States with the most military personnel
1. California: 288,064
2. Virginia: 237,682
3. Texas: 235,851
4. North Carolina: 159,180
5. Georgia: 137,591
6. Florida: 125,453
Pentagon data on active-duty, reserve and civilian personnel in 2013
Georgia’s biggest military bases
Base name Location Active-duty Reserve Civilian Total
Fort Benning Columbus 24,359 852 5,926 31,137
Fort Stewart Hinesville 24,168 639 4,515 29,322
Robins Air Force Base Warner Robins 3,898 2,912 15,340 22,150
Fort Gordon Augusta 9,956 1,505 3,384 14,845
Moody Air Force Base Valdosta 4,627 289 538 5,454
Pentagon data from 2013
Staff Sgt. Tim Jalbert rejoined the U.S. Army out of a deep sense of anger after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, making the military his career.
The Army has grown since then and adapted to fight two major wars. But with withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq has come a proposal to shrink the Army to pre-World War II levels as part of an overall military retrenchment.
The move could help weed out those who don’t belong, Jalbert said. But he fears what could happen to the Army’s strength. “I don’t like it,” Jalbert said as he shopped at the Ranger Joe’s military supply store here in the shadow of Fort Benning. “If they reduce it to piddly size and if something bad happens, it will severely degrade our ability to deal with it.”
Business groups have another fear and are already lobbying against cuts to a military presence that generates an estimated $21 billion a year for the state economy. Georgia is the fifth-largest military state, according to Pentagon figures as of last year, with 137,000 active-duty, reserve and civilian personnel.
The economic hit would be felt particularly south of Macon, where most of the state’s bases are.
Fort Benning could lose training classes. Moody Air Force Base in Valdosta could lose half its strength if the A-10 aircraft is retired. Fort Stewart, outside Savannah, already is set to lose a brigade.
Military budgets are not going to get fewer dollars, as next year’s $500 billion spending proposal is projected to grow, but slower than the Pentagon is used to, while off-budget war spending dwindles. For Winslow Wheeler, director of the Straus Military Reform Project at the private nonprofit Project on Government Oversight, the proposal falls short of needed fundamental changes.
“They have sat on their hands as the costs got totally out of control, on both hardware and personnel,” said Wheeler, a former Congressional staffer specializing in military costs. “And they’re now living the consequences of that.”
Many Georgia installations are well positioned to weather the storm.
“Every state’s going to have similar issues,” said Georgia Republican U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss, a longtime member of the Armed Services Committee. “On balance, simply because of the number of military installations that we have, we’re going to come out pretty good.”
In Congress, which must pass the Pentagon’s budget, the pushback has already begun from lawmakers concerned about the impact on military readiness and their home states’ economies.
For Fort Benning, Fort Stewart and Fort Gordon in Augusta, the Army troop reductions loom large.
The Pentagon proposes to reduce the number of active-duty soldiers from 520,000 to between 440,000 and 450,000. If across-the-board spending cuts return – Congress’ recent budget deal put them off until 2016 at the earliest — the force could go as low as 420,000.
“An Army of this size is larger than required to meet the demands of our defense strategy,” Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said in a speech last month laying out the cuts. “Given reduced budgets, it is also larger than we can afford to modernize and keep ready.”
The Army has not said which bases those cuts will come from. The process will play out over years and depends on how much of the cuts Congress actually approves.
Fort Benning, which half of Army recruits pass through, could come under the knife because it has a lot of training missions: Training classes will be smaller or less frequent as the Army shrinks.
The Army already announced Fort Stewart will lose a brigade next year, a net loss of about 1,900 soldiers. The “best guess” from Chuck Hunsaker, assistant director of Gov. Nathan Deal’s economic development Defense Initiative, is that losing the brigade means a $300 million economic loss for the region.
U.S. Rep. Jack Kingston, a Savannah Republican, said the new cuts will likely mean Fort Benning will lose a brigade because of its size and “since it was spared this last go-round.”
Fort Gordon is well-positioned to withstand any force cuts as it becomes the new home of the Army’s Cyber Command, which Hunsaker said will bring 4,000 jobs by 2019.
The biggest single threat to any Georgia base comes at Moody Air Force base, because the Air Force is proposing to retire the aging A-10 aircraft.
The A-10, which provides close air support to ground troops, is being phased out in favor of the long-awaited F-35 – which is still years away from being fully operational, and the Air Force has not decided where the new planes will be stationed.
