That closure will also reduce our strategic flexibility: East Coast submarines deploy to the Pacific via the North Pole. New London is perfectly geographically situated to continue this practice as well as to support operations in the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf.

What is particularly troubling about the drive to close these critical facilities is the sudden shift in the analysis behind the U.S. military's approach to the structure of our armed forces, and its relationship to the budget.

Our submarine force has been the subject of 14 studies in the last 12 years. These studies are time-consuming, but for the most part they are appropriate and welcome — we should be ready to justify the billions of dollars that the taxpayers spend on submarines; if we can't, the money should be taken away.

Repeatedly, the submarine force has been able to show a solid case — both in real world "peacetime" operations and in speculative wartime usage — that provides a firm basis for the American taxpayer to be comfortable that that money is not being wasted.

But more recent studies are different: The pragmatic and balanced approach favored in the past — one that understood the need to maintain a force ready for war — seems to have been replaced by a "reverse-engineered" analysis that starts with a fixed dollar amount, then finds and attempts to design a force structure that fits the budget.