Chiefs from four services tell
Congress
funds are needed to repair facilities
By Lisa Burgess, Washington Bureau
Franklin Fisher / Stars and
Stripes
The state of military housing, like these apartments in Taegu, South Korea, is under
review.Shortfalls, problems
at Pacific facilities
A service-by-service survey of some of the unclassified version of the 2000
Installations Readiness Report’s conclusions specifically regarding the Pacific
region revealed the following shortfalls and problems:
Air Force
¶ Pacific Air Forces (PACAF) notes
that airfields are degrading at several installations.
¶ Weapons maintenance facilities
at Kunsan and Osan are deficient, "affecting sortie support for newer munitions
facilities," PACAF reports.
¶ Brown water in rusty pipes is
affecting quality of life in Korea, Guam, and Hawaii.
Army
¶ Thirty-seven percent of the
Army’s facilities in Korea were built during World War II or the Korean War.
¶ The U.S. Army Pacific command
has also noted a shortage in operational and training ranges in Hawaii, Japan, and to some
extent, Alaska.
¶ The Eighth U.S. Army/Korea
(EUSA) reports that communications sites not built to withstand electronics surveillance
"make command and control facilities extremely vulnerable."
¶ EUSA also reports that current
airfield conditions do not satisfy existing requirements, and that limited railhead and
staging facilities "negatively affect the contingency mission and reduce the
availability of on-site training."
Marine Corps
¶ Fleet Marine Force Pacific
reports that 42 percent of its existing housing stock requires revitalization and
renovation.
Navy
¶ The average age of full-depth
airfield pavements for the Pacific Fleet is 39 years; the Federal Aviation
Administration’s standard for design life is 40 years.
¶ The Pacific Fleet’s ship
berths include deteriorated structural components in bulkheads, fenders, decking and
piles. Cranes are under-size and rail and trackage need repairs.
¶ Maintenance dredging is required
in Guam, Hawaii, San Diego and Yokosuka to allow free movement of ships and submarines. |
WASHINGTON
— Chiefs from the four services travelled to Capitol Hill Thursday to provide details
of the sometimes grim condition of the Pentagon’s military facilities worldwide,
asking House leaders for more funds to repair antiquated and deteriorating housing,
workspace, and training facilities.
"I
think we’re losing the battle to maintain the high standards our people have come to
expect and deserve," said Maj. Gen. Ernest Robbins, the Air Force’s civil
engineer, during testimony before the House Armed Services Committee’s Military
Installations and Facilities Subcommittee on Thursday morning.
Robbins
joined general officers from the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps during the hearing on the
condition of the military’s facilities.
The brass
discussed recent progress in programs to repair current structures and to move much of the
responsibility for base family housing onto the shoulders of private contractors, but also
described the variety of serious facilities problems that plague every one of the
services.
In South
Korea, the military housing situation is improving slowly but surely, said Dennis
Bohannon, spokesman for the 19th Theater Support Command.
"The
vast majority of barracks at camps throughout the country either are undergoing renovation
now or new barracks are being built from the ground up," he said.
"Vast
improvements also are being made in family housing across the peninsula. A
multimillion-dollar project to build new family quarters now is under way at Camp
Humphreys, and renovations are under way at other housing areas."
But, he
added, accomplishing those improvements is "a slow and tedious process. The bottom
line is that it will take several years more to complete those projects."
The current
state of the most of the military’s installations, is far from optimal, according to
the Pentagon’s most recent Installations Readiness Report, which covers the state of
facilities at the conclusion of fiscal 2000 (October 2000), includes reports from 41 major
commands rating a total of 341 facility classes.
Of that
number, 233 — or 68 percent — of the facility classes are rated C-3 or below, a
figure Saxton called "sobering."
The
military defines a C-3 rating as "significant facility deficiencies that prevent
performing some missions." The lowest rating, C-4, is defined as "major facility
deficiencies that preclude satisfactory mission accomplishment."
Although
individual facilities and installations may be in better shape than their commanders’
overall rating, the results of the installations report "do indicate broad readiness
and training problems affecting the warfighting mission of the military services,"
according to an April 25 background report on housing issues prepared by the House Armed
Services Committee.
By fiscal
2017, "at current funding levels … over 50 percent of the Army facilities are
projected to be rated C-4," said Maj. Gen. Robert Van Antwerp, Jr., the Army’s
Assistant Chief of Staff for Installation Management.
The poor
condition of many Army facilities is the result of years and years of under-funding the
real property maintenance account, Van Antwerp said, with average maintenance funding over
the last 10 years only about 60 percent of the Army’s needs.
"The
effects of under funding only gets worse as our facilities age," Van Antwerp said.
In the Air
Force, real property maintenance funding levels "only allow us to provide day-to-day
critical maintenance of our facilities and infrastructure," Robbins said.
The lack of
funding has led to a maintenance backlog, and "to buy this backlog down to a
desirable level by 2010 would require an additional $1.2 billion per year," Robbins
said.
Leaking
hangar roofs, cracked runways, and other workplace hazards distract airmen from their
primary duties as they attempt to jerry-rig repairs, Robbins said.
In the
Navy, the average age of facilities is 45 years old, with 67 percent of facility
categories rated C-3, said Rear Adm. David Pruett, the Navy’s Deputy Chief of Naval
Operations (logistics) and Director of Facilities and Engineering.
The
Navy’s current backlog of "critical deficiencies remains at an unacceptable
level of $2.6 billion," Pruett said. "The bottom line here is that our old,
deteriorating infrastructure is negatively affecting readiness."
Pruett said
that Navy’s facilities and infrastructures "are infected by a psychology of
deficiency," in which sailors are so accustomed to sub-standard conditions they
accept them as the normal condition.
In the
Marine Corps, bases are undergoing "a quiet crisis," said Brig. Gen. Michael
Lehnert, the Marines Corps’ Assistant Deputy Commandant, Installations and Logistics
(Facilities).
The Marine
Corps has 8,400 buildings that will turn 50 years old during the next 10 years, of which
6,684 are family housing units, Lehnert said.
Lehnert did
not specify what percentage of total Marine buildings that number represents, but he did
say that a January 2001 report indicated that 13 out of 30 facilities were rated as C-3 or
C-4. The main areas of deterioration are utilities, community and housing, and supply and
administration buildings, he said.
Of the
93,000 bachelor units maintained by the Corps worldwide, 7,800 do not meet Defense
Department adequacy standards, he added, while 13,830 of the Corps’ 25,015 owned,
leased, or public-private family housing units are substandard.
"Without
heroic funding levels, it will take us a decade to resolve the quiet crisis," Lehnert
said.
The service
chiefs met with a sympathetic subcommittee, whose members seemed eager to listen to
problems and promised to do what they could to seek Congressional support and funding to
provide relief.
"The
Air Force spends millions of dollars training young airmen to work on sophisticated
equipment," Robbins said, "yet they are required to work many non-productive
hours tending to their run-down workplaces.
"We
cannot ignore basic infrastructure," said subcommittee chairman Jim Saxton, R-Va.
"Military installations are, in the end, war-fighting platforms in their own right,
and the Department of Defense should plan adequately for their modernization."
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