The Price of Power -- Desert Snooze:
As the Military Slims,
Each Soldier's Upkeep
Grows More Expensive
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In the Mojave, Echo Range
Costs $16 Million a Year
For Only Occasional Use
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A Revealing Study of Studies

[Sixth in a Series on Military Spending]

CHINA LAKE, Calif. -- Scattered amid the creosote bushes of the Mojave Desert here stand more than a dozen giant contraptions bristling with some of the U.S. military's most sophisticated electronics. About 2,700 miles of fiber-optic strands connect the devices to computers that simulate almost any antiaircraft threat American fighter pilots could face anywhere in the world.

The Navy estimates that it spends $16 million a year to operate and maintain this 500,000-acre swath of wired, windblown wilderness. Nearly two hundred people work at Echo Range daily so planes can swoop overhead to see, for example, if the latest American onboard jamming technology can thwart the newest enemy radar.

But most of the time, there isn't a plane in sight. Some months, total aircraft testing time at the range averages less than two hours per weekday. For all of January 1996, total testing time was 20 hours. Why operate such an expensive site and use it so sparingly? It's hardly a question of need.

Repeated government studies have concluded that the Pentagon has more than enough electronic combat ranges -- Echo Range and two similar ones operated by the Air Force. One is just a few minutes away by jet at the Nellis Range Complex in Nevada; the other is at Florida's Eglin Air Force Base.

"Would the Navy build us again?" asks Ron Stepp, the Navy veteran in charge of running Echo Range. "I don't know. We're way expensive."

Indeed, four of the studies concluded that Echo Range is the least cost-effective to keep open. But bureaucratic turf wars, congressional pork-barreling and simple inertia have kept all three facilities up and, if not always running, taking leisurely strolls. At various times, senators and congressmen and the secretary of defense joined the fray to save one range or another. The issue has pitted the Air Force against the Navy and, at one point, one Air Force faction against another.

The long struggle over Echo Range helps explain a costly contradiction in the U.S. defense budget: Though troop totals have fallen in the past decade, the Pentagon is spending more than ever per troop.

For years, the debate over defense spending has focused on headline grabbing big-ticket items -- usually major weapons programs such as the F-22 fighter jet. But before the Pentagon buys a single rifle or pays a solitary grunt, it spends well over $100 billion a year on its support infrastructure -- all the things needed just to make things hum. By far the biggest component of this spending is the so-called operations-and-maintenance, or O&M, budget, yet it receives almost no public scrutiny. It pays for many things: spare parts, equipment overhauls, environmental programs, training, child care, health care, cutting grass and painting barracks. It also covers much of the cost of running Echo Range and its counterparts.

Since the Cold War ended in 1989, the number of active troops and the level at which they train -- Army tank miles, Air Force flying hours and the like -- have dropped by more than a third. At the same time, O&M expenses have fallen at less than half that rate. Today, the Pentagon spends roughly $70,000 a year per troop on O&M costs -- 30% more than it spent a decade ago, after adjusting for inflation.

There are some rational reasons: new environmental-cleanup directives, for instance, and growing medical expenses. And there's the obvious fact that constant peacekeeping and dictator-defeating operations have kept the downsized U.S. military extraordinarily active in the 1990s. But those factors aren't enough to explain the entire increase in per-troop O&M costs. Numerous government studies suggest that the O&M budget helps finance a system rife with inefficiencies: partly empty depots, underused testing facilities, commissaries that can't compete with neighboring Wal-Marts and warehouses crammed with tens of billions of dollars in inventory that may never be used.

The importance of the issue extends far beyond its fiscal impact. The O&M budget is the principal means by which readiness -- the speed at which military operations can be geared up -- is assured. And some military experts and congressional Republicans are becoming increasingly vocal in questioning the Pentagon's current state of readiness. Indeed, the Army has just concluded that two of its units are unprepared to go to war because they are too busy with peacekeeping efforts.

"The Department of Defense is burdened by a far-flung support infrastructure that is ponderous, bureaucratic and unaffordable," military experts on the National Defense Panel concluded in 1997. The General Accounting Office is even more blunt, finding in another 1997 report that "billions of dollars are wasted annually on inefficient and unneeded activities." In 1998, the Pentagon itself estimated excess base capacity at 23%, and said the figure for some functions -- including testing and evaluation centers and labs, a category that includes Echo Range -- was much higher.

