THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 12, 1994 TAG: 9406120064
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DALE EISMAN, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: 940612 LENGTH: ALEXANDRIA
The Navy's 1993 base closings were ``well beyond anything that anybody could have imagined,'' said Charles P. Nemfakos, the service's point man in the process. As a result, Nemfakos suggested that cuts next year in the Navy and Marine Corps will be smaller than predicted for the Defense Department as a whole.
{REST} The '95 round of base closings is the fourth and last now scheduled. Unwilling to incur voters' wrath by shutting hometown bases but recognizing the need to cut defense spending, Congress turned the process over to the independent Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission in the late 1980s.
Three sets of commissioners have ordered nearly 200 bases closed in an effort widely praised for its efficiency. Still, critics depict the process as a scheme that lets Congress dodge its responsibility and places inordinate power over lives, careers and tax dollars in the hands of a few senior Pentagon bureaucrats.
``There are a lot of good things about the Congress. But one of the bad things is that on issues such as this, everybody reverts to their own turf and therefore nothing happens,'' said Peter B. Bowman, a retired shipyard commander who served on the 1993 closure commission. ``Well, something has to happen.''
New commissioners will be appointed by President Clinton in January. But the most important work in the entire process is being done right now, by uniformed and civilian military analysts who are gathering information and shaping recommendations on existing bases, said Keith Cunningham, a defense infrastructure analyst for Business Executives for National Security.
``The commission depends on the military services' analysis, for the most part,'' said Cunningham, whose Washington-based group follows the closure process.
In the Navy's case, and the Marines', that means Nemfakos, a 51-year-old Greek immigrant of stoutish bearing and a formidable reputation in the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill. Admirers and detractors alike describe him as charming yet dictatorial, modest yet arrogant.
The Navy has given him - or he has assumed by intellect and force of will - a power that people familiar with the base-closing process say is unlike that exercised by anyone in any other service.
``Everybody's afraid of him. . . . He's the comptroller,'' said one Hill staff member, recalling Nemfakos' past work as chief developer of the Navy's annual budget. Nemfakos has reinforced the fear, the staffer added, by suggesting to those who might question his base recommendations that one day he may again control their budgets.
Lawrence Korb, an assistant secretary of defense during the Reagan administration, drew a particularly telling comparison when he placed Nemfakos in a line of forceful leaders and personalities unique to the Navy: ``The Air Force hasn't had any Rickovers, either,'' Korb observed, referring to Adm. Hyman Rickover, the maverick father of the nuclear navy.
Nemfakos scoffs at such descriptions, but said he understands them:
``When you're the guy who says `No' and takes (things) away, the first thing that's going to come to people's minds when they hear your name is not, `Gee what a nice guy, I really like him.' But I hope that as people work with me, they understand that I want the best.''
As director of the Navy's Base Structure Analysis Team, Nemfakos heads a group of about four dozen handpicked accountants and analysts. Working in cluttered offices several miles from the Pentagon, they already have spent almost a year grilling base commanders worldwide about the service's infrastructure.
A similar team in 1992 and 1993 produced recommendations to close or restructure operations at 127 Navy and Marine bases and other installations, including three in Hampton Roads. The total was more than three times that of the other services combined.
In a recent interview, Nemfakos talked guardedly about closures next year but suggested that the Navy will continue to see a movement of domestic naval resources toward ``megaports'' in Norfolk and San Diego.
``I don't think there is anything that has changed in the mathematics'' pushing that drive for centralization on the East and West coasts, he said. ``And since Norfolk and San Diego are going to have to be, then we have to fully utilize them.''
Still, ``If you're asking me the question: `Are we going to pull everything into Norfolk and San Diego?' I don't know. I suppose from an operational perspective one could make that decision, but I doubt seriously that everything would be folded into two locations.''
Nemfakos insisted that next year's closings will hinge on the data now being gathered on what the Navy owns vs. what the Navy needs. ``Just like we did last time, we're going to work really, really hard not to make decisions before we have data.''
On Capitol Hill, some are skeptical.
U.S. Rep. Norman Sisisky, a Petersburg Democrat whose district includes western Tidewater, said he's encouraged that higher-ranking Navy officials seem to be taking a more direct interest in the work of Nemfakos and his team this year than they did in the months before the '93 round of closures.
``But am I comfortable? Not really,'' Sisisky added.
He criticized some of the 1993 decisions, particularly the closing of the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Suffolk. ``It was a moving target. Every time we proved this (closure) was wrong, they just changed the figures.''
