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By Paul Connors

One of the main constructs of the Rumsfeld transformation of the U.S. armed forces has been the need for all of the services to work together in a more cooperative, or "joint" fashion.

Regardless of his view of what jointness means, the Pentagon's list of bases recommended for closure or realignment as part of the 2005 BRAC process has resulted in most of the closures and realignments hitting heaviest among the reserve components.

In those cases where realignment or closures do have an effect on the infrastructure of the active force, let no one be deceived that joint bases are going to create a new class of winners and losers. In what will probably be used as one of several test cases and challenges to the 2005 BRAC list, elected officials in North Carolina have already united to fight the Defense Department's plans to close Pope Air Force Base, N.C., as a separate Air Force installation and transfer authority over it to the Commander, XVIII Airborne Corps headquartered at Fort Bragg next door.

Since the end of World War II, Fort Bragg has been the headquarters and main base for the majority of the Army's airborne forces. Fort Bragg is the headquarters for XVIII Airborne Corps, the home of the 82nd Airborne Division, the Special Forces Training Center as well as various operational Special Forces organizations. Pope AFB, literally right next door to Fort Bragg , has long been the Air Force installation that has provided airlift and other support for airborne operations conducted worldwide by the Army. Certainly, without the airlift provided by the various units that have operated out of Pope over the years, the 82nd Airborne Division would have found it extremely difficult to be able to meet its worldwide deployment commitments.

But under the current BRAC proposal, the basic operating framework is supposed to change. Pope AFB as an Air Force installation will cease to exist; its new role will be nothing more than a landing field for the disparate Air Force, Air Force Reserve and Air National Guard units that will be tasked to provide support for airborne operations. The base itself will be annexed and appended to Fort Bragg .

On the east coast, this is not the only infrastructure transition that has been mandated by DoD. In New Jersey , Fort Dix , McGuire Air Force Base and Lakehurst Naval Air Engineering Station are scheduled to be merged into what will be known as Joint Base Dix-McGuire-Lakehurst.

Currently, the most active of the three installations is McGuire AFB. Its active Air Force host unit is the 305th Air Mobility Wing, which recently transitioned from the venerable C-141 Starlifter to the Boeing C-17 Globemaster III. The Air Force reserve unit on base is the 514th Airlift Wing, an associate unit that operates active duty aircraft. The New Jersey Air National Guard was also represented at McGuire where one of the state's two units, the 108th Air Refueling Wing, had provided worldwide tanker support for many years. With the 2005 BRAC, the 108 ARW lost its flying mission as the Air Force announced the retirement of the wing's rather aged KC-135E tankers.

Lakehurst NAES, located nearby, will become part of the larger complex, while Fort Dix , which was severely downsized during the 1990s, has been utilized mostly for reserve training and mobilization since 9/11.

The creation of additional joint bases leaves many unanswered questions. Some of the most pertinent are those related to chains of command, responsibility for housekeeping and so on. While these issues may seem trivial to civilians, they are not to folks in uniform.

First of all, each of the services has cultural differences. They also have different standards for quality of life issues. Each of the services responds differently to its family readiness issues as well. At the current time, the Army and Air Force operate the Army and Air Force Exchange Service, while the Navy runs the Navy Exchange System. The Marine Corps has its own exchange system, as does the U.S. Coast Guard. These systems operate independently of each other and while there may be some common procurement activities, the level of support for Morale, Welfare and Recreation (MWR) provided back to host installations also varies by location and service.

Over the course of several rounds of BRAC, the northeastern portion of the country has been hit especially hard as base after base, many of them dating back to the dawn of the aviation era, have closed. The 2005 BRAC hit New Jersey again when the Army announced that it planned to close Fort Monmouth , a key installation for secure communications research and development.

If the United States looks north to Canada and its recent military history, there are numerous examples of where the mania for jointness and transformation failed miserably. During the 1960s, senior civilian and military leaders within the Canadian Department of National Defence concluded that the three separate services, the Canadian Army, the Royal Canadian Air Force and the Royal Canadian Navy should be merged into a unified command structure.

Military planners even went so far as to eliminate separate uniforms for the services, as well as the traditions that each service held dear. In short order, morale within the "Tri-Service" plummeted and many career officers and non-commissioned officers began to vote with their feet. The warrior ethos, once a proud part of each service, died as combat leaders in Canada were replaced by managers trained in business principles but lacking in those most needed on the battlefield.

The Canadian experiment failed and in the years since, successive governments, unwilling to provide adequate financial support for the Canadian military have continued to allow their military to wither on the vine.

It is the Rumsfeld defense cabal, so enamored of its own ideas for transformation, that has forced the separate service chiefs to buy into, accept and adopt the ongoing plans that will leave the United States with a "transformed" military that more and more will come to resemble that non-descript Tri-Service that failed so miserably in Canada in the 1960s and 70s.

Military budgets are not limitless resource pools and budget planners in each of the services know that. They have years of experience and know what is possible and what is not. But more and more, the buzzwords that continue to crop up, those that include "jointness," "tranformation," "unified," etc. are starting to look like nothing more than the rigid edict from Secretary Rumsfeld as he runs roughshod over senior uniformed leaders.

Forcing fifty pounds of potatoes into a twenty-pound bag generally doesn't work. Insisting on compliance and inane transformational concepts simply because one can do that is also a quick way to meet resistance. Yes, having a military is an expensive proposition. But we need to have the right type of military for the responsibilities we face on a daily basis.

Making Air Force or Army or Navy bases "joint" and then transferring command responsibility from one service to another will continue to exacerbate problems that didn't need to be created. The problems will not be localized at the military level either, because local politicians and community leaders will weigh in on the decisions that threaten their states' economies.

In the United States , a civilian appointed by the President oversees the military. It is very unfortunate that at this time in our history, as we are engaged in a war that may just determine whether we survive as a nation, that our civilian leadership is more interested in seeing their pet theories come to fruition than they are in doing what's best for the nation and the services that defend it.

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Paul Connors is a Senior Editor of DefenseWatch. He can be reached at paulconnors@hotmail.com. ©2005 Paul Connors. Please send Feedback responses to dwfeedback@yahoo.com.