OLF, chicken or egg? ( Proposed landing strip in NC a fraud)

The Pentagon has frequently cited the "fog of war" to describe confusion that can scramble the best-laid battle strategies.

That same phenomenon may now beset circumstances surrounding the evolving decisions that led to the Navy's selection of Washington County for its preferred outlying landing field site. Just what came when -- and in what order -- now befuddles many who have followed the process since its inception.

And the very record that reflects that evolution now appears subject to different interpretations by the Navy and OLF opponents.

One of the key issues at the heart of briefs filed by both sides is homebasing options and how -- and when -- such decisions logically and strategically influenced the Navy's alleged need for an OLF and the location for that OLF -- a classic chicken-or-egg conundrum.

Attorneys representing the Navy contend all environmental studies -- the much-argued "hard look" at issues required by the National Environmental Policy Act -- have shown clearly that all assessments have been thorough and by-the-book, building a logical path directly to Washington County.

"There is no logic," contends Derb Carter, Southern Environmental Law Center senior attorney, adding the Navy study team -- Tiger Team -- tailored its findings "in deciding to pick a site that violates (the Navy's own) criteria."

"These are the team of people assembled by the Navy to write the environmental document that is now being challenged," said Carter. "The e-mails capture exactly what was going on at that time. ... They actually reflect the context; they're not taken out of context."

The Navy doesn't fault some of the contentions in the opposition's brief, conceding that political realities were taken into account. Decisions of such magnitude, say the Navy, are not made in a "vacuum."

However, which came first, the decision to build an OLF -- initially, only a strategic option, according to Navy records -- or the decision to break up -- split homebase -- 10 East Coast Super Hornet squadrons figures prominently into the equation -- and the civil lawsuit.

Navy records clearly demonstrate that placing some of the squadrons outside Virginia has "zero operational benefit."

Similarly, the Navy's Environmental Impact Statement finds that an OLF outside Virginia is unnecessary unless a threshold number of Super Hornet squadrons is based outside Virginia.

However, the Navy cites NEPA requirements in contending that environmental considerations -- noise and air pollution around its Virginia facilities -- suggested a compromise, resulting in splitting the 10 squadrons originally slated for Virginia.

Less optimistic analysts predict North Carolina will never see the two squadrons slated for Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point. Indeed, the Navy contends the opposition lawsuit is so broad in its prohibitions that basing any squadrons outside Virginia is not allowable under the current preliminary injunction. Even a permanent injunction, says the Navy, will have to be redefined to allow such basing in North Carolina, regardless of the OLF location.

And the Navy's latest brief appears to ask the court for more specific directions.

"I think what the Navy's saying is, 'Court, give us more direction if you're going to enjoin us,'" explained Kiran Mehta, Kennedy Covington team attorney. "'Don't just say you can't build anything, or you can't do anything until you've complied with NEPA. ... Here's what you have to do before I lift my injunction.'"

Following Base Realignment and Closure reviews in the 1990s, the Navy closed Cecil Field in Florida and reviewed strategies on how best to relocate Hornet squadrons that had been based there.

"When the lights (are) all turned off and the doors locked, all that (will be) left of the largest military installation in the Jacksonville area and the South's only Master Jet Base will be 30,000 acres of land, some buildings and equipment," states Globalsecurity.org (see http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/facility/cecil-field.htm.).

The field was finally shut down in late 1999 just as Sen. Elizabeth Dole, Armed Service Committee member, was shaping the campaign for her successful bid for the Senate. Dole, in touring Eastern North Carolina, had gotten an earful of complaints, noted her spokesman Brian Nick, when residents recalled Cherry Point's failure to land a single Hornet squadron, generally regarded as worth $15-20 million per squadron to the local economy.

Ultimately, a near-concurrent effort to construct an OLF within one mile of the current Washington County site -- as well as establish more military controlled airspace, or Military Operations Areas -- failed, and Hornet squadrons went elsewhere.

Worthy of note, Marine Corps officials, according to military documents, have never deemed the MOA subject closed, contending instead the decade-long effort to acquire more airspace is simply "under review."

Dole, then, was armed for bear when the OLF and MOA campaigns resumed, indicated Nick.

A letter agreeing to support the Navy's decision -- cosigned by Dole and Sen. John Warner, Armed Services Committee chairman -- was, according to her spokesman, Dole's effort to ensure politics didn't enter the Navy's decision as the senator perceived had occurred in the 1990s.

Capable minds on both sides of the issue, however, disagree on the substance of Dole's letter.

One member of a local delegation that met with Hansford T. Johnson, then-acting Secretary of the Navy, insists the Dole/Warner agreement -- on its face -- doesn't pass the "giggle test." Dole, he insists, would not sign the equivalent of a blank check, pledging to support the Navy's decision, if she didn't have some implicit assurance that North Carolina wouldn't be shortchanged as Dole had perceived it was in the '90s.

Also implicit in that notion, he said, is a requirement that Super Hornet squadrons be split to assure that both senators' constituents would share the military largesse.

