From Fort Knox in Kentucky to the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, the Army is cutting civilian jobs.
As even larger defense cuts loom, the Pentagon will move forward with trimming the Defense Department’s civilian workforce. The Army confirmed this week it intends to move forward with a plan announced in July to cut 8,700 non-military jobs on 70 bases across the United States.
The news came as Washington prepared to play host to “America’s Game,” when teams for the Army and Navy football teams face off at the city’s FedEx Field today. Among the officials making public appearances at the pre-game pep rally yesterday was Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who has increasingly become the face of the Pentagon’s opposition to defense cuts.
The Army hopes to achieve most of the reductions through attrition, early retirement and voluntary buyouts before a deadline set in September 2012, Lt. Col. Laurel Devine, Pentagon public affairs officer, told The Daily yesterday.
“They’re not going to go out and go fire everybody,” Devine said, adding that if too many people remain on the books as the deadline nears next year, “we’ll probably have to re-assess.”
The cuts affect blue- and white-collar positions in 37 states, with the majority occurring in Army commands that handle installation management, training and doctrine. Four states — Virginia, Alabama, Georgia and Texas — are losing more than 600 jobs each, according to documents obtained by The Daily.
Even in states where the number of lost positions remains relatively low, the hit list includes a number of well-known installations. Among them are 16 jobs at the Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona, where the Army tests equipment in harsh desert conditions; 431 jobs at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, the home of many elite special operations teams; and 105 positions at West Point, the Army’s military academy in upstate New York.
The announced cuts come after the bipartisan supercommittee on deficit reduction failed to reach an agreement last month — even as Panetta issued dire warnings of the consequences of defense cuts.
In a Nov. 14 letter to Republican senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, Panetta said the committee’s failure could trigger across-the-board Defense spending cuts, reaching $1 trillion over the next decade.
“The impacts of these cuts would be devastating for the department,” he wrote. “Facing such large reductions, we would have to reduce the size of the military sharply. Rough estimates suggest after 10 years of these cuts, we would have the smallest ground force since 1940, the smallest number of ships since 1915, and the smallest Air Force in its history.”