America, Alaska and Anchorage needs Eielson AFB

It has been nearly a year since the Air Force first proposed to eliminate year-round active duty flying at Eielson Air Force Base near Fairbanks and reduce the base population by about half. The plan is to accomplish this by transferring Eielson’s 18 F-16 aircraft to Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, which would immediately eliminate about 623 active duty positions.

I take great pride in the troops and operations we have at JBER, but I feel that adding a new fleet of aircraft and more than 600 people — not to mention their families — would undercut our state’s military readiness, overwhelm our already stretched thin school district and harm our real estate market, which multiple studies indicate is already maxed out.

The Alaska congressional delegation spent the better part of 2012 trying to understand the Air Force’s logic and tease out its math. The Air Force said this would be an immediate money-saving move, but then revised the plan to acknowledge it will actually cost the nation millions. They said the Anchorage housing market was bountiful, then admitted their analysis of this was done by pointing and clicking around Craigslist. They said that downgrading Eielson Air Force Base wouldn’t short-sheet our national defense, but the Pentagon then said our chief focus needs to be the Asia-Pacific region that Alaska is perfectly poised to address. The responses have been confusing to say the least, with many of the answers creating only more questions.

While we do not know the total number of people the Air Force wants to move south or when, we do know that Anchorage housing is currently stretched to the limit. Would the influx of military personnel and families cause a rise in housing costs for Anchorage residents who can least afford it? What would an influx of military families mean for class sizes in the Anchorage school district? It’s safe to presume some of the relocated families would move to the Mat-Su, but what would that new population bump mean for traffic on the already congested Glenn Highway?

Lastly, we have the nation’s second largest cargo hub, an incredibly busy international airport sharing airspace with JBER already. What would the presence of 18 F-16s have on the already crowded skies over Southcentral Alaska? These are all questions that the Air Force needs to answer in the Environmental Impact Statement. But just as importantly, these — and many others — are the questions that Southcentral community leaders and residents must voice when the Air Force comes to take public input next week.

What we do know is that the Air Force needs Eielson Air Force Base for its proximity to summer exercises at the Joint Pacific Alaska Range Complex (JPARC), to refuel and maintain refueling tankers and in case the operations tempo in Asia and the Pacific heighten in response to a new crisis. So I suppose my question to is why is the Air Force so anxious to spend so much money up front and create numerous Southcentral challenges to keep the base in an “Arctic warm” status with a low level of activity rather than take the time to evaluate ways to spread Eielson’s overhead over a higher activity level? After all, Eielson, like JBER, is geographically better suited to putting airpower where it’s needed in a hurry than most Lower 48 bases and some overseas bases.

Personally, I believe that the Air Force presence in the Interior is healthy both from a global and a local perspective. There’s room for the Air Force to grow at Eielson. In contrast, the Air Force’s 2005 decision to leave Kulis Air Force Base has left little room for expansion at JBER. Squeezing more into JBER without fully evaluating the future opportunity at Eielson is shortsighted at best.

As soon as Congress reconvened this year, I introduced the America Needs Eielson Air Force Base Act of 2013 that will force the Air Force to clear a number of hurdles — along with requiring a comprehensive study of the upside of Eielson — before the Air Force irreparably harms the Fairbanks economy, overwhelms Southcentral and perhaps damages its own mission flexibility.

Now more than ever, America needs Eielson.

U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, is the ranking member on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and also serves on the Senate Appropriations Committee.