However, navigating these murky waters is a little like navigating the Pamlico River and Sound without a chart -- finding the bottom is, at best, a random process. Opposition attorneys indicate even the Navy may be having trouble with its own narrative.

"In their last brief," said Mehta, "(the Navy) said that both the (Draft Environmental Impact Statement) and the (Final Environmental Impact Statement) had a single preferred (homebasing) alternative; in fact both of them had two alternatives."

Early in the process, the Navy, based on its records, considered Naval Air Station Beaufort in South Carolina, MCAS Cherry Point in North Carolina and Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia, as well as split-basing options calling for up to two alternatives. The now-familiar 8/2 split -- with a 6/4 alternative -- would base eight Super Hornet squadrons, along with two replacement squadrons, in Virginia and two in Cherry Point.

"Assistant Secretary Johnson's view was that, to put an OLF in North Carolina, we had to put at least two squadrons down there," said Carter. "That's the payoff."

Mehta faults the Navy for not revisiting OLF sites and existing facilities in Virginia which were originally rejected because they were beyond the Navy's 50 nautical mile limit, a limit that was bent in selecting Washington County -- 70 nautical miles from NAS Oceana.

"If you're going to bend the rules that much," contends Mehta, "why not bend them just a little bit more (to accomodate the Virginia sites) if there's other issues with respect to the Washington-Beaufort site. Of course what they never acknowledged is that there are other issues with respect to the Washington/Beaufort site."

Attorneys opposing the Navy relied upon University of North Carolina and Duke law student teams to plumb the depths of over 200,000 pages of documents the Navy turned over under court order. Based upon statements contained within those documents -- including internal Navy e-mails -- opposition attorneys allege it's clear that politics, not operational needs, dictated the OLF site selection, requiring "reverse engineering" and "fabrication" of supporting data to support a contention the Navy insists relies on out-of-context interpretations of Navy memos and e-mails.

The record itself may be equally murky, based upon the same Navy documents. The Navy's Tiger Team is alleged to have watered down language in the Final Environmental Impact Statement to make more difficult to pin down the meaning of statements.

"It goes back to the same fundamental problem that has existed all along," he explained. "The Navy's just not objectively evaluating the need for an OLF and where to put it."

So far, Boyle's rulings appears to support that allegation. But all the legal wrangling has continued to delay resolution through a civil trial, now slated for winter 2005 at the earliest. Both Navy and opposition attorneys have filed for dismissal. A ruling on those motions is scheduled for Jan. 19.

And so it appears resolving the chicken-or-egg pre-eminence as well environmental issues, will be left to the federal court -- if not in North Carolina's Eastern District, then the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Virginia.

"The court's objective always is to get to the truth," said Mehta. "We've had different stories from the Navy on this, and we haven't gotten there yet apparently."

When I first say the signs in northeasternnorthcarolina saying "Stop OLF," I figured some Norwegian guy had run amok. But the more I read about the proposed landing field, the more absurd it sounds. The Navy has not only failed to make a cogent case for the facility from a military standpoint and from a tax expenditure standpoint, but has compounded the error with a web of cover-ups and outright fabrication.

For some time now, my hometown Charlotte Observer, though nearly 300 miles from the proposed site, has been crusading against the project. Under most circumstances, an Observer stand on a given issue would tend to cause me to take the opposite view. But that's a knee-jerk tendency; in this case, they're right.

Associate Editor Jack Betts wrote an op-ed piece in Sunday's paper. The headline of the column is innocuous, but I think the column is pretty devastating:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

OLF opponents off base, Navy brass argues
Those embarrassing e-mails were taken out of context, admiral says

JACK BETTS

RALEIGH - The Navy is shifting tactics in a campaign it has been losing much of the past year -- the public debate on whether it makes sense to put a jet landing field near one of the nation's most important wildlife refuges.

Last week the Navy dispatched an admiral and other federal officials to visit newspapers in North Carolina that have raised questions about the plan to build an outlying landing field (OLF) in Washington County near the Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge. Large waterfowl such as snow geese and tundra swans winter in the refuge, presenting a safety and operational challenge to the Navy's plan for aircraft carrier pilots to practice landings with new Super Hornet jets.

The visits were scheduled the same day the Navy's and OLF opponents' latest briefs were due in federal court in Raleigh in a lawsuit challenging whether the Navy took the required hard look at the OLF's environmental consequences. Judge Terrence Boyle, who has halted work on the OLF and rejected Navy requests to be allowed to continue buying land, will hold a hearing on the litigation Jan. 19.

The Navy's visit to N.C. newspapers represents a new public relations tack. Naval officials seemed reluctant to answer questions about the OLF in the past couple of years and sometimes said they could not talk because of pending litigation.

Why the change?

Until recently, the Navy enjoyed at least the tacit support of two major newspapers whose extended readership overlaps parts of northeastern North Carolina. The (Norfolk) Virginian-Pilot editorialized in favor of the Navy's tentative decision in 2003 to put eight squadrons of Super Hornets at Ocean Naval Air Station in Virginia Beach, and two squadrons at Cherry Point Marine Air Station in North Carolina, with an OLF in North Carolina. The plan represented "a sensible compromise on jet noise," the newspaper said.

