After dealing with lower-hanging fruit, Elon Musk’s U.S. Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) now has its sights on a bigger target: the Defense Department and its projected $1 trillion new budget. One cost-saving idea that both military officials and external analysts have suggested is to close or consolidate dozens of U.S. military bases.
The idea is attractive at first glance: streamline the military’s footprint, sell off unused real estate, and save the taxpayer billions. But another round of base closures—on top of five such rounds since 1988—could severely undermine the United States’ ability to mobilize for a major war. It would also deepen the recruiting crisis that threatens the all-volunteer force.
The Defense Department operates nearly 200 major bases and a myriad of smaller posts on more than 26 million acres of land in the United States. Many of these are joint bases, which host personnel, equipment, and facilities for multiple services. Together, these installations serve as barracks, training grounds, sustainment hubs, hospitals, and depots.
A cursory review might suggest that this vast real estate portfolio should be trimmed. In a widely cited 2017 report, the Pentagon concluded that the department had 19 percent excess capacity in military installations overall. If DOGE needs an example of government waste to cherry pick, it can point to the almost 150 golf courses owned by the Defense Department around the world.
A congressionally authorized process known as BRAC (base realignment and closure) requires the Pentagon to submit a list of installations for closure or consolidation. Previous rounds of BRAC have closed or realigned around 200 major military bases and an additional 1,000 or so minor installations since 1988.
Advocates of BRAC argue that it is “more cost-effective to rebuild capacity versus continually maintaining unnecessary assets.” The U.S. government has undoubtedly saved money: In 2018, a Pentagon official claimed that past BRAC cycles were saving $12 billion a year and estimated that a new round could add another $2 billion.
Some have cast serious doubt on the calculated savings, however. The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) found in a 2018 report that the Pentagon’s 2017 calculations used the wrong baseline, relied on faulty assumptions, and applied a flawed methodology. The GAO concluded that the Pentagon might be overstating its excess capacity problem while failing to identify existing infrastructure shortfalls.
Managing a military organization is not like running a business; cost efficiency is not synonymous with military effectiveness. Redundancy, resilience, and excess capacity are critical requirements in the dynamic, contingent, and often protracted process of war. Regarding bases and installations, the need for excess capacity reflects a largely forgotten but essential component of U.S. warfighting: military and economic mobilization.
The United States won its truly existential wars—the Civil War and World War II—by mobilizing its immense human and industrial capital. With the U.S. military now the smallest that it has been in 80 years, and further cuts of up to 90,000 active-duty soldiers under consideration, a future war of any meaningful size or duration will undoubtedly require mobilization. This was unnecessary during the past 20 years of low-stakes, low-intensity, counterterrorism operations, but a future large-scale war would require enormous capacity for processing, training, and deploying additional manpower, as well as accommodating larger stores of weapons, vehicles, food, fuel, and medical supplies.
Less than half of the Army is composed of active duty personnel; the majority of the land force is made up of the U.S. Army Reserve and the state-level National Guard. By strategic design, the Army—and the nation—cannot go to war without mobilizing the reserves. Calling up the Army Reserve and National Guard en masse would require activating many Mobilization Force Generation Installations—bases that are used to house, train, and equip units activated for overseas deployment. These bases are, by definition, largely inactive in peacetime. That makes them targets for DOGE, which has operated with a glaring lack of expertise.
A protracted major war would require far more troops and training sites than the U.S. military can provide today. In three years of attritional warfare, Ukraine and Russia have together lost perhaps 1 million soldiers between those killed, wounded, and missing. Including reserve troops and the National Guard, the total U.S. military barely reaches this number today. Its remaining manpower well is nearly dry: The Army’s post-active duty Individual Ready Reserve (IRR) holds barely 75,000 soldiers, a small percentage of whom are trained for front-line combat. After the IRR comes full mobilization: finding, selecting, training, and equipping new soldiers and new units through conscription from a cold start.
Measured against the needs of full-scale mobilization, the Pentagon’s 26 million acres of bases are grossly inadequate. During World War II, the U.S. military constructed 30,000 new barracks buildings, and the number of military airfields in the continental United States grew from 40 at the end of World War I to 783 in 1943. In Florida alone, the number of military installations increased from eight to more than 170 during the war.
