NEWS ANALYSIS: Guam Military Buildup Easily Positioned to Absorb Senate Committee Budget Cut Amid Flexible Deadline, Planning

Written by ADAM BROWN

Wednesday, July 06, 2011

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GUAM – With a flexible structure and timeline, the Guam military buildup can easily absorb changes and cuts such as the Senate Appropriation Committee's $155 million reduction. In fact, the cut, if implemented, may be barely felt in the long run as the military fine-tunes its plans.

The Senate decision to cut the construction budget for the Guam military buildup for fiscal year 2012, which came amid a pre-election posture of austerity and still must be approved by the full Senate and reconciled with the House's version, amounts to only a portion of the funding that is already waiting to be spent or transferred. And, if the cuts go though, flexible planning and timing can accommodate it.

The money in the committee cuts amounts to about the same as the military and buildup-related contract awards from June alone, which totalled $157 million for contracts to paint, pave and repair some military properties on Guam and build some new facilities, including a barracks and a headquarters building.

Funds appropriated for the buildup since 2008 -- not including fiscal year 2011 funds from Japan – total $1.32 billion. Early delays and an effort to pace construction to avoid overwhelming the island's infrastructure have left a large portion of program appropriations unspent. With fiscal year 2012 approaching, only $264.3 million for 12 major design-build task orders under the Small Business multiple award construction contract and Design-Build MACC for the buildup have so far been awarded.

Japan, which has committed to spending more than $6 billion for the buildup, also approved $420 million for this year as part of its $1.1 trillion fiscal year 2011 budget. Japanese lawmakers are still debating how the budget will be financed.

As it stands, the buildup plan includes the transfer of at least 8,600 Marines and their dependants and support staff to Okinawa from Guam. The number to be transferred, though, may be changed to as many as 9,700, according to a senior policy maker. So too may be the mix of troops, allowing for more fighting soldiers and fewer administrative staff which, in turn, would alter the amount of dependants and support staff needed as well as change some of the types of facilities to be built.

The deadline for the transfer was also altered on June 21 in a Washington meeting between Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Japan Defense Minister Toshimi Kitazawa and Japan Foreign Minister Takeaki Matsumoto. From a firm, albeit unrealistic, deadline of 2014, the four members of the bilateral Security Consultative Committee set a vaguer deadline of "the earliest possible date after 2014."

The new, flexible deadline allows for fiscal constraint in Washington and the type of political wind change reflected in the Senate committee's decision to cut the $155 million as part of an overall $1.25 billion in cuts from President Obama's military construction budget request for fiscal year 2012.

The Senate committee's budget cut, the Security Consultative Committee's new deadline, the possible changes to the plan and other developments on the Guam military buildup planning point to the words of John Jackson, the outgoing forward director of the Joint Guam Program Office.

"The buildup will continue but it will not be at the billion dollar of threshold of construction every year but it will be in the hundreds of millions of dollars every year," Jackson said in an interview with GuamBuildupNews.com. "Instead of having a big curve that goes really, really steep and lasts for just a two or three year period, I think we're going to have a flatter rise in construction costs and over a much longer period of time."

For queries regarding this or other stories, email the editors This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Image used in this article courtesy Idea go / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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