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Washington, D.C. --- U.S. Senator Jon Corzine, Reps. Rush Holt (NJ-12) and Frank Pallone, Jr. (NJ-06), along with local elected leaders and members of the Save Our Fort Committee, held a press conference today to update the public on their most recent efforts to get Ft. Monmouth off the Pentagon’s Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) list in the run up to the independent BRAC Commission’s final series of public hearings, scheduled to begin August 24 in Crystal City, Virginia, just outside of Washington, DC.
“Fort Monmouth’s work in communications, computers, intelligence and surveillance has proven to be critical to the war on terror being fought overseas in Iraq and Afghanistan and critical to homeland security efforts here at home,” said Corzine. “Closing Fort Monmouth would disrupt important research and prove costly in terms of dollars and the loss of human capital and expertise. In fact, the projected financial costs to relocate are staggering with a projected return on investment stretching four decades and beyond. It also ignores the potential of long-term cooperation between Fort Monmouth and the new Fort Dix-McGuire-Lakehurst joint base.”
“The entire delegation has been involved in working this issue since the May 13 Pentagon announcement that Ft. Monmouth was on their closure list,” said Holt. “I’ve been truly gratified by the bipartisan support we’ve had throughout this process. We’ve had very productive meetings with both Commissioners and staff over the summer, and I have the sense that the Commission has grown increasingly skeptical of the Pentagon’s rationale for closing a number of bases, including Ft. Monmouth, but we’re taking nothing for granted. We will be working right up until the very last minute to drive home the point that closing Ft. Monmouth will put the lives of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan in peril, period.”
"In the months since the Pentagon's recommendation we have made a very strong case that the closure of Fort Monmouth would cause a catastrophic loss in intellectual capital," Pallone said. "Fort Monmouth has 2,055 experienced people working on C4ISR systems, and we are talking about moving them to a base with only 25. It is ridiculous to think that there won't be a major disruption to critical technologies developed here and needed by our soldiers in Iraq if Fort Monmouth is closed."
Although unable to attend in person, Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) issued a statement saying that “Fort Monmouth is leading the effort to protect our soldiers from roadside bombs, like the one that killed 14 Marines this month. Closing Fort Monmouth at a time when the enemy is escalating the use of these deadly devices would be as foolish as shutting down a fire house while an arsonist was on the loose.”
Commission members have recently publicly questioned some of the Pentagon’s key assumptions about the supposed benefits of the current BRAC round.
On August 14, the New York Times quoted BRAC Commission Chairman Anthony Principi as saying that “I fail to see at this point how you could arrive at the figures they arrived at. We're going through this effort to save money from excess capacity to modernize forces. If the savings aren't there, and it costs money to do this on top of all the economic upheaval, why are we doing this?"
While many of the public signs of skepticism by BRAC Commissioners are hopeful, Holt cautioned everyone following the process to remember that the decisive factor for Commissioners will be the “military value” criteria.
“I think our team has made it clear that the men and women of Ft. Monmouth offer absolutely irreplaceable military value for the soldier or Marine in the field in Iraq or Afghanistan, and we’ll continue to drive that point home right up until the voting begins next week.”
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