Dignitaries, brass to officially dissolve JFCOM today

NORFOLK

A bit of military history will be made today in Hampton Roads.

Amid typical martial pomp and pageantry, in a ceremony outside a suburban office building in Suffolk, the U.S. Joint Forces Command will be officially dissolved.

JFCOM, as it has been known since its establishment in 1999, was one of 10 combatant commands in the American armed forces. It is the first ever to be disestablished.

Today's ceremony is the culmination of a yearlong process initiated in August 2010 by then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates as part of a Pentagon cost-cutting initiative aimed at finding $100 billion in savings across the armed services.

Gates' announcement set off a furious reaction from state officials and the local congressional delegation, alarmed by the potential impact of the closure on Hampton Roads' military-dependent economy.

In the end, although they failed to halt the shutdown, JFCOM's defenders declared partial victory. While the Norfolk-based command will go away, many of its functions will be parceled out to other military commands and will remain in Hampton Roads. Its $1 billion annual budget and its local workforce - nearly 4,000 people - will be cut roughly in half.

For proponents of military spending, however, the campaign to save JFCOM may turn out to be only the opening salvo in a continuing budgetary war of attrition. The debt compromise hammered out by Congress this week calls for $350 billion in military savings over the next 10 years - dwarfing Gates' target - with the potential for $500 billion to $600 billion in additional cuts.

Hampton Roads is likely to be on the front lines of that struggle. Federal spending on military installations now tops $10 billion a year here, more than in any other metro area in the country. The direct and indirect effects of military spending account for nearly half of the region's economy, according to estimates by economists at Old Dominion University.

Underlining the region's stake in the budget debate, the guest speaker at today's JFCOM dissolution ceremony will be Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Mullen is just back from the Iraq and Afghanistan war zones, where he told anxious troops that nothing is off the table in the search for savings - including health care, retirement and other benefits.

Presiding over the ceremony will be Army Gen. Ray Odierno, the former commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, who was installed by Gates as JFCOM's commanding officer for the express purpose of shutting it down.

Rear Adm. Ted Carter, who headed the transition planning team, said this week that one of Odierno's guiding principles for the drawdown was "to promote a culture of savings and efficiency."

He believes that goal was achieved, Carter said. He held out the JFCOM experience as a model for the budget-cutting efforts still to come.

"It was a challenging task," he said. "We had to make some tough calls."

In its brief 12-year history, JFCOM's budget had grown fourfold without a serious look at what the Pentagon was getting for its money, Carter said.

The most conspicuous target for Carter's team was the superstructure that comes with a four-star military command. About 600 people - 10 percent of JFCOM's nearly 6,000 personnel worldwide - were providing support functions for the command.

That structure has been dismantled, along with two JFCOM sub-units: the Joint Irregular Warfare Center in Suffolk and the Joint Unmanned Aerial Center at Creech Air Force Base, Nev.

All of the command's other functions have survived, but have been "realigned and right-sized," Carter said.

Taking the biggest hit by far in the drawdown were the myriad government contractors that JFCOM had accumulated over the years. By 2010 the command had 280 contracts with 70 companies.

"A lot of the things they were doing were inherently governmental functions," Carter said.

The command's roster of contractors has been slashed from 2,600 to 700.

Of the roughly 1,900 employees left in Hampton Roads, about 1,600 will report to the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon. Most of them will work at the Joint and Coalition Warfighting Center in Suffolk.

The command's local physical footprint will shrink from 21 buildings to four.

The JFCOM brass will never have a chance to occupy a new $14 million headquarters building, authorized by Congress in 2007, that is still under construction at Norfolk Naval Station. It will be turned over to the Navy, Carter said.

Retired Adm. Harold W. Gehman Jr., JFCOM's first commanding officer, said the command's most lasting legacy is the inculcation of joint training among the different branches of the armed forces.

"The country had been fooling around with joint training for years and years and years," he said. "But we were on a treadmill. We were running in place. We were never going anywhere. Joint Forces Command institutionalized it."

He is confident that the joint-training function will survive JFCOM's demise, Gehman said.

"I suspect that if the congressional delegation hadn't screamed bloody murder, we would have had a smaller Joint Forces Command than we have now," he said.

Bill Sizemore, (757) 446-2276, bill.sizemore@pilotonline.com