Rep. Owen B. Pickett, a Virginia Beach Democrat, said some of the 1993 recommendations ``did not meet the test of common sense.''
Nemfakos' team, he said, often took a ``bean-counter approach,'' relying too heavily on data and computer models and not enough on the experiences of the Navy's on-line leaders. Like Sisisky, Pickett said he sees signs of change in that approach this year.
Other sources suggested several 1993 commission members were suspicious about some recommendations from each of the services. ``Sometimes it seemed like the data was not fairly weighted,'' one commission member said privately.
Though Sisisky insisted that ``I don't lobby Nemfakos. I may go above him,'' he and Pickett are among a growing number of congressmen who have mobilized business and political leaders in their communities to monitor the work of Nemfakos' team.
Some of those groups, including Pickett's, have come to the team's offices to size up Nemfakos and plead their cases. Pickett's group includes several retired admirals familiar with the bases being surveyed and the senior Navy leaders to whom the team and its parent group, the Base Structure Evaluation Committee, ultimately will report.
Such efforts imply the kind of political influence-peddling that the closure process is supposed to be above. But there are conflicting views as to their effectiveness.
The committee Sisisky has assembled should help make sure the commission gets all relevant information about bases in his district, the congressman said. ``I don't think it makes any difference'' in the recommendations of Nemfakos and his counterparts in the other services, the congressman added.
But Nelson Panazzolo, director of Armed Services for the Staten Island, N.Y., Chamber of Commerce, said he came away from the '93 closure round feeling politics played a role in his community's loss of its naval station.
``It comes down to maybe who had the most pull, I guess,'' he said.
Navy personnel are under orders not to discuss specific bases, but Nemfakos said the service welcomes requests to talk about the process of closing bases.
``Because our view is: The more clarity there is upfront, when the recommendations finally come out . . . there will be a little bit better understanding, and less recrimination.''
Not even critics question Nemfakos' dedication to the job and the Navy, but some who've been through the process wonder whether such power over the direction of tax dollars should be conferred on people who never have to answer to the voters.
``It's very disturbing that our congressmen can't do this,'' said Patrick Sweeney, a University of Dayton professor who has studied base closings.
Congress' inability to act on its own ``casts a very revealing light on the pork-barrel nature of a lot of our federal procedures,'' said Bruce Allen, a spokesman for the San Francisco-based Center for Economic Conversion.
Allen's group has been in business for 19 years, helping communities facing the loss of a base to recover economically. He casts Congress' need to get out of the closure process as a natural result of the military's decisions in past years to cultivate congressional support by spreading bases around.
``There was a strategy in placing a military base or large contractor in just about every congressional district,'' he said. ``What we ended up with was almost a military addiction.''
Others, including former New Jersey Rep. Jim Courter, who headed the 1993 closure commission, hail the process as a testament to Congress' ability to solve a tough problem creatively and rationally.
Said Korb: ``When the political leaders realized that our system is biased against doing the right thing . . . they set up a system to do the right thing as well as protect the individual legislators.''
``This is not a complete departure from democracy,'' argued Cunningham of Business Executives for National Security. ``It's a compromise, a necessary compromise.''
He'd prefer that base-closing decisions be made solely by the military, he said, but that's as impossible as turning them over to Congress.
Those who are troubled by the insulation of Nemfakos and other key players, and who suspect the services already have targeted particular bases, should take comfort from the scrutiny the Pentagon's recommendations get before the commission's final decisions, Cunningham said.
``You gotta go through so many different scrubs that it would be hard to trick everybody. . . . We'd find it if it was there,'' he said. ``Everybody is looking. . . . I'd become a national hero if I found a smoking gun.''
Nemfakos answers suggestions that the process might be rigged with the air of a man smoldering at the idea.
``The Department of the Navy uniquely was challenged by the base-closure commission (in 1993), on almost every single recommendation,'' he said. ``You had communities, such as Charleston, Orlando, Meridian (Miss.) and other places, who hired both legal counsel as well as outside economists and management and technical experts to assist the communities. All of them had access to every piece of information. We generated additional information for questions that came to their minds.
``And . . . in every instance, what you saw was the fabric holding together. So if I'm good enough to take a predecision and create a fabric that can withstand that kind of a challenge, I'm in the wrong business. That's my answer. And I welcome the same kind of challenge this time.''
{KEYWORDS} BASE CLOSINGS DEFENSE BASE CLOSURE AND REALIGNMENT COMMISSION
by CNB