has said he intended to reject in
favor of "transformation."

I'm concerned about these criteria, not just because Hanscom Air Force Base
pumps more than $3.2 billion and nearly 26,000 jobs into our region's
economy, but because it weakens the Pentagon's effort to modernize our
military.

One of the central ideas behind transformation, as! the term is used by
Rumsfeld, is that the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force can no longer
afford to fight wars separately. Instead, Rumsfeld believes, the US military
needs to take advantage of advances in technology -- particularly
information technology -- to develop an integrated, interoperable military
that can communicate and coordinate to respond quickly and effectively to
any conflict.

Part of this strategy requires streamlining our enormous installation
infrastructure down to the bases that can best support the war against
terrorism and other national security priorities. Over the next two years,
the Base Realignment and Closure Commission will evaluate bases across the
country and ultimately decide which ones to close.

With its unique collection of world-class universities, research
laboratories, and technology companies, Massachusetts will play a central
role in maintaining and building on the technological edge that makes
transformation possible. The hub of much of that activity is the Electronic
Systems Center at Hanscom Air Force base. Hanscom is the home of the program
offices charged with developing network-centric command and control systems,
many of which were used to achieve dramatic advantages over our adversaries
in Iraq and Afghanistan. Just as our military is leveraging information
technology, Hanscom is leveraging the intellectual capital and innovation of
Massachusetts to develop that technology and improve on it for the future.

Without technical facilities like Hanscom, Rumsfeld's plan to transform our
military will be impossible. Hanscom may not have a fighter wing or other
trappings of a conventional Air Force base, but it provides our armed forces
with something even more valuable -- the capability to locate, track, and
coordinate the application of devastating firepower so rapidly that the
enemy does not even realize what is ! happening until the target is destroyed.
In the 21st century, a soldier or airman at a computer terminal is often
much more dangerous to our adversaries than one holding a gun on the
battlefield.

Despite Rumsfeld's repeated assertions that the base closure process would
take account of the unique contributions of technology to transformation,
the criteria released this week are essentially identical to the factors
used in every previous base closure round: lots of emphasis on the length of
runways and number of planes, not one word about research and development
capabilities or technological expertise.

An assessment of technical facilities like Hanscom that fails to consider
the value of educated, trained, and experienced workers and engineers --
along with the for-profit and non-profit organizations and educational
institutions that support them -- only weakens Rumsfeld's mission of
transformation. The commission's 2005 criteria migh! t be well-suited to
evaluate our war capabilities against the Soviet-era threat, but are
obsolete against the challenges of a new century.

Anyone who assumes that the Air Force might do just as well by moving the
research and development mission performed at Hanscom to some other part of
the country should ask themselves why start-up technology companies decided
to locate their operations in places like Silicon Valley in northern
California or the Route 128 corridor in eastern Massachusetts rather than in
a city with lower real estate prices and other costs. These companies
understand that the value of ready access to human capital is immense, even
though it is difficult to quantify with precision.

If the Department of Defense moves the Hanscom mission across the country, a
few of the contractors whose jobs are directly tied to work on programs
managed at the base might try to move with it, but most of the thousands of
scientists! and engineers at MIT's Lincoln Labs, Mitre, and the hundreds of
defense and technology companies in the region will stay put, leaving the
Air Force cut off from a massive pool of talent and experience.

Rumsfeld recently told me that he agreed that facilities like Hanscom should
not be evaluated on the same basis as conventional military bases. I would
like to believe that the base closure process will be guided by his stated
objective: to ensure that it makes a profound contribution to transforming
the Department by rationalizing our infrastructure with defense strategy.

In the official commentary accompanying the final Base Realignment and
Closure criteria, the Pentagon acknowledged that it heard our criticism, but
these words failed to translate into changes in the criteria. Without these
changes, there can be no assurance that the closure process will consider
the factors that make Hanscom a vital asset to our nation's security as well
as our region's economy.

Marty Meehan is US Representative from the 5th District of Massachusetts.

© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.
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