Photo credit: Virginian Pilot

Today the Department of Defense released final plans to resize, refocus and rename Joint Forces Command (JFCOM) in Hampton Roads.

Last August, Defense Secretary Robert Gates proposed the complete elimination of JFCOM to save money and promote greater Pentagon efficiency.

But over the past six months, Senator Warner worked with Virginia’s congressional delegation, Governor McDonnell, and other state and local elected officials to successfully make the business and military case that completely eliminating JFCOM was a bad idea.

JFCOM employs about 5,800 military and civilian workers and private contractors, and about 3,900 of these employees work at facilities in Norfolk and Suffolk. Today’s announcement from the Pentagon will preserve about half of those jobs, with the transformation expected to take about one year to complete.

Here’s Senator Warner’s comment on today’s announcement:

“As our nation grapples with its unsustainable deficits and debt, the Hampton Roads region and the Commonwealth as a whole inevitably will be confronted with additional efforts to reduce military and federal spending,” Senator Warner said. “I believe this effort helped us design a workable model going forward.”

“Our elected leadership worked as a strong, bipartisan team, partnering with local officials and reaching-out to key retired military officials in Hampton Roads to push-back with facts and logic. I am extremely pleased that the Pentagon ultimately agreed with our strong business and national security arguments that JFCOM’s modeling and simulation investments and infrastructure provided a capability that simply doesn’t exist anywhere else in the U.S. military today.”

More information is available here.