Pentagon's $800 Billion Real Estate Problem -- Matthew Gault, Real Clear Defense
The U.S. Military Has No Idea What It Owns
The U.S. Department of Defense owns more than half a million properties worth in excess of $800 billion dollars. The military’s real estate holdings span the globe and, all together, sprawl across 30 million acres.
Pentagon auditors can’t explain what half the properties are for—and doesn’t have a plan for finding out. All this according to a Sept. 8 report from the Government Accountability Office.
The nearly trillion-dollar real estate glut is merely another example of egregious military waste.
Way back in 1997, the GAO identified the Pentagon’s real estate record-keeping as a “high risk” problem. The Defense Department could sell unused facilities and save billions.
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My Comment: So typical of government .... spend spend spend .... and then they try to figure out what they bought (and why).
2 comments:
I think every base commander knows the real estate for the base and knows how it is used.
At the SecDef level, the Sedfef does not have a dashboard showing everything or a single database or a patchwork of them to ask questions and to slice and dice the data to analyze it.
If a quesiton was aksed about any piece of land the SecDef could findout why it wa sourchased, what it is used for and similar quesiotns. But it is nt at his finger tips. If take a day or several (a few) phone calls .
where it matters is how efficient is the real estate infrastructure today. It might have made science before but not today. Or it might have been a boondoggle from the start.
There are a lot of WW2 bases that are still on the books that may not be needed. If they are not in on the record books of the regular Army/Air force they were given to the National Guard. I can think of a few.
I would hate to give some of them up although they are under-utilized currently. Once you give them up it would be hard to get them back.
Even now it is hard in the military. Big city mayors can chase the military off land even when it is very active used. This is a huge problem. Mayor Daley chased the Air National Guard for O'hare airport. He wanted the real estate. The ANG unit relocated & is still operational. That is not the point.
The point is that people have a lot of competing needs in their lives. If they are a reservists, they want to train, but if the training bases is hours and hours way, they will quit. It depends on how far along they are in their 20, how demanding their day job is and how onerous weekend duty is including the commute. But Mayor Daley did not care.
I believe it is a mistake not to have a reserve base in every major metropolitan area.
Nice post on "The Pentagon Owns A Lot Of Real Estate" really awesome.
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