The Army would have to spend at least $19 billion to eliminate the maintenance backlog in its buildings and bring them up to standards, the Congressional Budget Office has said, while the cost to fully provide users with the capability to fulfill their missions would be an additional $34 billion.
Those figures were based on the latest data available, through September 2020, and do not account for inflation since then nor the potential cost of upgrading facilities to accommodate developments in weapons systems, it added. It said that as that date the Army, its components, and other organizations were responsible for maintaining more than 500,000 pieces of used or unused real property assets worldwide, including more than 200,000 buildings with about 1.3 billion square feet of space.
In focusing on 49,000 buildings, the CBO found that their average age was 47 years old, 11 years longer than their overall estimated useful life—the number of years a real property is depreciated in financial statements. “Thousands of those buildings, some of which are probably designated as historic, were 75 years old or older,” it said.
In addition, by a measure of the expense “necessary to address deterioration resulting from deferred maintenance and to restore buildings to a fully functioning condition,” the average score was 88—in essence, a cost of 12 percent of the building’s value. Older buildings pulled down that score disproportionately, it added, since the median score—the point where half are above and half are below—was 95.
It said that six percent of the buildings need major renovations, another 16 percent significant renovations and another 13 percent only minimal renovations.
“Categories with the largest deferred maintenance costs include those that support military units (troop housing and food services and maintenance and production) or the quality of life of the people on base (hospital and medical care), indicating that those buildings were larger and in slightly worse condition, on average,” it said.
By facility, the two with highest amounts of deferred maintenance were Fort Bragg in North Carolina and U.S. Army Garrison Hawaii.
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