Indeed, the problem is widespread, reaching far beyond this remote testing field. Consider:

• At a Navy storage facility in Norfolk, Va., a General Accounting Office investigator in 1995 found 27 circuit-card assemblies, used on various planes and helicopters and valued at $1,000, though only two were needed to satisfy war reserves or current operating requirements. And 10 more were on order, since the Navy computer automatically reorders some supplies without staff ever having to sign off. At other storage depots, the GAO found enough wiring harnesses for airborne radio communication systems to last 277 years and enough AP-1 central computers for the F-15 aircraft to last 109 years.
• At Edwards Air Force Base about an hour down the road from China Lake, the Electronic Warfare Directorate recently expanded its Benefield Anechoic Facility -- a hangar 80 feet high and sporting the "biggest single-piece door in the world," says Lt. Col. Randy Kelly, who oversaw the facility until several weeks ago. Covering the walls, the floors and the ceilings of the vast room are dark cones of blue foam, which keeps out all electromagnetic waves. By simulating conditions at 60,000 feet, the chamber allows for testing of electronic systems without the cost of running a fighter down an open-air range.

The problem, according to the GAO, is that the Benefield facility offers the same testing environment as a similar Navy chamber in Maryland. Both the Air Force and the Navy are expanding their chambers, spending a total of $512 million by the year 2002, some of it "to make the same electronic combat test upgrades," the GAO says. Lt. Col. Kelly says that for the past two years, the Air Force's Benefield chamber had no tests going on 40% of the time; the Navy, according to the GAO, insists it needs to expand its own chambers to handle future work.

-- Both the North Island Naval Aviation Depot in California and the Ogden Air Logistics Center in Utah can repair and maintain F/A-18 fighter planes. In the mid-1990s, the Ogden facility won a bid to repair some of the Navy's planes. But the Navy eventually canceled the contract, saying it wanted to keep repairs of the Navy plane within the Navy, even though the GAO concluded the Air Force could do the work for less money. One of the reasons Navy officials gave for canceling the contract was slow turnaround time by the Air Force repair center; the Air Force, however, responded that the Navy caused the delays, and pointed to more than 100 letters to Navy contracting officers complaining about them. Today, across all the armed services, maintenance depot facilities have excess capacity of between 25% and 50%, according to the GAO.

-- A 1997 Congressional Budget Office report found that the Pentagon's retail system -- comprising commissaries that resemble grocery stores and department stores -- is "not a cost-effective alternative to cash compensation" for active and retired military personnel. In other words, the U.S. would be better financially off if it were to boost wages for military personnel and let them buy their food, clothing and such at private-sector outlets, rather than continuing to run a vast, subsidized retail network of its own.

Pricing aside, the Pentagon's retail outlets are often far less convenient than private-sector shopping. The average commissary is open only 48 hours a week, is likely to be closed on Sundays, and can't carry the variety of goods that can be found at discount retailers like Wal-Mart.

The debate over downsizing and efficiency dominates the history of Echo Range in the 1990s. The facility opened in 1966 as an adjunct to an existing major Naval weapons-testing site. The California desert offered a nearly perfect environment for year-round testing, with rain a rarity (22 days a year) and visibility practically unlimited.

At its peak in the midst of the Cold War, base officials estimate, Echo Range employed more than 300 people. The range also was used to test other weapons systems, including the Tomahawk and HARM missiles, and the Navy's famed Top Gun pilots do some training here. Its most important achievement came in the 1980s, when its technicians simulated the antiaircraft systems of a Soviet ship, allowing the Navy to perfect the defense systems on their fighters.

Mr. Stepp, a civilian employee at the range for 16 years, waxes nostalgic about those days: The "Soviet ship in the desert" was "our number one claim to fame, marketing niche, operational strength," he says. Now that the Soviet naval threat has been neutered, much of the equipment is mothballed.

"So now what?" Mr. Stepp asks, wistfully.

