Plan to Save Some Base Jobs Criticized : Military: Defense analysts say Clinton’s proposal for McClellan is flawed and could seriously erode savings the Air Force hopes to make.

WASHINGTON — President Clinton’s new plan for saving some of the 11,000 jobs that otherwise would be lost with the closing of McClellan Air Force Base near Sacramento may seem attractive politically but it is unlikely to produce the results he has promised, defense analysts said Thursday.

The White House said that Clinton would seek to ease the pain of the base closure by retaining 8,700 of the jobs at McClellan for five years and then channeling enough military repair contracts to private firms to enable up to 4,300 workers to find new jobs.

But defense analysts familiar with the issue said that the plan still is so sketchy--and the job outlook for the medium term still so uncertain--that there is no guarantee the President’s new plan to save jobs will come close to its targets.

At the same time, except for the five-year grace period to be granted to the 8,700 workers, analysts said it is difficult to see how the new program would produce substantially more relief than the Pentagon already has offered to communities hit hard by base closings.

As a result, the consensus outside the Administration is that the President’s action is mainly a political gesture likely to have only modest impact at best in “saving” the jobs of many of the workers who are about to be displaced at the sprawling maintenance facility.

With California wielding 54 electoral votes, Clinton’s new program appears to be designed to save “at least one job”--his own--said Stephen Hess, a political analyst at the nonpartisan Brookings Institution.

Paul Taibl, an analyst for Business Executives for National Security, a defense monitoring group, added: “The only thing he’s going to salvage is public opinion. The number of jobs likely to be saved is minuscule.”

Analysts asked these questions:

* With its total number of aircraft shrinking, does the Air Force really have enough maintenance work to support the plan to turn military jobs into private employment? In other words, given the amount of excess capacity in the Air Force maintenance system, will there be any work to rechannel?

Air Force officials have testified that the service can now justify only three of its five maintenance depots. Closing McClellan and Kelly Air Force Base in San Antonio would eliminate excess capacity but would not boost the workload.

Deputy Defense Secretary John P. White insisted that the Air Force has enough maintenance work on hand to keep all three remaining depots working at full steam and still channel a sufficient number of contracts to Sacramento-area firms.

But Loren B. Thompson, a Washington-based consultant, said that the only way the Administration would be able to guarantee jobs for Sacramento and San Antonio would be to take work away from other depots--or to use federal subsidies to finance unneeded work.

*

“The Administration is using this as an excuse for not making the hard choices that it needs to,” Thompson said.

* Will the Administration be able to obtain the legislation that it needs to carry out its plan for McClellan and Kelly?

Under current law, the Pentagon may send only 40% of its military maintenance work nationwide to private firms. That limit likely would permit “privatization” for one of the bases, but not both.

The House already has voted to repeal those barriers but the Senate Armed Services Committee is proving less willing to change current rules.

* Prospects that the Administration would be able to find enough commercial firms to bid on the maintenance contracts that it plans to offer to private companies in the Sacramento and San Antonio areas are uncertain.

White said that initial conversations with local defense contractors have shown that some local firms are interested in “examining” the program but many private analysts are dubious.

* Will the Air Force still be able to achieve the huge cost savings that it was seeking if it has to channel a substantial amount of maintenance and repair work to private firms in California and Texas?

White contended that the military would still reap most of the savings that it had sought because it would be free of the substantial expense of maintaining the government buildings and equipment.

But Dan Cosgrove, president of Defense Facilities Corp., an Alexandria, Va., consulting firm, said that the plan to freeze McClellan intact at 8,700 workers essentially defers most of the savings for five years and that turning half those jobs over to private contractors would erode the savings even more.

“What is happening here is that the government is creating an artificial situation to keep the jobs going,” Cosgrove said.

Even if the President were able to rechannel some of the work in the medium term, some critics said that the plan is not viable over the longer run because the Air Force is phasing out many of its major weapons systems and will have even less work to be done in future years.

Although the Air Force is about to receive more new C-17 transport aircraft, it is phasing out its high-maintenance B-52 bombers, C-141 transports and C-5 cargo planes and is likely to have fewer aircraft in coming years.

“Downstream, the Air Force is going to have to reduce capacity in [its] remaining depots in order to prop up the job situation in California,” the Business Executives for National Security’s Taibl said.

For all of Clinton’s claims, the government has little real experience with employing private contractors to do the work at military maintenance depots. Although White cited a pilot effort at Newark Air Force Base in Ohio as a model, the General Accounting Office, a congressional watchdog agency, reported last year that the Newark project has fallen far short of its goals and should be “re-evaluated.”

Even the political effectiveness of the President’s decision is being seriously questioned.

“My hunch is that this doesn’t do very much for Bill Clinton in the long run,” Brookings’ Hess asserted. “It gets him past today but there’s still 18 months until the election and by then a lot of other factors could come into play.”