BRAC

That's Base Realignment And Closure, not that guy on Space Ghost and Adult Swim. QandO is covering Wesley Clarke's comments about them.

When I was down visiting Amybear and her parents this weekend, BRAC was a major topic of discussion. They live outside the beltway in Northern Virginia, so many of the DC area realignments were significant for the people at Amybear's graduation party Saturday night. Overall though, the folks at the party were generally supportive of the plan. There were concerns about traffic (a perennial problem in the DC area), but by moving many jobs outside the beltway to Ft Belvoir, traffic into DC may actually improve.

Of course people like Wesley Clarke are bashing the plan because the military is "losing it's small town roots". This is bunk. There are small town installations which will be closed, that is true. However most of the larger realignments are not in small towns, but urban centers. This is because real estate prices are a big part of what drives BRAC. Smaller towns have cheaper land prices and lower operational costs so the military actually prefers them. So while small installations will be closed and their mission rolled into the larger ones, in general I expect to see staffing drift out of the cities not into them.

This weekends wisdom says that the military generally sees BRAC as a good thing. I agree. It makes the military more efficient in the long run and that is very important when budgets are tight and we're fighting a war. However, congress will make a stink bipartisanly. Military spending is the pork of choice for the Republican party and the Democrats like it almost as much. Expect to see the Congress put up a fight, especially when jobs move across state lines.