The (Raleigh) News & Observer, meanwhile, also lent editorial support. In early 2003 the newspaper opined that while nature's birds and Navy jets wouldn't make good neighbors, "the final decision must be based on what is best for the Navy." It said if the Navy believed it could operate safely, "its needs in perilous times outweigh those of migrating birds."

But this fall, lawyers for OLF opponents came across damaging e-mails during the discovery phase of the lawsuit. Among other things, Navy e-mails quoted one staff officer as saying they had to "fabricate" justifications for the OLF decision and in another e-mail observed, "Now we have to reverse engineer the whole process to justify the outcome." The e-mails also cited political pressure to split the Super Hornet squadrons between Oceana and Cherry Point, and noted talks between Virginia Sen. John Warner (a former secretary of the Navy) and N.C. Sen. Elizabeth Dole.

When those e-mails became part of the public record Nov. 22, newspaper reaction was harsh. The Navy probably wasn't surprised by The Charlotte Observer, which has raised questions about the OLF consistently since December of 2002 and called for another N.C. site. But the Navy must have been stung by the reaction of The Virginian Pilot and The News and Observer, whose former ownership included a secretary of the Navy in the Wilson administration. "Ground the plan," The N&O opined two days after the e-mails became public.

The Virginian-Pilot editorialized that the Navy must provide persuasive answers to charges of political interference: "If these allegations are true, the Navy has justified confiscating private property for less than honorable reasons. Perhaps the Navy has a logical explanation for all this. It's hard to imagine one that will remove the doubts."

By then the Navy was already moving to staunch the damage. It commissioned Rear Admiral Donald Bullard, a Naval aviator recently back from duty in Afghanistan, to review the extensive record and drafting of an environmental impact statement. He led a contingent that met with News & Observer editors and reporters last week and also met with Observer writers to challenge OLF opponents' characterization of the e-mails. Bullard said his review of the record showed the Navy had fully complied with the requirements of federal law and that a staff officer's concerns about reverse engineering had been taken out of context. Those concerns involved potential OLF sites in Virginia, he said, not North Carolina. And the internal debate showed a Navy confident enough in its own deliberations to have frank exchanges as each step of the OLF search progressed.

And, he pointed out, it was a part of the American system that the nation's political leadership -- which controls the military -- would have input over such important considerations as where to base new facilities.

The Navy's official view of its e-mail exchanges, and its position on a number of other issues related to the possibility of collisions with birds and choice of sites, are still subject to considerable question. I think the Navy's wrong on this; the Navy thinks it's right.

Ultimately, though, the person the Navy must persuade is a federal judge who lives in Elizabeth City and who soon will be up for confirmation to the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond. And so far, Judge Terrence Boyle has ruled three times against the Navy, suggesting that opponents are right in arguing that it failed to take the necessary hard look at the OLF's impact on the environment or an adequate assessment of other sites.

Jack Betts is an Observer associate editor based in Raleigh. Reach him at jbetts@charlotteobserver.com.

You asked for it. Here goes.

Back in the day the Navy decided to base like aircraft at the same base on each coast. They called those bases "Master Jet Bases." After BRAC there just aren't that many jet bases left. OLFs are training fields which don't have permanently stationed aircraft, but are used for training. In the Navy TACAIR community they are used mostly to practice landings prior to shipboard operations

NAS Oceana is the Navy's Master Jet Base on the East Coast. It currently has F-14's and F-18 A/B/C's with F-18E/F on the way and F-14's going away. While Oceana used to be in the middle of nowhere it is now in downtown suburban Va. Beach. The landing pattern goes right over a large mall. The Navy currently operates an OLF called Fentress which is about 11 miles south of Oceana. Again, this used to be out in the middle of nowhere, but is now surrounded by houses.

Depending on level of currency (days since last carrier landing) Navy pilots need a certain number of FCLP (field carrier landing practice) landings graded by an LSO (landing signal officer) prior to going to the ship. With Oceana being in the middle of town most of the FCLPs are completed at Fentress. The Navy sometimes needs to operate this field around the clock, so needless to say the neighbors hate us. The funny thing is that one of the big wheels in the anti-jet noise crowd is a retired naval officer.

The Navy figured out their days of operating at Fentress were numbered and started looking for a new OLF. That is why this location in North Carolina was selected. This has nothing to do with Cherry Point getting Super Hornets or not getting Super Hornets. Either way, the Navy isn't going to be able to bounce at Fentress.

What the Navy needs is an 8,000 foot airstrip out in the middle of nowhere, within a reasonable distance of Oceana. Pilots need to be able to fly out of Oceana, fly to this field, get 6-10 touch and goes below max trap weight, and be able to return to Oceana with a comfortable amount of fuel and minimum interaction with ATC.

I don't know what is so special about this section of North Carolina. Evidently it must be pretty special when even posters on this website are saying screw the Navy.

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