Today, Echo Range continues to conduct the sort of tests that are essential for America's cutting-edge fighters. U.S. warplanes are fully integrated weapons systems, able to track and deceive threats, communicate with command headquarters and engage in battle -- all at the same time. To remain effective, they must be tested and refined continually. Pilots also need constantly to hone their flying and fighting skills.

The problem is, Echo Range's customers -- the Navy, the Air Force and a few foreign allies -- haven't had very much use for it lately. In the post-Cold War era, there aren't as many new threats to America's air superiority, and there are fewer new aircraft to test. So the facility is open only four days a week. And though Navy records show it's available to test aircraft for 1,560 hours a year, it was used for only 576 hours in fiscal 1996 and 820 hours in fiscal 1997. (The range declined to release more recent figures; other records show that it expects usage to remain stable in coming years.)

That leaves Echo Range's 187 employees with a lot of downtime. Some of that is used to maintain and repair equipment, line up and plan tests and study the resulting data. Mr. Stepp contends that the employees stay plenty busy, and he has argued for years against attempts to close his range in favor of the Air Force ranges in Nevada and Florida.

To bolster his case, Mr. Stepp provides a tour of the facility, restricted to nonclassified areas. He drives 25 miles from base headquarters to the range, passing a burro-crossing sign as he points out the spot that was once the set for another planet in a "Star Trek" movie.

Off in the distance, he passes what looks like a huge golf ball sitting on a ridge about 400 feet above the valley floor. It's called the "missile on a mountain." Inside the sphere and on the ground nearby, Mr. Stepp says, is just about everything needed to launch an antiaircraft missile: "If we had the missiles, we could launch at an airplane." When a plane zooms by, a seeker in the sphere fixes on the target and "we know what the missile is seeing," he says. The range's powerful computers collect hundreds of data points, from which the Navy can figure out what kind of decoys and jammers would work to evade the missile.

At his office, a nondescript building in a tiny complex of low-rise white buildings and trailers, Mr. Stepp takes a phone call to discuss an upcoming test -- proof, he says afterward, that the facility has plenty of work. He offers a slide show of the range's sophisticated equipment. The devices dotting the landscape, he says, house various "threat systems" with names like "spoon rest" and "bass tilt." If the Pentagon calls with word that a potential adversary has a new radar system, Echo Range technicians go to work.

The highlight of the tour are two 350-foot-tall wooden structures that look like teepee skeletons, built in the 1950s for various testing purposes. "At one time, when business was low, I was going to do some bungee-jumping," Mr. Stepp jokes.

One thing has kept some of the employees here busy for the past decade: a constant stream of studies that have required staffers to try to justify -- mostly successfully so far -- their existence. "You're putting dedicated man-hours of highly skilled people to work for months collecting and working the data," complains A.K. Rogers, Mr. Stepp's boss, in an interview.

The studies started back in 1990, as the Pentagon was first coming to grips with post-Cold War budget realities and looking for ways to scale back. Military planners quickly concluded that aircraft testing-and-evaluation, or T&E, sites such as Echo Range were a logical place to start. Such facilities illustrated the Pentagon's "greatest overlap in capabilities," one early report concluded.

Soon after, the Pentagon ordered up a study aimed at reducing duplication rampant throughout the Defense Department. The goal couldn't have been clearer: "an aggressive inter-service T&E consolidation effort." Instead, the study ended up focusing on avoiding additional duplication in the future, and the Defense Department told Congress it could be years before any consolidation savings were realized. The reason, according to a later report by the General Accounting Office: "service resistance to consolidating these existing test capabilities."

A few years later, a panel of officials from all the services looked at duplication at the testing facilities at Echo Range, the Nellis Range Complex in Nevada, which is managed by Edwards Air Force Base in California, and Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. In 1994, the panel decided that closing Echo Range would save taxpayers the most -- $95 million over five years, compared to $48 million if Eglin's facility were shut down. The Nellis range was considered too valuable an asset to close. The plan called for the consolidation to be complete no later than 1997. A year later, another study came to a similar conclusion.

The Navy fully participated in both studies. But it criticized their conclusions as "incomplete and flawed," according to the GAO, and it refused to consider closing its facility if the Air Force was going to retain both of its ranges.