“If you eliminate the A-10s and Moody doesn’t have an F-35 mission, it would be devastating for Moody,” Kingston said.
Hunsaker put the job losses as high as 2,000.
When Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James visited the base recently, she was joined by Chambliss, Georgia Republican U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson and U.S. Rep. Austin Scott, a Republican from Tifton, in part to talk about the A-10.
James announced that the rescue helicopter mission at Moody will continue and the helicopters will be replaced. But the Georgia delegation is challenging the decision to retire the A-10s, citing their performance record and the fact that the F-35 — at $400 billion, the most expensive weapons platform in Pentagon history — is not ready.
Scott proposed scaling back the purchase of F-35’s slightly to keep the A-10 fleet, but Chambliss said the F-35 purchases are already behind schedule and the savings could be found elsewhere.
Picking up F-35 purchases boosts Georgia, too: Part of the plane is made at the Lockheed Martin plant in Marietta, and that’s projected to support 1,000 jobs by the end of the decade.
Wheeler, the military budget expert, said Georgia’s members of Congress have a good point about the A-10.
He said favoring the F-35 is an example of “the Pentagon ignoring the unaffordability of some of its programs and wanting to press ahead, and in order to pay for them getting rid of high-performing low-cost programs.”
At Robins Air Force Base in Warner Robins, Chambliss said he was worried about plans to reduce the size of the J-STARS surveillance fleet and using the savings on newer planes. But Chambliss said he was pleased that the Air Force shows no signs of taking up a recent proposal to eliminate the Air Reserve Command at Robins.
Other big Georgia installations appear to avoid big setbacks in the Pentagon proposal. The Naval Submarine Base at Kings Bay, near the Florida border, is home to Ohio-class subs that are in the midst of a lengthy redesign and aren’t going anywhere. The Marine Corps Logistics Base in Albany remains well positioned, said Albany Democratic U.S. Rep. Sanford Bishop, as it helps support nearby Jacksonville.
The Army National Guard also faces a reduction, perhaps as high as 11 percent, to 315,000 in the coming years. Alarmed by that possibility, the National Guard Association of the United States is saying the nation should rely more on the Guard because it is a lot cheaper than the regular Army when the Guard is not deployed.
“This one of these situations where you just don’t know what is over the horizon,” said John Goheen, a spokesman for the association. “Our argument is let’s keep the most capacity that we possibly can.”
Georgia is now home to 11,152 Army National Guard personnel.
The size of Georgia’s military presence has been fairly stable in recent years. The 2005 Base Realignment and Closure Commission shuttered Atlanta’s Fort Gillem and Fort McPherson and the U.S. Navy Supply Corps school in Athens, but the state came out a net winner, as more missions came to the big bases.
From 2003 to 2013 the number of military personnel stationed in Georgia, according to Pentagon figures, rose by about 20,000.
But as those numbers shrink across the country, Georgia will lose its fair share. Hagel asked for a new BRAC but there’s little chance Congress will go for it in an election year.
After last year’s across-the-board chop in military spending brought furloughs for civilian employees, the business community is anxiously eyeing the new cuts.
Cobb County business leaders are worried about the fate of Dobbins Air Reserve Base, which is home to more than 4,900 personnel.
Joe Gaskin is a project manager with Arcadis, a Cobb County contractor that has done utility work at Dobbins.
“We definitely have to be concerned with it,” said Gaskin, a co-chairman of a Cobb Chamber of Commerce program that serves as a liaison with Dobbins. “It affects all of us.”
Jason McKenzie, co-owner of Ride on Bikes in Uptown Columbus, said just over half of his store’s business is tied to Fort Benning. His store started with two employees in 2003 and has grown to 12 workers in four times the space.
“It’s like a snowball effect,” said McKenzie, whose store rents, sells and repairs bikes. “Whenever you cut a contractor here and you cut their pay, then they don’t buy a bike that they were going to buy here. Then I don’t get the Subaru that I wanted to buy this year. And that (car salesman) doesn’t get the commission. And they don’t go to the grocery store.”
Business groups across the state have sprung into action, lobbying Congress against any spending cuts. Gary Jones, the former garrison commander at Fort Benning and now executive vice president for military affairs at the Greater Columbus Georgia Chamber of Commerce, is helping lead the charge.
“The light at the end of the tunnel is a train,” he said. “And people need to know it is coming.”
