Senate Floor Speech
Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison
April 29, 2003 -- Page: S5495

MRS. HUTCHISON. Mr. President, today Senator Feinstein and I are introducing the "Overseas Military Facility Structure Review Act'' to establish a congressional panel to conduct a detailed study of U.S. military facilities overseas. This bill creates a bipartisan congressional commission charged with undertaking an objective and thorough review of our overseas basing structure. The commission will consider a host of criteria to determine whether our overseas bases are prepared to meet our needs in the 21st Century. The commission will be comprised of national security and foreign affairs experts who will present their findings to the 2005 domestic Base Realignment and Closure, BRAC, Commission, providing a comprehensive analysis of our worldwide base and force structure.

We believe it is important to determine our overseas basing requirements, assess training constraints, and provide recommendations on future realignments. As a result, we are proposing legislation that would create a congressional Overseas Basing Commission to review our basing strategy to ensure that it is consistent with both our short- and long-term national security objectives. We believe the time is right to move forward with a more structured approach to reviewing these overseas bases.

Such a review is timely. The 2005 BRAC is just around the corner and some in the Pentagon have suggested it could result in the closure of nearly one out of every four domestic bases. Before we close stateside military bases, we must first analyze our overseas infrastructure. If we reduce our overseas presence, we need stateside bases to station returning troops. It is senseless to close bases on U.S. soil in 2005 only to determine a few years later that we made a costly, irrevocable mistake. A painful lesson we learned in the last rounds of closures.

Though our military force structure has decreased since the Cold War, the responsibilities placed upon our service members have significantly increased. While operational effectiveness is paramount, it would be irresponsible to build on an inefficient, obsolete overseas base structure, as we face new strategic threats in the 21st century, taking valuable dollars needed elsewhere.