From the U.S. Government Accountability Office, www.gao.gov Transcript for: How to Improve Base Realignment and Closure Rounds Description: The Base Realignment and Closure process has changed the physical landscape of DoD for the past three decades. Hear what GAO recommends for the next BRAC round. Related GAO Work: GAO-18-231: Military Bases: DOD Should Address Communication Challenges and Mission Changes to Improve Future Base Realignment and Closure Rounds Released: April 2018 [ Background Music ] [ Brian Lepore: ] The primary goal is to close bases and realign bases for the purpose of saving money. [ Matt Oldham: ] Welcome to GAO's Watchdog Report, your source for news and information from the U.S. Government Accountability Office. I'm Matt Oldham. The Base Realignment and Closure process, also known as BRAC, closes some Department of Defense facilities while moving or combining others. BRAC is the reason there's no longer a naval station in Pascagoula, Mississippi, or why the Army's Fort Lewis and McChord Air Force Base, both near Tacoma, Washington, combined as joint base, Lewis McChord. It's a giant undertaking with many moving parts. So many, in fact, lessons learned from the last round of BRAC in 2005 may help DOD carry out the next BRAC round, whenever that may be. I sat down with Brian Lepore, a director in our Defense Capabilities and Management team, to talk about GAO's recent report on challenges during the BRAC process, and I wanted to know more about the goals of BRAC. Brian, I assume the main goal is to reduce costs, but is that the only goal? [ Brian Lepore: ] In fact, the -- the primary goal is exactly that. It's to close bases for the purpose, and realign bases, for the purpose of saving money. Essentially you save money two ways. Number one is probably fairly obvious, if we're no longer operating the base, well, then the cost of base operations goes away, so that's a cost avoidance. The other way is military construction projects that were scheduled on those bases also get cancelled. Now, it's also important to note that in BRAC 2005, DOD used the round in a little bit of a different way. They added some other goals to it. There were two in particular. One was force transformation, or business transformation, and the second was to enhance jointness, and let me tell you a little bit about both of those. Business transformation is just like it sounds. The idea was to try and find new ways of doing business to save money or develop some enhanced efficiency. As an example, the way the Defense Logistics Agency now provides spare parts to the military services for repairing vehicles, helicopters, trucks, that kind of thing, that was changed. That was a transformational type recommendation. Another one was to establish joint pilot training and maintainer training for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter down in Eglin Air Force Base. So that was a jointness type recommendation. That was an unusual use of the BRAC process, and it made BRAC 2005 much more interesting and challenging to implement, and much more interesting to review. [ Matt Oldham: ] Looking at the Department of Defense, and -- and their role in the BRAC process specifically, do you have a sense of how well the DOD has done at meeting their goals in the past? [ Brian Lepore: ] We have a sense of how well they did in the past because if one of the measures is, did they succeed in closing bases? Well, then the answer is, by golly, they did succeed, and, in fact, DOD has closed 120 major bases in the first five rounds of BRAC, including 23 major bases in BRAC 2005. With respect to the transformational type recommendations, and the jointness type recommendations from BRAC 2005, there it's a more nuanced answer. One of the things that we have found is that the services did not always develop good performance measures for how they did. Why does that matter? For the jointness type recommendations and the transformational type recommendations, the military departments essentially created an ongoing federal program or they modified an ongoing federal program, and as with any other federal program, we want to know how you're doing, it's important to know that as well in this circumstance. [ Background Music ] [ Matt Oldham: ] Considering the amount of resources and people involved with conducting a round of Base Realignments and Closures, it might be unsurprising, there have been some challenges in the past. And one of those challenges has been DOD's evaluation of their efforts during the BRAC process, but if those challenges are solved, it could go a long way to helping the DOD achieve its goals. So I asked Brian what recommendations his team had. [ Brian Lepore: ] In the March 2018 report, we found a couple of things. First we found that the military services, as I said earlier, have not developed good performance measures or metrics for some of these recommendations that were put forward and that were approved and have been implemented. So it made a recommendation there that in the future, you really ought to do that. We ought to know what we're getting when -- if we're going to do these force transformational type recommendations, jointness type recommendations, or has now been suggested for the next round, we may want to focus on lethality, it makes perfect sense, but we ought to have some measure to know how we did that. Similarly, with respect to the jointness type recommendations, if we do more of those, we're going to want to know what we got out of it. One of the other things that we found with respect to base closure is that DOD did not have a good handle on how much property they actually got -- they actually disposed of in BRAC 2005. While it's true that we can count the major bases, the 23 major bases and we can identify them by name and location and all that, what we don't know, because the data didn't exist at the time, is what the value of that was or how much property that actually accounted for. And that's something we also think should be accounted for as the baseline, going into the next BRAC round, what's the total value of the property, the square footage, the acreage, and then how much did we actually dispose of. [ Matt Oldham: ] Brian, what do you believe the bottom line of your report is? [ Brian Lepore: ] I think the bottom line is that while DOD did achieve some success in BRAC 2005, they did close the major bases, they did do the transformational type stuff, we still don't have a good handle on how well we're doing on an ongoing basis with respect to these ongoing type programs, and that's the bottom line, we really ought to have a better handle on that. [Background Music] [ Matt Oldham: ] Now, that usually is our last question for a podcast, but I'm taking a shot here at a scoop, what do you know that we don't about BRAC, when it's going to be and what's on the list? [ Brian Lepore: ] Well, what I can tell you that I know about the next round of BRAC is that nobody, myself included, has any idea which bases will be closed, and which ones will be realigned. The process is set up in such a way that all bases in the United States are on the table when the process starts. So that's as much as I know, and we will all find out together. 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