2005 BRAC Commission

The Commission assessed the Department of Defense’s (DoD’s) closure and realignment recommendations for consistency with the eight statutory selection criteria and the DoD Force Structure Plan. The recommendations announced by Secretary Rumsfeld on May 13, 2005 comprised, by the Commission’s count, 190 separate DoD recommendations that would produce as many as 837 distinct and identifiable recommended BRAC “close" or "realign" actions. These 837 distinct actions also involved an additional 160 installations that would gain missions or resources due to the proposed closures and realignments. All told, the 2005 BRAC recommendations exceeded the number considered by all prior BRAC Commissions combined. In addition to the unprecedented number, many DoD recommendations were extremely complex, proposing intertwining movements between and among numerous installations. Other DoD proposals consolidated apparently unrelated actions within the same recommendation. \ud Unlike prior BRAC rounds, the Commission evaluated DoD’s recommendations in the context of a stable or increasing force structure, an ongoing conflict in Southwest Asia, and the projected redeployment of 70,000 servicemembers and family members from Europe and Asia to the United States. The 20-year BRAC outlook required the Commission to make allowances for major uncertainties in the military and strategic environment. While acknowledging the importance of savings as a BRAC goal, the Commission went beyond a business model analysis of DoD’s recommendations and weighed the strategic environment within which recommendations would be implemented and their effect on DoD’s transformational goals. The BRAC Commission Report to the President has two volume and this volume (Volume One) contains the Executive Summary and Chapters 1-