Originally published at The Augusta Chronicle, Jan. 15, 2006, https://www.augustachronicle.com/stories/2006/01/15/met_43593.shtml.
By Jeremy Craig
As Fort Gordon celebrates its 65th anniversary this year, its boosters have plenty to celebrate about its future.
After surviving the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure round, the post is set to see new construction, bringing more jobs to the area and new military and civilian personnel.
“Fort Gordon is in excellent shape and the future is very bright,” said U.S. Rep. Charlie Norwood, R-Ga., who helped to form the community’s anti-BRAC coalition.
After several years of community mobilization against closure, the announcement of what bases the Pentagon wanted to close came in May. Fort Gordon was to remain open.
Other Georgia bases weren’t so lucky. The Navy Supply Corps School in Athens; Fort McPherson and Fort Gillem in Atlanta; and Naval Air Station Atlanta became the first bases in Georgia selected and confirmed for closure.
After a nine-member commission wrangled with the BRAC list, President Bush confirmed the list in the latter half of 2005, and Congress didn’t resist.
It will take several years to close the bases.
Fort Gordon won’t be gaining new personnel or missions directly from the closing bases, but it is making gains through other processes separate from BRAC.
The gains that observers see coming this year and in the next few years are related to military intelligence, as the nation continues to fight terrorism.
In 2004, $230 million in spending was announced to add a new building to the Gordon Regional Security Operations Center, run by the Defense Department and the National Security Agency.
The center’s exact mission is secret, but it is used in intelligence operations, intercepting signals to help track terrorists.
“Those folks have done a great job in working with the WMD issue in Iraq and the interrogation of Iraqis (during the war),” said U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga.
Mr. Chambliss said the center was very useful to the military and gave the Pentagon a very good reason to keep Fort Gordon open.
“That value in and of itself showed the value of Fort Gordon to the military, and it’s one of the prime reasons that when it came to look at base closures … (Fort Gordon) not only survived but is expanding,” he said.
The new facility for the center is expected to bring 100 to 125 new people per year for five years, said retired Army Col. Thom Tuckey, the former garrison commander and executive director of the CSRA Alliance for Fort Gordon, which worked to stave off closure.
The NSA, in fact, held a job expo in 2005 in Augusta, seeking people who can fill high-tech jobs.
“They’ve probably hired 100 civilians already,” said Mr. Tuckey, who is also the director for military affairs for the Augusta Metro Chamber of Commerce.
Fort Gordon houses personnel from all service branches because of its training school for satellite communications and intelligence activities.
More Navy personnel are expected to come on board at Fort Gordon, Mr. Tuckey said, as the Navy reorganizes its intelligence functions. The fort is projected to receive more than 200 additional sailors within the next few months, he said.
There’s still some potential to receive more missions and troops, Mr. Tuckey said.
The decisions of the Overseas Basing Commission, the overseas equivalent of BRAC, haven’t been finalized, and as bases are closed and realigned in the U.S. over the next few years, there might be “tweaking” of plans to move troops and missions around.
“It will be on a smaller scale,” he said. “It would not be a 3,000-soldier brigade moving here, but several hundred from a battalion here and there. Over time, Fort Gordon will be a gainer.”
In addition, the post’s housing privatization project – called the Residential Communities Initiative – is under way, with about 60 percent to 80 percent of renovating work to post housing to be assigned to local contractors, Mr. Tuckey said.
“That’s a multimillion-dollar shot in the arm for the local economy,” he said.
The recent growth at Fort Gordon has probably made the Augusta Metro Chamber of Commerce’s economic impact figure of $1 billion out of date, he said.
Fort Gordon is also benefitting from BRAC in that money for a new military police complex probably wouldn’t have been approved for the fort unless other bases were to close, Mr. Norwood said. The roughly $4.6 million was approved in November.
“Some bases that are closing had money appropriated that didn’t need it … and (Mr. Chambliss) made sure the extra money came to Fort Gordon,” he said.
“It’s just a little piece of luck. We thought it would be two to three years before we’d get it, and (the post) desperately needs it,” Mr. Norwood said.
Even though the 2005 BRAC is over, that’s not to say there won’t be another closure round in the 2010s.
“It will happen because (Defense Secretary) Donald Rumsfeld didn’t get anything near what he hoped to achieve in terms of infrastructure reduction,” Mr. Tuckey said.
“The worst thing we can do now is sit back and say ‘BRAC’s over,’” he said.
Before BRAC, Augustans were told to show support for the fort, and the installation’s future became one of the top concerns of many people.
Local political candidates, such as former Augusta Commissioner Barbara Sims in 2003, even made saving the fort part of their campaign advertisements.
But, Mr. Tuckey said, there is a danger that people in the area will become complacent about the fort again.
The military can see sudden displays of support for it that fade after the danger of BRAC passes, he said.
Support can be measured in different ways, including the number of businesses offering discounts, the assistance to families and support during unit deployments and redeployments.
“Those military communities that think you can turn BRAC on and off … those are the communities that lose,” he said.
Still, BRAC is necessary to get rid of waste, Mr. Norwood said.
“We could always be a victim, but we want to make Fort Gordon so valuable that no one can think of closing it.”