BRAC votes to shut Walter Reed hospital

WASHINGTON — Siding with the Pentagon, the base-closing commission voted Thursday to shut down the Army's historic Walter Reed hospital and move about 20,000 defense workers miles away from their offices just outside the nation's capital.

The nine-member panel also started deciding which Air Force facilities should be closed or consolidated as part of the Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's nationwide restructuring of military bases.

Overall, the commission endorsed much of Rumsfeld's broader plan to streamline support services across the Army, Navy and Air Force. In many cases, it voted to merge programs scattered around military facilities across the country to centralized locations.

Deliberations concerning Utah's Hill Air Force Base were expected to be included in today's agenda.

Just before adjourning for the day, the commissioners decided to shutter Air Force facilities in Alaska and California. But they postponed until Friday votes on the service branch's most contentious recommendations.

The Air Force wants to vastly reconfigure the Air National Guard, a move that states fiercely oppose. It also wants to close Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota and Cannon Air Force Base in New Mexico.

Anticipating the high-stakes votes, the entire South Dakota congressional delegation — Sens. John Thune, a Republican, and Tim Johnson, a Democrat, and Democratic Rep. Stephanie Herseth — attended the hearing, as did Democratic Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico.

Late Thursday, the commission decided to approve its own proposal to close the Galena Airport Forward Operation Location in Alaska, which the Air Force uses for training and to land fighter jets when necessary. The Air Force had wanted to keep it open, but commissioners say other Air Force bases in Alaska suffice. The commercial airport there would continue operating.

The panel also chose to keep Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska operational, rejecting a Pentagon plan to sharply scale back personnel and aircraft there.

But commissioners did side with military planners in approving the closure of two other major bases — Onizuka Air Force Station in California and Brooks City-Base in Texas.

As the commission tackled proposals that affected all the service branches, members focused on recommendations that sometimes were complex and interconnected.

"In this case, I'm pretty confident we got it right," commissioner Harold Gehman said, while considering a plan to consolidate some research and development activities. "But I'm telling you we're going to be faced with a bunch of these ... where I honestly do not know if we got it right or not."