Local leaders ready to fight for JFCOM but lack key info

Faced with the prospect of losing about 6,000 jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars through a single act of Defense Secretary Robert Gates, congressional and local leaders in Hampton Roads are spoiling for a fight.

Yet nearly a week after the shock of Gates' announcement that he will shut down the Norfolk-based Joint Forces Command within a year and slash spending on defense support contractors by nearly one-third over three years, the area's politicians are still scrambling to organize their defense.

For starters, they're lacking critical information because Gates offered few details to back up his decision. And there's no indication that the rest of Congress will support the Virginia delegation's bid to keep open the command, known as JFCOM.

"It is going to be difficult," said Frank Roberts, executive director of the Hampton Roads Military and Federal Facilities Alliance. "People are running around trying to do something, but we don't really have a scope of what this really means. We're essentially in battlefield triage mode."

JFCOM employs about 5,000 people in Norfolk and at a facility in Suffolk; the rest work elsewhere. Its overall contribution to Hampton Roads amounts to an estimated 10,000 jobs and $1 billion in economic activity each year, according to James Koch, an economist at Old Dominion University.

The command's mission is to ensure that different branches of the armed forces work well together. It's part think tank and part training center, and it assigns nearly 1.2 million troops for missions worldwide.

More than half of its employees are civilian contractors, a greater share than any of the military's other combatant commands, which made it a prime target for Gates' mission to slash overhead and use the savings to sustain and modernize America's fighting forces.

Gates contends that the JFCOM closure requires the approval of only President Barack Obama, not Congress.

Local officials say the timing of Gates' comments, made without warning to members of Congress, was calculated to give him an advantage in the public debate. His announcement came at the start of a five-week congressional recess that legislators traditionally use to begin their fall re-election campaigns.

So far, it seems to have worked.

When the House of Representatives gathered Tuesday for a special one-day session, Gates' announcement was on the front pages of many major newspapers but didn't generate much reaction from members of Congress, according to staff members of several legislators from other states, who spoke on background. Rather, the focus was the death of former U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens in a plane crash in Alaska, they said.

The Virginia delegation also lacks the veteran senator who protected the state during the 2005 round of base closures, John Warner, who retired in 2008. Its current senators, Democrats Jim Webb and Mark Warner, are in their first terms. On the House side, the highest-ranking member of the Hampton Roads delegation, Democrat Bobby Scott of Newport News, does not serve on the Armed Services Committee, though the three other local representatives do.

Local members of Congress say it will be critical to convince colleagues who have their own federal installations to protect that if Gates can single-handedly close JFCOM, he can shut down their bases as well.

In a letter to Gates on Friday, they argued that he is required by law to notify Congress before closing JFCOM. They also said that the closure recommendation was based on "superficial research and a lack of analytical rigor."

The letter was signed by Webb, Warner, Scott and U.S. Reps. Glenn Nye, D-Virginia Beach; Randy Forbes, R-Chesapeake; and Rob Wittman,

R-Westmoreland County.

Forbes, whose district includes the large JFCOM complex in northern Suffolk, said he's hoping to conduct a congressional field hearing sometime in the next month.

Meanwhile, U.S. Rep. Gerry Conno lly, whose Northern Virginia district has the highest concentration of defense contractors in the nation, has announced there will be a hearing in late September in Washington on Gates' plan to reduce spending on support contracts.

The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Missouri Democrat Ike Skelton, has said he'll ask for a hearing on JFCOM when Congress returns in mid-September.

Nye, whose district includes JFCOM's headquarters at Norfolk Naval Station, said Skelton told him he doesn't believe Gates followed proper procedure in closing JFCOM.

"He agrees with us that the process is broken," Nye said.

The delegation is arguing that because the command's shutdown involves more than 1,000 civilians, federal laws governing base closures and realignments require congressional review.

Locally, three groups have sought to play a role. The Hampton Roads Military and Federal Facilities Alliance is a government-funded group that lobbies in support of military bases. The Hampton Roads Military Affairs Commission is a panel of elected leaders and retired military officers created earlier this year by Nye in part to fight the efforts to move a Norfolk-based carrier to Mayport, Fla. The state Commission on Military and National Security Facilities is being formed by Gov. Bob McDonnell.

Of the three, the likely leader of the JFCOM effort would be the alliance, said Virginia Beach Mayor Will Sessoms, who is chairman of the alliance's board.

"The one with the money is going to take the lead," Sessoms said.

The group, which has an annual budget of about $760,000, is supported by a 50-cent-per-resident fee paid by the cities of Chesapeake, Franklin, Hampton, Newport News, Norfolk, Poquoson, Portsmouth, Suffolk, Virginia Beach and Williamsburg, as well as Isle of Wight, James City and York counties.

In the hopes of crafting some sort of uniform response, the congressional delegation has scheduled a meeting Wednesday in Suffolk with city officials and state legislators.

"Depending on what we get from that, we can see what kind of package we can put together," Forbes said.

Sessoms said he starts with the premise that "we intend to save it all."

Bill Bartel, (757) 446-2398, bill.bartel@pilotonline.com