The federal BRAC Commission heard on Monday from local and state officials who testified that Monterey’s Naval Postgraduate School and Defense Language Institute are unique academic institutions which provide a highly cost-effective service for the Department of Defense.

Senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, former Congressman Leon Panetta, Rep. Sam Farr and Monterey City Manager Fred Meurer repeatedly testified that NPS is widely considered the best academic institution in the military, and that DLI is the only institution in the nation capable of generating the types of linguists crucial to the war on terror.

Fanned by a front page story in Sunday’s Monterey County Herald—which seemed to contain erroneous information about the costs of the institutions—the BRAC panel expressed concerns about Monterey’s high cost of living.

Realignment advocates have suggested consolidating NPS with the Air Force Institute of Technology on Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio and the Herald article provided a cost comparison which highly favored Dayton.

At the end of the public testimony, the first question asked by BRAC commissioner Phillip Coyle was directed to Meurer, and referred to the Aug. 7 Herald article. That story pointed to “recently declassified defense department reports,” and claimed to show that the costs of running NPS in Monterey were significantly higher than they would be in Dayton or elsewhere.

Meurer responded by telling Coyle, “I wrote an e-mail to the reporter and told her I wish she had checked her numbers with me. You can do almost anything you want with numbers.”

City officials and others have since pointed out that the Herald’s analysis got two important figures wrong in factoring per-student costs. The story lists the number of NPS students at 1,250—ignoring almost 50,000 “short-course” students—and reports that the school’s budget is “$268 million, not counting millions more for research”—which seems to combine the school’s $76 million congressional appropriation and the $171 million that NPS raises through research grants.

“We are concerned with the fact that there are serious factual errors which we will be discussing with the Herald at a later time,” Monterey Assistant City Manager Fred Cohn later told the Weekly.

Yet outside of the cost of living flap, most testimony focused on the two institutions’ vital role in wartime.

“Education and training is not just the first weapon in peace, it’s the first weapon in war,” Panetta told the BRAC Commission at the Monterey Conference Center. “You can’t have good intelligence without language.”

With this said, Panetta then echoed what other local representatives told the BRAC commission during their testimonies—closing or relocating the Defense Language Institute and the Naval Postgraduate School would be a waste of money and, above all, a detriment to national security at a time when it faces unprecedented threats.

While the afternoon’s various testimony provided a litany of reasons why the schools should not be privatized, relocated or closed, each representative’s testimony eventually included the same ominous refrain.

“It would be a huge mistake to lose these two tremendous assets,” Sen. Feinstein said. “We’re in the middle of a war.”

“Closing NPS and DLI would cause irreparable harm to our nation’s security,” Sen. Boxer said.

“We cannot win the war on terrorism without the missions performed at DLI and NPS,” Panetta said.

“It’s not just the fate of these two institutions that rests in their hands, or the impact on Monterey,” Rep. Farr said. “But the safety and defense and military intellectual prowess of the United States.”

And in a highly detailed PowerPoint presentation to the four commissioners, Meurer pointed out exactly how research conducted at the institutions is focused on national security.

According to Meurer, NPS’s war on terror initiatives include strategies to counter Islamic extremism, virtual training technologies, remotely-piloted aircraft, autonomous underwater vehicles and network research, classified research in Maritime Domain Awareness, and computer security and information assurance.

Meurer also showed that 521 of the 547 Arabic linguists who received a bachelor of arts degree in 2004 graduated from DLI and all of the 157 Persian Farsi linguists from last year are DLI alumni.

“There is no equivalent [to DLI] in the public sector,” Senator Boxer confirmed. “We want to win the war on terror and to do that we must do more than simply pursue our military options…This is impossible if we can’t even speak the language.”

The hearing opened with video testimony from Feinstein and Boxer, both of whom stated that both institutions were vital to the war on terror and impossible to effectively relocate.

Boxer also pointed out that it would take “12 to 15 years to replicate the internal structure of DLI elsewhere” and reminded the commissioners that, “Time is our enemy in this fight.”

