The Pentagon vs. Congress: The political economy of military base closures during BRAC

This dissertation examines and analyzes economic and political forces that influenced military base closures under the Defense Base Closure and Realignment (BRAC) process of the late 1980's and early 1990's. The research utilizes a qualitative approach to outline the public good nature of defense and describes the rapid shifts in power and authority that were necessary for the formation of four "independent" BRAC commissions. Win-set analysis demonstrates that outside forces played a large role in allowing self-interested politicians to relinquish control over pork-laden defense expenditures.;A quantitative approach, based on logistic regression, is used to analyze the significance and magnitude of economic and political variables that influenced the Pentagon and the BRAC Commissioners. Empirical findings indicate that politics was not removed from the process and that political variables were important in determining the probability a particular military facility remained open. Sensitivity analysis indicates that a measure of learning occurred over the four commission periods and that the individual services approached base closures from different perspectives. The findings of the empirical work are applied to the fiscal year 2002 military base structure using current political and economic data to provide a unique forecast of the military facilities most at risk for closure in 2005---the next major base closure year. If closures proceed in a similar manner to BRAC, several political and economic variables will be important to determining which military bases remain open and which are closed.;The approach and unique findings presented in this work provide further evidence of the applicability of economic principles to non-market arenas such as politics and national security. The principles of self-interest, unlimited wants, and constrained resources provide important tools that can be used by social scientists to more fully understand the effects politics has on decision making in a market economy.