I have lots of books.  I’m not really a book collecting kind of guy, but over 34 years I’ve accumulated a fairly substantial library.  At home I have an office, or man cave in the current vernacular, although I don’t have a TV.  It’s just my computer, my “I love me wall”, and lots of bookshelves (If you know Peg, IKEA of course!).  I’ve got a “do it yourself” section, a theology section, a fiction section, a Ronald Reagan section, and a smattering of political references.  On the other hand my library at work leans towards, shall we say, eclectic.

I have books jammed in the credenza, in the drawers, on the coffee table and every time I move I’m amazed at how many boxes it takes to empty the office.  I’ve got Ayn Rand, Charles Colson, Natan Sharansky, and C.S. Lewis just to name a few, but there isn’t really an overarching theme to any of it.  Just things I find interesting.

At the top of the “interesting” list is a thrilling read entitled, “Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission, 1995 Report to the President”.  In 1995 I was here at Pittsburgh as the Chief of Stan/Eval.  A job I loved but, after 9 years and multiple ASEVs, decided to leave in 1999 for a DO job in Youngstown.  But I digress.  I remember clearly the day that the proposal was made by the DoD to close Pittsburgh and that moment is captured precisely in the Commission Report with the quote: “It’s operating costs are the greatest among Air Force Reserve C-130 operations at civilian airfields”.  Well, we were gobsmacked!  We knew our financial situation here at Pittsburgh.  We only pay $25,000 per year to lease our property and it includes all fire fighting and crash/rescue services from the County.  Greater Pittsburgh has an international reputation as the most efficient snow removal airport in the nation and the runways are open 24/7 with almost no interruption even with the occasional blizzard.  The county even comes over and repaints the lines on our ramp for free.  We could only conclude that either other airports pay the units to be there or there was something “rotten in Denmark”, or at least Georgia.

We had some pretty smart guys here at the time, math/accounting types, so after the BRAC folks provided us their data base we were able to dig into numbers and it quickly became obvious that something wasn’t quite right.  “Someone” had taken many of the highest costs from all of the C-130 units and plugged them into the data for Pittsburgh and in some cases, numbers were just fabricated.  AFRES had decided what they wanted the answer to be and had, through the plans office, made the numbers add up.

The BRAC commissioner assigned to talk with the 911^th was a small businessman from Rapid City, South Dakota and as we started the interview I remember him brushing aside discussions of value to the community and economic impact.  His perspective was that all communities suffer when their unit is closed and he just wanted facts.  Well, when the cooked books were presented to him, his whole attitude changed.  He gathered up the spreadsheets and headed out the door.

His conclusions were veiled in the paragraph:  “The commission found costs to operate Pittsburgh International Airport Air Reserve Station were inaccurate.  With corrected data applied to the COBRA model, the commission found Pittsburgh was one of the least costly installations to operate”.  As we all know, the commission eventually placed all C-130 bases on the list and made them defend themselves.  The rumor was perpetuated, and the myth continues to this day, that Pittsburgh pointed the finger at all of the other units when, in reality by attempting to cook the books, HQ placed all units at risk.

Eventually Chicago closed, mostly because the mayor literally told the commission that he didn’t want the unit there.  General Macintosh came to Pittsburgh and apologized at a commanders’ call for “mistakes” that were made and told us that “heads had rolled”, or at least been move to other offices.  But the end result was a community which now rabidly defends the 911^th as it does all things “Pittsburgh” and offers its sons and daughters to its Reserve unit at a higher rate than any other C-130 unit in AFRC.

Luckily, we’re much more enlightened these days.  We’ve imbued our AF culture with TQM/6 Sigma/AFSO21 and all decisions are fact based/metric-micro-managed and we can be sure that everything we do is done to save the taxpayer the most amount of money and not to meet petty political parochial agendas.

‘Til next time, “on glidepath, slightly right of course”

It’s easy to get lost in zeros so let’s put the plight of the 911^th in terms we can all understand.

“A Tale of Two Houses”

Let’s say that you’ve been transferred to a new city.  You sit down with a realtor and make a long list of all the things you want in a house.  Good curb appeal, granite counters, open concept, low crime rate, great school district, and a nice backyard.  She goes back to her office, checks the listings, and comes back to you with two houses that fit all of your needs.  As it turns out, the houses are only blocks apart and, since they’re in the same plan, they are identical.  Not just similar, but exactly the same, even down to the room colors.  The only difference is that they are in different townships.   Which one do you pick?

You realize that the only thing you haven’t looked into is the tax rates so you call the township offices.  Township #1 tells you that it’s a great place to live.  The people are friendly, the schools are great, and the property taxes are identical to all of the other townships in the area.  There’s only one small issue.  They’ve experienced some cost overruns in maintaining the roads and street lights.  Their firefighting costs and ambulance fees have skyrocketed over the last few years so they’ve found it necessary to levy an additional fee on every household that probably won’t go away in the foreseeable future.  Now you’re worried.  So, you ask, how much is it going to cost me?  Sadly, they say, it’s going to be $20 per year for at least 20 years.  Well, $20 a year, you figure you could probably forgo 1 pizza a year, but 20 bucks is 20 bucks.  So now you call the second township.  They go through the same diatribe about schools and taxes and they come to the same sad story about additional costs and a necessary levy.  Here’s where the pacemaker kicks in.  They tell you that the levy is $6,000 per year and that it will probably go up every year from here to eternity.

Do we even have to ask which house you pick?  The 20 year cost on house #1 is $400, the 20 year cost on house #2 is $120,000.

Now let’s add the zeros in and change the houses to Air Force Reserve facilities.  House # 1 is Pittsburgh Air Reserve Station.  Its’ fixed costs for keeping the runways and taxiways in good repair and providing Fire/EMS coverage for the facility and aircraft is $20,000/year.  A fixed cost guaranteed for at least 20 years!  For the sake of comparison, house #2 is Dobbins Air Reserve Base.  Both bases provide the exact same capability to the new National Defense Objectives.  Both bases have the same number of aircraft.  The difference is the cost to maintain the airport infrastructure.  The Air Force must maintain the runways and taxiways.  The Air Force must provide a fire department and the personnel to man it.  The Air Force must purchase and maintain firefighting equipment.  All of these costs add up to over $6,000,000 per year and those costs will go up every year with inflation.

Pittsburgh 20 year fixed costs, $400,000.  Dobbins 20 year costs (unadjusted for inflation) $120,000,000.