N.J. town rallies against closing

By Melissa Harris | Sun Staff

May 28, 2005

EATONTOWN, N.J. - On the more-than-1,000-acre Fort Monmouth military base, Michael Brunskill and thousands of other civilian engineers develop the latest in electronic warfare, including computers that jam detonators on car bombs and flares that veer shoulder-fired missiles off course.

If the Pentagon gets its way, most of these high-salary, high-tech jobs would move to the Baltimore region over the next several years as part of a nationwide downsizing and reorganization of the military.

But Brunskill and fellow workers are doing their best to thwart Maryland's most controversial gain: a proposal that would bring thousands of employees from Fort Monmouth to the Aberdeen Proving Ground just two hours south.

"I will absolutely not move," said Brunskill, 49, the chief of a team of 70 engineers who build systems that protect soldiers from surface-to-air missiles. "My son is the quarterback of the high school football team. I'm not going to take that away from him when I can easily find employment elsewhere."

To reverse the Pentagon's proposal to a nine-member base-closing commission, leaders in the Fort Monmouth area have launched a political and publicity offensive.

They've held "Save Our Fort" rallies, hired consultants to assess the plan's economic damage, asked citizens to write letters and formed a "Patriots Alliance" of local defense contractors.

Every worker who quits or retires early would add thousands of dollars in recruitment costs to Fort Monmouth's closure. That would bolster arguments from New Jersey officials, who say that the large number of people expected to stay behind would so disrupt the fort's research efforts that the move wouldn't save a dime.

Maryland officials said that they expect a tough fight from Fort Monmouth - which has saved some of its jobs from being shipped off in the past - but the threats from its workers do not worry them.

"There are people here who can replace them," said Aris Melissaratos, Maryland's secretary for economic development and the leader of Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr's two-year-old council to protect the state's military jobs. "We have the workforce depth. We're satisfying some of the Army's electronic warfare needs already."

Stephen Fuller, an economist at George Mason University, said that his study of a similar move of Pentagon civilians from Northern Virginia to Memphis after the 1995 base-closure round resulted in one-third of them retiring early, another third moving and another third quitting.

Vigorous efforts to save bases are not unusual. Right now, they're taking place at naval installations in Pascagoula, Miss., and Groton, Conn.

But in contrast to the workforce at those installations, most workers at Fort Monmouth are civilians, who can't be ordered to move.

The base's surrounding boroughs, which would be temporarily paralyzed by the loss of Monmouth County's largest employer, are spending thousands of dollars to showcase its value.

The rallies, letter-writing campaigns and consultants already have drawn attention from two members of the Base Realignment and Closure Commission, who have expressed concerns about a brain drain inside Fort Monmouth's commands should it close.

Five of the nine votes on the Commission would be needed to override Fort Monmouth's closure, the Army's largest.

Innovative efforts

Founded in 1917 as Camp Alfred Vail, the New Jersey installation once trained pigeons to deliver coded messages to the front lines.

Over the years, it has celebrated numerous firsts - the first portable, hand-held "walkie-talkie" on the front lines, the first radar signal bounced off of the moon and the first televised weather satellite, called Tiros-1.

Of Fort Monmouth's 7,500 on-base workers, only about 500 are soldiers. The civilians are some of the army's most skilled engineers and scientists, who design battlefield technology in advanced computer labs, 3-D simulators and echo-free testing chambers.

Earlier this week, in a vault lined with blue foam spikes, Dan Duvak, who is working on a Ph.D., adjusted a mannequin dressed in an Army green helmet.