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chapter five Guns, Dogs, Fences, and Base Transfers During Sparta’s war with Argos, King Cleomenes (520–491 BC) negotiated a thirty-day truce with Argos that he violated nightly by ravaging their fields. Cleomenes never understood the fuss over the violations, Cicero reports, because of a technicality: The truce stipulated days, not nights.1 As the previous chapter began describing, those trying to ensure that closed, realigned, or realigning military properties in the post–Cold War era were available for reuse and redevelopment without compromising public health, safety, and the environment knew how the people of Argos felt by the end of the Clinton administration. As important as the gains noted in chapter 4 were to the U.S. military in shaping , preparing, and responding the base cleanup “battlefield” to the services’ liking, a spate of more technical cleanup and transfer issues involving priority setting, base reuse, and land transfers also had to be resolved. Indeed, these were critical as part of greening proponents’ ongoing offensive to speed up actual cleanup (not just studies) of contaminated properties. As in chapter 4, how and in what ways this second tier of issues were resolved again tested the patience, persistence, and political aplomb of proponents of greening the military. Challenged in the process was the resiliency of the military’s Cold War ethic in the post–Cold War era. As I will also demonstrate in this chapter, a parsing of language that would have made King Cleomenes blush drove these debates. Combined with the dynamics chronicled in the previous two chapters, the strategies and tactics used again sent consistently mixed signals about the priority to be given to greening efforts in the U.S. military. Moreover, they cumulatively left a halting, halfway, and patchworked set of structures, processes, and procedures whose misalignment further complicated the institutionalization of a green ethic in the services. To see how and why this was the case, in this chapter I review the patterns of politics driving and driven by three major and interrelated sets of decisions affecting how best to transfer properties. First, what methodologies and criteria should determine the order of base cleanups at DoD sites? Second, regardless of order, under what circumstances, using what types of conveyances, and held accountable in what ways for public health and safety could the military transfer properties to communities for redevelopment? Third, regardless of conveyance instrument, could the services cut their costs and still protect public health and safety by using institutional controls? The Relative Risk Ranking Challenge With tens of thousands of polluted sites spread across the nation, the Pentagon had worked since 1986 to prioritize cleanups on a “worst first” basis. And so confident was the military in its finished defense priority model (DPM) that representatives fully expected a panel of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to endorse their model roundly in 1991. Reminiscent of the military’s heroic self-image and hubris, one Pentagon spokesperson even told the NAS panel that “as far as [the Pentagon is] concerned, the key task for the Academy is merely to add some credibility on Capitol Hill and out there [i.e., among the general public]” to DoD’s model.2 To the Pentagon’s chagrin, however, panel members disparaged the complex , quantitatively driven, and seventy-five-variable-informed model as poorly conceived, misspecified, and underspecified. Said one member sarcastically, the DPM was no more than “a process of getting numbers to derive more numbers to go to a table to get a further number all in an effort to rationalize a comparison of apples and oranges.”3 Indeed, when asked by NAS panelists how a cleanup “site” was defined and cross-site comparisons made, Pentagon briefers responded that they were not sure how to compare a “large, relatively benign problem to a smaller, more hazardous one.” Likewise, when panelists asked why the DPM did not include important cultural and regional differences in such things as fish consumption or bathing patterns , the briefers responded, “We want to be as accurate as we can . . . , [but] we have to weigh how much additional information will benefit the precision of the score.” But even when measured accurately, NAS panelists complained that some factors were weighted in ways incommensurate with their potential dangers . The model relegated unexploded ordinance (UXO), for example, to the bottom of its site cleanup priority list, as it did the potential harm from the burning of chemical weapons at its disposal...

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