Guam Not Ready For 5,000 More Marines: GAO

[mota bhai 2,675]

Guam is America’s unsinkable aircraft carrier in the South Pacific, the fulcrum of the fabled Pacific “pivot.” It’s also kind of a mess.

With a GDP per capita less than a third the US average, an earthquake-damaged harbor, geriatric generators that black out the entire island roughly twice a year, drinking water periodically contaminated with sewage, a fire department with three working ambulances for a population of 160,000, and a police department so short-staffed it’s started deputizing unpaid civilians, according to a Government Accountability Office report due out today, Guam is closer to the Third World than to California economically as well as geographically.

That’s not just a development problem, it’s a national security issue. The Defense Department, which already owns more than a quarter of the island, plans on bringing in 5,000 more Marines and their estimated 1,300 dependents. DoD and GAO agree that the island’s infrastructure isn’t ready to receive them. What they disagree on is the cost to get it ready. The last three defense budgets requested, all told, $400 million for public infrastructure in Guam over 2012-2014, with more costs to come, but GAO doubts that that’s all necessary.

There are two big problems here, one that’s merely difficult to fix and the other nigh-impossible. The first is that the Pentagon’s still rewriting its Guam plan. The original goal was to relocate 8,600 Marines and 9,000 dependents from Okinawa to Guam by 2014, but disagreements over cost-sharing with the Japanese led the Defense Department to scale the move down to 5,000 Marines and 1,300 dependents. (Mathematically minded readers will notice that the Marine-to-dependent ratio in those two plans is radically different: My guess is this is because the current plan includes a higher percentage of young, unmarried Marine Corps riflemen).

That’s a 64 percent reduction in the number of people moving, but you can’t just cut the cost estimates by 64 percent and call it a day. A smaller force gives you more options about where to put it, such as US bases on the island that generate their own clean water, which could bring the needed infrastructure investments down more than 64 percent. But some costs are fixed – assuming that you decide to do them at all– such as upgrading water treatment plants.

That kind of costs brings us to the second, almost insoluble problem: How do you disentangle what’s needed purely to support the military– i.e. what Congress feels the Pentagon should pay for – from what’s needed by the civilian population? You can’t even draw a neat line between the two groups, because adding more Marines and their families also requires adding more civilian contractors who will work on base but never live there.

The relocation would also mean a temporary upsurge in construction workers, many of them from off the island, and, besides all the other public infrastructure the influx would require, Guamanian officials say they lack the health labs to test the newcomers for communicable diseases. Then you get into messy issues like landfill sites: The main Air Force and Navy bases have almost filled theirs up and are starting to send their trash, for a fee, to Guam’s waste disposal site, which by the way is in court-ordered receivership for environmental violations.

Congress has been deeply skeptical of the Pentagon’s cost estimates and Japan’s pledged contributions, so it keeps legislating restrictions on what the Defense Department can spend to move forces from Okinawa to Guam, leading to what one thinktank study called a “logjam.” As Congress’s accountant/attack dog, the GAO has challenged DoD on costs in the past, and the report due out today is just the latest installment in a long and dreary story.

So what does the GAO study (which we got in advance) actually recommend? The report’s title, as usual, is little help: “Further Analysis Needed to Identify Guam’s Public Infrastructure Requirements and Costs for DoD’s Realignment Plan.” (Pro tip: GAO always thinks “further analysis is needed.” If your house was on fire and you were trying to get out, GAO would tell you to first make sure that your escape plan met best practices and that you had perfected your knowledge-based systems analysis.) In this case, GAO wants the Defense Department to revise its estimates for Guam – which the Pentagon is doing – before it asks for any more money and to write “an integrated master plan” for all the forces reshuffling around the Pacific – which the Pentagon is not doing.

That’s precisely the kind of long-term planning that the last two years of sequestration, government shutdown, and general legislative chaos have made impossible. Now that the budget deal has – we hope – stabilized the situation for the next two years, maybe everyone can get back to business.

http://breakingdefense.com/2013/12/guam-not-ready-for-5000-more-marines-gao/

[GandD 5,966]

I don't know that its unsinkable. It may capsize. Here you go republican's, enjoy:

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

Guam is where the Tan family lives. Put that in the Chinese column as well.

Edited December 17, 2013 by The Patriot

[GandD 5,966]

Guam is where the Tan family lives. Put that in the Chinese column as well.

How are they going to beat out all those marines? Or Planes? Or Ships?

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

How are they going to beat out all those marines? Or Planes? Or Ships?

Money. Very likely some if not all of the clothing and equipment those Marines are wearing was manufactured and/or imported through a corporation owned by the Tan family.

[GandD 5,966]

Money. Very likely some if not all of the clothing and equipment those Marines are wearing was manufactured and/or imported through a corporation owned by the Tan family.

So, if China started a military campaign, the US Marines would switch sides to the Chinese because the Tan family has been paying for stuff? Or are you suggesting the US would never dare challenge their Chinese landlords?

[mota bhai 2,675]

I think he is suggesting the Tan family retains ownership of the clothing they manufacture even after the Marines pay for it. Because Tan.

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

The family had origins in Hong Kong and mainland China. They spent time on the Philippines and Guam. By the early 1980s they were part of a vanguard of global Chinese entrepreneurs reconnecting with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the aftermath of Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s declaration that "To be rich is glorious."

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/10/23/401675/-Meet-the-Tan-Family-corrupt-patrons-of-the-GOP-HRC

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

So, if China started a military campaign, the US Marines would switch sides to the Chinese because the Tan family has been paying for stuff? Or are you suggesting the US would never dare challenge their Chinese landlords overlords?

That is what you mean, right?

[GandD 5,966]

That is what you mean, right?

You know what's really funny about that.......... That is literally what I wrote and then I thought it my be too over the top in context to what I thought you were suggesting. So I erased it and put landlords.

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

You know what's really funny about that.......... That is literally what I wrote and then I thought it my be too over the top in context to what I thought you were suggesting. So I erased it and put landlords.

First impressions are often the correct ones.

[GandD 5,966]

Well, I'm trying to keep my extremism in check. Some think i'm doing a decent job. Others think I'm this:

Edited December 17, 2013 by GandD

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

Nobody really likes the creamy filling in the center.

[GandD 5,966]

Isn't that the truth.