Trumps Pentagon wants to spend almost $500 million on Guantnamo construction
Source: mcclatchydc
August 21, 2017 12:05 PM
GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba
Behind the scenes, the U.S. military is planning for nearly a half-billion dollars in new construction during the Trump administration, including a Navy request to build a $250 million, five-bed hospital here that has been singled out for study by a Senate committee.
Despite President Donald J. Trump’s campaign promise to reduce costs at the remote U.S. Navy base — at one point he mused that his new Cuba policy might import cheap, local labor from across the minefield — the Pentagon’s appetite to spend at this outpost of about 5,500 residents and 41 wartime prisoners continues unsated.
In two other major projects, Congress is poised to give the Army $124 million to build a new barracks for 848 prison troops to be ready four years from now. And on a different corner of the base, the Pentagon is soliciting bids of up to $100 million to build a skeletal structure for a 13,000-migrant tent city and housing for 5,000 U.S. forces.
But it was the hospital plan that prompted the Republican-led Senate Armed Services Committee to ask Defense Secretary James Mattis to conduct an analysis of “remote locations with high family support costs” — noting the “proposed $250 million replacement hospital at Guantánamo Bay would cost $50 million per bed.”
hospital2
Guantánamo Navy base hospital on Oct. 13, 2016.
CAROL ROSENBERG crosenberg@miamiherald.com
The Senate tasked Mattis to undertake a “comprehensive study” that essentially asks the Pentagon to take a hard look at the costs of bringing families to distant, remote places like Guantánamo Bay and Kwajalein in the South Pacific. The Pentagon proposes to build 52 family homes at a cost of $1.3 million each on the atoll in the Marshall Islands. The Senate, however, called small post, so-called unaccompanied tours costly, “which is a primary reason why locations such as Diego Garcia are unaccompanied.”
Read more here:
Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/article168364842.html#storylink=cpy
= new reply since forum marked as read
ever again. NO ONE here or anywhere else. 