Though the United States may not need this volume of infrastructure in a future war, growing Chinese long-range precision strike capabilities will put a new premium on installation resiliency, redundancy, and the ability to disperse manpower and materiel even within the United States.
Even without a war, the United States’ all-volunteer force is facing an existential threat: recruiting. A cratering fertility rate is making each generation of Americans smaller than the last, while mental, physical, and educational hurdles leave just 23 percent of 17- to 24-year-olds eligible to serve. Regardless of a purported “Trump bump” in recruiting over the past few months, attracting sufficient high-quality recruits will be an enduring challenge.
In place of a broad base of citizen-soldiers, the all-volunteer force is increasingly manned by a military caste. Those with preexisting military ties—often through parents and relatives—provide a disproportionate share of recruits: Nearly 80 percent of recent U.S. Army recruits had a close connection to the service before they joined. For roughly 30 percent, it was a parent.
Recruiting the children of service members and veterans is a dual-edged sword. Some 52 years after the end of the last draft, fewer and fewer young Americans have a connection to their country’s military and a call to serve. A survey conducted by the Office of People Analytics last year found that only 11 percent of Americans aged 16 to 21 would consider serving, while the Pentagon’s own data indicates that this age cohort is ignorant of what life in the military is actually like. For the vast majority of young Americans, the civil-military divide has become a chasm.
The military’s insularity is worsened by geography and policy choices. The services’ recruiting commands choose to “fish where the fish are,” focusing limited recruiting resources on a few sections of the country, such as the “Southern smile”—a region from Virginia to Arizona that has traditionally produced a plurality of recruits. In recent years, the South has produced 20 percent more Army recruits than would be expected based on its demographics, whereas the Northeast produced 20 percent fewer. Oklahoma City now hosts as many Army recruiters as New York City.
Base closures have further isolated the U.S. military from the communities that it needs to reach to sustain itself. With fewer opportunities to routinely interact with uniformed personnel and learn about the opportunities and benefits of service, this problem will deepen and put the continued viability of the all-volunteer force in doubt. As a result of previous base closures, there is now only one large active Army installation in the entire Northeast: remote Fort Drum in upstate New York, 30 miles from the Canadian border. The country’s best-educated and most densely populated region now has barely any contact with its largest military service.
The U.S. military’s retreat from major urban areas is particularly striking. Due to past closures, bases such as Fort Devens, the Presidio, and Marine Corps Air Station El Toro have been shuttered or shrunken, even as the metro areas that they abut have become the country’s economic powerhouses and innovation hubs.
Another round of closures would also exacerbate housing problems for military families by further shrinking the on-base housing inventory. In a 2023 survey of military families, nearly 80 percent of respondents said they were paying more for housing than they could afford. Nearly as many noted that increases in housing allowances did not make up for inflation and high-priced housing markets. Privatizing barracks, a new development on some bases, may push more junior enlisted service members into civilian housing that they can ill afford.
The cost and quality of military housing is contributing to a broader dissatisfaction with military life. The 2023 survey showed a serious decline in the propensity of service members to recommend joining the military—from 75 percent in 2019 to 58 percent in 2023, with the drop greater among recently enlisted service members who reported higher rates of poor-to-moderate family well-being. Since recruitment is disproportionately dependent on relatives and acquaintances of service members and veterans, further shrinking housing options through base consolidation could dramatically worsen the recruiting environment.
For years, the Pentagon has asked Congress to approve another round of BRAC to fund other budget priorities. But given an over-budget nuclear modernization effort, the costly sixth-generation F-47 fighter aircraft, and a potentially enormous revitalization of shipbuilding, the Pentagon’s tough spending choices go far beyond any cost savings that it might get by closing bases. The services wrongly look to base closures as a bill payer for their modernization and procurement agendas.
The next war might not cooperate with the Pentagon’s plans and timelines. In July 2024, the congressionally mandated Commission on the National Defense Strategy concluded that the United States faces serious threats, including “the potential for near-term major war.”
In a fiscally constrained environment, the U.S. military must learn to live within its means. Even if Musk leaves Washington and DOGE’s grip relaxes, the drive for Pentagon prioritization and cost cutting will continue. But selling off more bases—amid the rising threat of war and a major military recruiting crisis—should be one of the last tools chosen to restore fiscal sanity to U.S. national security.
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