On behalf of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who could not attend the hearing because of prior commitments, his cabinet secretary Terry Tamminen read a letter to the commissioners. In this correspondence, Tamminen told the commission that DLI’s response to the immediate demand for more linguists who spoke Arabic, Pushto, Farsi, and other Central Asian languages after the events of Sept. 11, 2001, was “faster than any public or private college or university could have done.”

In his subsequent testimony, Panetta told the commission he realized that educational facilities and missions were considered second-class citizens by the military. “They’re not as important as ships, weapons, and tanks. It’s just a reality,” he said.

But, Panetta said, the commission simply couldn’t privatize DLI because of the quality of its faculty, its focus on difficult languages like Arabic, Farsi, Korean and Mandarin, and its unique mentoring relationship with nearby Monterey Institute of International Studies (MIIS)—whose faculty teaches DLI faculty how to teach.

“These assets don’t exist in the private sector,” Panetta told the commission. “Language training in our universities is a national scandal. No other school, including Stanford, could reasonably duplicate what DLI does.”

After Panetta, Rep. Sam Farr read a prepared statement focusing on the importance of Monterey’s location to both institutions and argued against the physical relocation of either school.

“Moving NPS and DLI is a misnomer because you’re not ‘moving’ it—you’re dismantling it and trying to reconstruct it elsewhere,” he said. “But not all the pieces will be there when you try to rebuild it.”

Farr warned the commission that they could order the military students and staff to move, but they couldn’t order civilian faculty, staff and other workers to move. Plus, he said, “You cannot transport the buildings and facilities.”

Farr then echoed earlier testimony by pointing out Monterey’s “key military jointness,” stating that students at NPS and DLI train in non-academic military exercises at nearby Fort Hunter-Liggett, Camp Roberts and perform Military Operations on Urban Terrain (MOUT) exercises on the ground of what was Fort Ord.

Farr also referred to the existence of “some of the last remaining uninterrupted airspace over Los Padres National Forest, and over the ocean” and easy access to open ocean for sea experience and battle readiness training.

“Where else in America do you have this kind of close proximity to facilities and training space of such varied nature, above and beyond but in concert with academics?”

Farr concluded by reiterating the fact that NPS has the “highest military value of all the military educational institutions” and is an important and unique research hotbed of immediate engineering, data analysis or program development for military applications.

“There is no vendor in the US who can replicate what NPS does, with as much professionalism, speed and military relevance,” Farr said. “Monterey is where America’s brain trust resides.”

The testimony in favor of retaining DLI and NPS concluded with Meurer’s PowerPoint presentation.

Meurer began by listing the dozens of higher education and research assets along the Monterey Bay Crescent, which include universities, marine laboratories, and government agencies like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Meurer stated that many NPS graduates go on to become significant military and state leaders, citing the King of Jordan as an example. King Abdullah II attended a defense resources management course in the summer of 1998. Meurer then provided an overview of DLI and its mission, pointing out the importance of strong linguists as “we haven’t had an English-speaking enemy since 1812.”

Meurer proceeded to outline how the city of Monterey saves DLI roughly $4 million a year by providing base operations support such as road maintenance, landscaping and public works and how the same contract could be put in place at NPS for additional savings.

Meurer also pointed out that Monterey’s fiber optic Institutional Network provides more broadband/Internet capacity to NPS for $88,000 a year than could be secured via the phone company for $1.5 million a year.

In conclusion, Meurer provided data showing that NPS actually costs significantly less to operate than most private universities. Unlike the Herald article, which compared NPS to other local institutions, Meurer’s presentation compared the Postgraduate school to its peers—schools such as Stanford, Harvard and MIT. In that comparison, NPS seems to be delivering a bargain.

At the conclusion of the hearing BRAC commissioner James Bilbray said he was impressed with the testimony, adding, “I feel in the long run it’ll be fine for Monterey.”