Usually, BRAC is a matter of shedding excess property or unused land, and as McCollum pointed out, the Pentagon has identified around 20 percent of its holdings as excess. But in a hearing back in 2019, other Members of Congressa different metric for deciding which bases to close: vulnerability to natural disasters.
The Department of Defense occupies more than 500,000 structures, spread across nearly 28 million acres worldwide, with military facilities in every American state. DoD is, for example, the single largest employer in the three most populous states—California, Texas, and Florida—as well as Alaska, the largest.DoD started consolidating that footprint at the end of the Cold War through the BRAC process, shutting down or significantly rearranging some 200 military installations since 1988.