Broken bases

Almost every day at Langley Air Force Base, Va., airmen walk slowly and deliberately, shoulder-to-shoulder, up and down the runways where $31 million-dollar F-15s regularly take off and land.

The airmen stare fixedly at the pavement, not at the planes roaring overhead. They ignore the bustle of the fighter jocks along the flight line. They are focused on a critical mission that could improve the Air Force's ability to fight and could save hundreds of thousands of dollars: They're picking up trash.

These foreign object debris walks, or FODs, are a common feature of life at Langley. Should an errant piece of runway debris get sucked into an F-15's engine, fixing the damage could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions. With too little money set aside for repairing runways, the Air Force can't afford more sophisticated preventive maintenance than sending airmen out across the cracked pavement to find stray pieces of concrete or asphalt.

"That's not the best and highest use of a mechanic," says Air Force Maj. Gen. Earnest Robbins, the service's top civil engineer. "The Air Force knows it's an issue, but it's matter of where you put scarce dollars."

The Air Force is not alone. Across the nation, military bases and installations have fallen into disrepair. The Defense Department has a staggering $60 billion backlog of maintenance work ranging from fixing leaking roofs to repaving runways. The military services have not set aside enough money to renovate and replace buildings as they age. At current funding levels, it would take 192 years to upgrade all military installations to a level that would satisfy all military mission requirements. Just to maintain its crumbling facilities and insufficient infrastructure, the Defense Department would have to divert billions of dollars from training service members and buying new weaponry.

During recent interviews with service members and officers and visits to military bases, Government Executive found:

• Soldiers deploying to Afghanistan often spend the weeks before they ship out in dilapidated, wooden barracks-with no air conditioning-at Fort Bragg, N.C. The barracks were built for temporary use during World War II, but soldiers still live in them because the base is overcrowded.
• Marines and civilian personnel at Camp Pendleton, Calif., are working in World War II Quonset huts converted to administrative offices. Summer temperatures top 100 degrees in the huts.
• Fleming Hall, headquarters building for the 43rd Support Group at Pope Air Force Base, N.C., built in 1933, would fail a workplace safety inspection on just about every score. All drinking fountains have been removed from the building because rust from 50-year old pipes contaminates the water. There are no elevators to carry people up the building's three stories, a violation of the 1990 Americans With Disabilities Act. The nearly 20 layers of lead-based paint on the walls peel and flake when passersby brush against them.
• Two years ago, large chunks of concrete rained down on Navy mechanics and aircraft from the ceiling of an aging airplane hangar at North Island Naval Air Station, Calif. The Navy had put off for three years spending the $1 million it would have cost to repair the hangar.

The deterioration of barracks, buildings, power and water systems and runways is taking a toll on America's ability to mobilize and to fight, the survey found. "Military installations and facilities are an integral component of readiness. Installations are the platforms from which our forces successfully deploy to execute their diverse missions," Ray DuBois, Defense deputy undersecretary for installations, told the House Appropriations military construction subcommittee in April.

DuBois told legislators that the condition of military facilities not only affects the morale of military and civilian personnel, it makes it harder for the armed services to keep good people. "Quality of life and quality of workplace are directly linked to the quality of our infrastructure," he said at the April hearing. "Many surveys have shown that poor quality facilities are a major source of dissatisfaction for families and service members alike. Our aging and deteriorating infrastructure has a direct impact on retention."