Hampton Roads needs a Plan B for JFCOM

When you’re facing disaster, a Plan B isn’t surrender. It’s prudence, a fact that has become brutally clear in the past few days.

On Wednesday, a group of local leaders refused to even discuss a contingency if the Joint Forces Command is closed on the recommendation by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.

As a violent thunderstorm dimmed the lights in Suffolk, congressmen, legislators and mayors vowed instead to delay a closure and to force a Base Realignment and Closure Commission to review the decision. Gates was too secretive, his decision too casual, too quick, too flawed. It could not stand.

“We need to slow this process down,” said U.S. Rep Randy Forbes. “We can’t take the possibility of litigation off the table.”

That meeting was followed two days later by a memo pointing out that plans to close JFCOM — which directly employs nearly 6,000 people — were far further along than anyone in Hampton Roads knew.

The memo says that the decision to shutter JFCOM was the result of months of study, was a conclusion shared by the former and current commanding officer, and is likely to be approved by the president in a few days, before Congress returns from recess.

Since Plan A to protect JFCOM includes a lawsuit built on the premise that Gates didn’t do his homework, didn’t have support, and didn’t have the legal authority, the need for a Plan B has never been clearer. While we’re at it, Hampton Roads also needs a contingency in case the 2nd Fleet’s command is — in the words of the memo — “mothballed.”

Planning for the future, even if painful and complicated, is one of the things taxpayers pay government to do. To worry about what might happen and figure out how to minimize the damage.

It’s why the military runs war games at places like JFCOM, in fact. It’s why police and fire officials run disaster planning. Solving scenarios is part of learning. It’s part of governing.

JFCOM has a critical mission. It is the military’s think-tank and high-tech laboratory.

People there are experts at the kind of computer modeling and simulation that can help governments and businesses plan better for any eventuality. Thanks mostly to JFCOM, Hampton Roads has become a center for the industry, and has nearly 250 students in masters and doctorate programs in modeling and simulation and related fields.

Leaders need to work hard to protect that piece of JFCOM. But they must also consider how to do that if JFCOM disappears. In other words, to do their jobs they must seriously consider and exhaustively plan for what happens if they lose.

They also must contemplate what happens if the new BRAC round they are bizarrely advocating were approved. If Oceana Naval Air Station were shuttered. Or the shipyard. Or if a carrier — or two, or three — moved to Mayport.

Given our economy’s dependence on the military — it’s 45 percent of the region’s economic activity, according to a study by Old Dominion’s James Koch — and the federal government’s growing budget woes, we need a Plan B, perhaps more than at any time in recent decades. We also need leaders wise enough to recognize that.