Some years back, the Allegheny County Airport Authority set aside land adjacent to the military bases near Pittsburgh International Airport.

The idea was to give the three installations -- the 171st Air Refueling Wing, the 911th Military Airlift Group and the 99th Regional Readiness Command -- some extra room if they needed it.

"All of us out here acknowledge the importance of the military bases," said Kent George, head of the airport authority. "We wanted to make sure that there was no question that we were positioning ourselves for the future."

Especially when the future would bring a new round of base closings of the kind that shut down installations across the country in 1988, 1991, 1993 and 1995.

Now, as the Pentagon prepares to close up to a quarter of the nation's 425 bases, states are lobbying hard to spare theirs.

In Pittsburgh, the extra airport land could help stave off the ax because urban "encroachment" on bases is considered a major drawback.

"Land is not an issue," said state Sen. John Pippy, R-Moon, a captain and engineer in the National Guard. "That's one of our selling points."

There are many others, officials say, and everyone from local chambers of commerce to the state's U.S. senators are making them known as the May 16 deadline approaches for the Pentagon to release its list of recommended closings.

The Base Realignment and Closure Commission, appointed by President Bush, will examine the recommendations and possibly make some changes. Then the list goes to the president by Sept. 8.

If Bush approves it, Congress has 45 days to reject the entire list, but lawmakers can't pick and choose which bases close. The purpose of the process is to remove it from politics so decisions are based primarily on military need.

Still, politicos and business leaders do their best to influence the decision-makers, setting up task forces, hiring lobbyists and preparing economic-impact reports to show why their bases are more important than the other guy's.

The real lobbying will start after the May 16 deadline, when the commission starts to tweak the Pentagon's list. Each base slated for closing, for example, will be visited by two commission members. That will be a prime opportunity for local leaders to push their cause.

But this effort has really been under way for several years, here and across the country.

In New England, which has seen a huge exodus of military installations in previous realignments, politicians have been warning that more cuts will leave the heavily populated Northeast vulnerable to terrorist attacks.

Texas has spent millions buying up land around its military bases to make them more attractive, and Alabama is spending $6 million to build a military training facility.

In Kansas, a commission with a $1 million budget developed a DVD describing the value of its bases to send to commission members, and the state also pays two Washington, D.C., lobbying firms to coordinate its campaign.

Pennsylvania has its own task force and a lobbying firm, too, and leaders here say they're doing their best to spare the state's 12 bases.

"Is the military trying to do this in a vacuum? Sure. But time has shown that you can present evidence to influence the decision-making process," said Adrian King, former senior aide to Gov. Ed Rendell and now head of the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency.

Typical of how the politicking works is a letter that Sens. Arlen Specter and Rick Santorum wrote in 1995 to the commission, asking it to spare all of Pennsylvania's bases because, they said, the state had been hit too hard by previous closings.

Whether it worked or not isn't clear, but the only base that closed for good after that round was the Naval Air Warfare Center in Warminster. Fort Indiantown Gap also shut down as an Army base, but it was reincarnated as a National Guard base.

By then, however, the state had already lost its largest battle in the BRAC wars: the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard.

The fight to save it began immediately after it was ordered closed in 1991. A coalition of government and labor leaders filed suit, the first such legal action of its kind, saying the Navy suppressed information from its own experts about the shipyard's viability.

The court battle lasted three years and finally ended when Specter, an opponent of the BRAC process from the beginning, personally argued the case before the U.S. Supreme Court.

He lost when the court ruled that the federal base closure law did not allow for judicial review.

Since then, Specter, Santorum, Rendell and former Gov. Tom Ridge have all consistently argued that the state cannot afford any more closures.

That's one of the themes again this time around.

In 2003, Rendell established the Pennsylvania Base Development Committee to fight off any further loss of jobs, saying the state had already lost 16,000 from base closings.

In the last two years, the state has appropriated about $4.5 million, distributed through the Department of Community and Economic Development, to persuade the military to leave Pennsylvania's bases alone.

Some of the money goes to local groups to tout their facilities, such as task forces trying to save the Tobyhanna Army Depot outside Scranton and the Letterkenny Army Depot near Chambersburg.

In Allegheny County, state money is being used for a study commissioned by the Military Affairs Council of Western Pennsylvania to look at expanding operations at the airport to benefit both the military and the Department of Homeland Security.

Pitching bases as multi-purpose is a common strategy, because the BRAC commission values flexibility and looks for opportunities to consolidate.

A local coalition, which includes the Military Affairs Council, the airport authority, the Pittsburgh Airport Area Chamber of Commerce, congressional members and others, is also crunching numbers on the economic benefits of the bases to the region.

While military need is the key criterion for the BRAC commission, it does consider economic impact.

"The coalition is making every effort to ensure that these facilities continue to serve as economic engines for our region and remain fully operational in the future," said County Executive Dan Onorato.

Pippy and state Rep. Mark Mustio, R-Moon, also have collected thousands of petition signatures from residents in support of the airport bases.

"The petition drive won't change anyone's mind," said Pippy, "but we want to make sure it's on the radar screen."

Lobbying can work, certainly. A few years ago, Pippy said, he and others convinced the military that it shouldn't close the commissary at the Charles E. Kelly Support Facility in Oakdale by showing that a lot of retirees used it.

Now there's an effort to get a new commissary built at the 99th Regional Readiness Command at the airport, for which the Airport Authority has set aside a piece of land. Earlier this month Santorum wrote a letter to the Department of Defense, trying to get it to reverse an earlier decision that the Oakdale facility was good enough.

Santorum also recently made a pitch to the Air Force on behalf of the 911th.

"The unit has a sterling reputation in the community and is a tremendous asset to southwestern Pennsylvania," he wrote to an Air Force official. "In the event that there is an effort to consolidate similar units or capabilities within the Air Force, I would encourage you and others in senior leadership positions to consider combining the assets of similar Air Force units at the 911th."

Local officials have made their voices heard, too.

Sally Haas, head of the 1,100-member Pittsburgh Airport Area Chamber of Commerce, testified in support of the airport bases last year at a summit convened by Specter in Washington. "We're trying to heighten awareness," she said. "We've taken such a hit in the Pittsburgh region. The last thing we want to see is this military installation disappear."

Officials in central Pennsylvania are especially worried about the five bases there, particularly the Army War College in Carlisle.

Last year, a group called the Cumberland County Base Realignment and Closures Political Action Committee asked a Dickinson College professor to study the value of the War College in anticipation of the base-closing announcement.

The professor concluded the facility is worth $118 million every year to the Carlisle area.