Amid uncertainty, carrier stays put

The Obama administration's 2013 budget proposal brought good news for the Navy in Hampton Roads - and a good deal of uncertainty.

The move of an aircraft carrier from Norfolk to Mayport, Fla., originally scheduled for 2019, was postponed indefinitely. The $525 billion defense budget, which outlines plans for the next five years, does not include three key projects to upgrade the Florida base for a nuclear carrier.

Keeping that carrier in Norfolk means this region also keeps the 6,000 jobs and $425 million in annual revenue that go with it.

It's a victory for all of us, especially for the sailors who would prefer to live in Virginia than in Florida, but also for their neighbors and friends and the schools and churches that depend on them. It's a victory for Virginia's legislators who worked for years for this result.

It's a victory for the region's businesses and for tourism across several states.

It's also a victory for good sense.

Building a second carrier base on the East Coast has never been justified. It is monstrously expensive at a time the Defense Department needs to save every penny. With carriers on an almost constant deployment rotation, the idea of vulnerable ships sitting in port is a quaint anachronism.

Despite the decision - and perhaps to compensate for it - Hampton Roads is likely to lose an amphibious ready group and its 2,000 sailors to Mayport by 2015. A fast-attack submarine and a dock landing ship based here will be decommissioned.

Perhaps most unsettling for Hampton Roads: The budget requests two rounds of military base closings, one in 2013 and another in 2015.

We don't have to remind anyone who was here in 2005 how devastating the Base Realignment and Closure Commission decisions can be. The BRAC round that year resulted in Fort Monroe in Hampton closing and recommended that Oceana Naval Air Station be shut because surrounding development had undermined its mission.

Only with concessions from local and state leaders, only with promises to curb encroachment on Oceana's fenceline, was the base - and with it tens of thousands of jobs - allowed to remain.

The defense proposal, part of Obama's $3.8 trillion spending plan for 2013, is merely the first part of the process. Congress will attack and amend. But it's better for Hampton Roads than many feared.

The bipartisan, bicameral super committee's inability last fall to come up with $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction was supposed to result in another $500 billion in cuts to the Pentagon starting next year.

Obama's budget parses cuts more judiciously.

It would provide piddling raises over the next five years, increases that will be eaten up by increased insurance costs. It calls for significant cuts in the number of service men and women, especially as the war in Afghanistan winds down.

Nevertheless, as America begins to refocus its military efforts away from Iraq and Afghanistan, as the Pentagon moves toward another round of BRAC hearings, it's good news that the administration finds no need to waste $1 billion to move an aircraft carrier to Florida.