Senate panel to hold hearing on Gates’s decision to close Joint Forces Command

The Senate Armed Services Committee will hold a hearing on
Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s proposal to close the Joint Forces Command (JFCOM) based in Virginia.

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the committee’s chairman, granted
the full committee hearing at the request of Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.). The date
for the hearing has yet to be set.

{mosads}Webb and several members of the Virginia-delegation are
fighting Gates’s decision to close Joint Forces Command, based in Norfolk, Va., as a part of the secretary’s effort to save billions of dollars within
the Pentagon’s budget.

Webb, who chairs the committee’s subcommittee on military
personnel matters, called on the Pentagon and White House to suspend any
actions related to the sweeping savings initiative until Congress had “ample
opportunity to review the full scope of the Secretary’s actions.”

Levin said in a letter to Webb this week that he would
confer with Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), his panel’s ranking Republican, about the
hearing when the Senate returns from recess in September.

“I share the Secretary’s objectives of reducing
‘duplication, overhead, and excess in the defense enterprise,’ and instilling
‘a culture of savings and restraint’ across the Department of Defense,” Levin
wrote. “At the same time, I agree that the far-reaching initiatives announced
by the Secretary deserve close scrutiny from our Committee.”

Webb, Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), and Virginia Reps. Glenn Nye (D),
Bobby Scott (D), Rob Wittman (R) and Randy Forbes (R) wrote to
Gates on Aug. 13 urging him to conduct a review of JFCOM’s mission and
activities without a predisposed intent to close the command.

“The Department of Defense has declined for two weeks to
provide any additional details regarding the decision to close JFCOM,” Webb
said in a statement Tuesday. “The committee’s hearing will afford us the
opportunity to receive answers to the many questions that, for whatever reason,
Secretary Gates has declined to provide since he announced his initiatives.”

JFCOM is one of 10 combat commands, which include Central
Command, European Command and Africa Command. JFCOM was previously the U.S.
Atlantic Command. With the Soviet submarine threat diminished at the end of the
Cold War, the command in 1999 was turned into a training, concepts and
experimentation combatant command that spans all armed services.