Excess Facilities
Installation commanders are often forced to divert funds to operate and maintain obsolete and excess structures. These costs come at the expense of more important requirements, and could be avoided by demolishing or disposing of the unnecessary facilities.
As detailed in the 1997 Defense Reform Initiative Report, the Military Services surveyed their installations and identified over 80 million square feet of buildings,including more than 8,300 individual structures that could be demolished in the near future.
This is a sizeable amount…roughly equivalent to 12.3 Pentagons…and the Pentagon is one of the largest office buildings in the world! We need to eliminate these excess structures and redirect the operations and maintenance funds being spent on them to higher priorities.
During the first two years of this initiative, 1998 and 1999, the Department of Defense eliminated about 31 million square feet of excess space, exceeding the two-year goal of 25 million.
This year, we plan to eliminate an additional 15 million square feet.
The Department has also identified additional excess non-building structures -- such as towers and storage tanks - and is planning to demolish these as well.