The Pentagon today announced its long-awaited and oft-delayed base realignment and closure (BRAC) recommendations. A nine-person commission composed of retired military personnel and former members of Congress will take the Defense Department's list into consideration before it makes its own recommendations, after extensive public hearings, to President Bush in September. Bush and Congress will each be required to approve or reject the recommendations without amendment, in a process that will probably be finalized by November. It's very important that this process be allowed to proceed to fruition on a bipartisan basis as an urgent national security priority.

The BRAC process was developed back in the 1980s to deal with three big realities.

• The simple and incontrovertible fact that the armed forces were operating more bases than they needed to house and support the units actually deployed. In many cases, existing bases had been set up during World War II, when active duty forces were far larger than at any time in the Cold War, much less the post-Cold War era.
• The need for "military transformation" to create a more agile, technologically sophisticated force structure appropriate to the new and multiple threats facing the United States as the Cold War ended, with inter-service cooperation becoming especially critical.
• The unavoidable political reality that members of Congress whose states or districts were negatively affected by base closings or consolidations would thwart any piecemeal approach.

Presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Clinton, along with both Democratic and Republican-controlled Congresses, approved four rounds of BRAC recommendations between 1988 and 1995, saving an estimated $29 billion as of 2003 and helping create the force structure that stopped ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and toppled the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. But Congress has repeatedly postponed a fifth BRAC round, even as the force structure continued to change and the cost of excess or redundant bases began to compete with other urgent national security needs.

Despite the long delays, the recommendations announced by the Pentagon today are not particularly draconian, in large part because of the need to accommodate an estimated 70,000 troops and 100,000 dependents based in Europe who are now returning home. In addition, post-9/11 security considerations have convinced the Pentagon to shift many military personnel from leased facilities to existing bases, soaking up even more excess capacity. Still, today's recommended closures, cutbacks, and consolidations are expected to generate $7 billion in new defense savings, at a time when the U.S. needs every spare dollar to support ongoing military deployments in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Moreover, the new recommendations continue a welcome trend toward joint inter-service operations at bases previously limited to one service.

There's no question that communities with bases taking big "hits" in these recommendations will mobilize congressional allies to oppose them. And the BRAC process will give them every opportunity to make their case: in the four previous rounds, the BRAC made significant changes in the Pentagon recommendations based on extensive and intensive public hearings. There's no reason to think the current BRAC will do otherwise.

But we strongly urge critics of the Bush administration's overall national security strategy -- among whom we count ourselves -- to avoid the temptation to turn the BRAC into a symbolic fight over unrelated issues. We share the concerns of most Democrats about the administration's deplorable failure to deploy enough troops to perform the missions we have given them without a "back-door draft" involving extended tours of duty and excessive reliance on Guard and Reserve units, and about its parallel failure to support military personnel and their families. But more and better-supported troops do not require more redundant bases, and indeed, the savings that BRAC could produce will help make it possible to meet the armed forces' actual needs.