Around this time, congressional interest in the issue intensified. Members from Western states criticized the antiEcho Range proposals from within the Pentagon and proposed consolidating such military testing facilities into a complex in the Southwest. That prompted protests from senators from Florida and other Eastern states, who told the Pentagon in a letter that they were "gravely concerned" by the proposal and praised the previous pro-Eglin studies.

Another Pentagon multibranch study ordered by Congress then concluded that electronic combat ranges had 30% excess capacity. The result, according to a later GAO report on the earlier studies, was a "gentleman's agreement" that spared Echo Range: the Navy and the Air Force would consolidate within their respective services, rather than among the services.

The Pentagon disputes that there was any gentleman's agreement. Nevertheless, the Air Force volunteered to relocate its testing equipment from Eglin to Nellisa move that previous studies had concluded was less cost-effective than closing the Navy's Echo Range and that would leave the military with no major East Coast testing facility.

That deal prompted a rearguard action from the Air Force's Special Operations Command, based right near Eglin's runway. "Over the years, we have grown accustomed to having this special facility in our own backyard," one Special Operations commander said in a memo. "Should the proposed realignment occur, it will not be business as unusual for AFSOC." The people behind the deal scoffed at such complaints. "Requirements in yesterday's fiscal environment are conveniences today," one Pentagon official responded in a letter.

But the Special Operations Command called on some friends in high places -- the Florida congressional delegation. Republican Sen. Connie Mack in the Senate expressed his "surprise and dismay" at the plan to close Eglin and, with Democratic Sen. Bob Graham and GOP Rep. Joe Scarborough, ordered the GAO to investigate.

Once the GAO started poking around, Echo Range's Mr. Stepp shifted into high gear. He argued strenuously that the previous studies were flawed at best and biased at worst. To no avail: The GAO blasted the decision to scale back Eglin and save Echo Range, noting that the Pentagon previously had "produced three studies with a conclusion that China Lake is less costeffective to keep."

Defense Secretary William Cohen also sided with the Florida lawmakers. "Let me assure you we share your concern," he told Sen. Mack in a May 1998 letter. "The Department has no intention of eliminating the electronic combat operational test and training capabilities needed to support the Air Force Special Operations Command," he wrote.

The Florida delegation also persuaded Congress to appropriate an extra $5 million so Eglin could "maintain and improve its [electronic combat] capability" -- money that even the Pentagon said it didn't need because, as the previous studies had proved, it already had too much testing capacity.

In the end, the Air Force decided to transfer some Eglin testing systems to Nellis in Nevada. Even that limited move toward consolidation was delayed at the request of the Special Operations Command, and some of the equipment slated to be shipped out West will stay at Eglin at least through July 2001 -- and may be allowed to stay indefinitely. The rest will remain at Eglin.

Ironically, military officials themselves concede that the inefficiency and overlap uncovered in countless studies often applies to the studies themselves -- especially given the outcome.

"If you look at the history of the studies, new studies often roll in before or right at the time others are completed," says Mitchell Cary, a midlevel Air Force official well versed in the issue's acronymheavy history. "There was the Board of Operating Directors study, and right at the end of that it was announced there would be a look at T&E with BRAC."

Maj. Marc Shaver, a colleague, chimes in: "At the same time, they were already doing the test consolidation master plan."

"And Vision 21 came right on the end of that," adds Mr. Cary. "Vision 21 was kind of cut short by the Quadrennial Defense Review, and then we went right into Section 912."

That last one came out this past summer. Its conclusion: The Pentagon's base-closing process was "specifically focused on reducing cross-service redundancies" but had resulted in "no significant actions." And, once again, the study recommended that the Pentagon consolidate its electronic testing ranges.

But even the Pentagon official who oversaw that study doesn't sound very hopeful. Stan Soloway, deputy undersecretary of defense for acquisition reform, says he isn't familiar enough with the specifics of electronic combat ranges to explain why all three ranges remain open after so many years of study. Speaking generally, however, he says the Defense Department is so "overlayered with management and the board and committee structure that it inhibits" real reform.

"If you have . . . a convoluted enough structure, change becomes almost impossible," he says. "Can I sit here and suggest to you that this study has taken us several steps beyond those studies that were done earlier? Not really."