Western Pennsylvania community leaders apparently saved the 911th Military Airlift Wing at Pittsburgh International Airport -- in a still-to-be-determined form -- by proposing to turn it into a new type of military base.

The "joint readiness center" concept embraced by the Base Realignment and Closure, or BRAC, Commission yesterday had been suggested by the Pit-BRAC task force, a coalition of local leaders who came together specifically to preserve the 911th and other regional military facilities that the Pentagon had proposed to close or shrink.

Dewitt Peart chaired the committee that developed the idea, which was fleshed out by a study the task force commissioned from the Dupuy Institute, a military think tank in Northern Virginia. The aim is to combine the military assets in the Pittsburgh region with nonmilitary assets to create a facility aimed at improving homeland defense.

Peart, whose day job is government affairs representative for the Greater Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce, said, for example, that Pittsburgh has superb hospitals with considerable capacity. That fact, coupled with the airlift capacity of the 911th, could make Pittsburgh the ideal place to which to evacuate casualties from a major terrorist incident in an Eastern Seaboard city that overwhelms local facilities.

First-rate research facilities at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh already are being employed for homeland defense -- studying and preparing to deal with bioterrorism, for instance -- and could be tied into the new operation, Peart said.

A more mundane example of the benefits of consolidating military activities at the airport would be to save money on processing recruits. Each year about 10,000 young people from Western Pennsylvania enter all branches of the military, active and reserve. Each must undergo a physical examination and other tests before being sent to basic training. If the entrance processing could be done at a single location, in existing facilities like those at the 911th, the military could save hundreds of thousands of dollars each year, Peart said.

The idea is to combine all local military activities in the same area, utilizing unused land around the airport and the soon-to-be vacated headquarters of the 99th Regional Readiness Command, which the BRAC Commission voted this week to move to Fort Dix, N.J.

"We found that the Army doesn't necessarily talk to the Air Force," Peart said. "A lot of money could be saved if they did."

There are a number of bases where two or more services operate jointly, but Pittsburgh would be the first place in the country where there would be a formal relationship between both military and nonmilitary institutions.

The fact that the concept is new could explain why the BRAC Commission was vague about how many people would work at the rearranged 911th Airlift Wing and what all of them would do, Peart said. The wing currently employs 44 military personnel and 278 civilians. "They're making this recommendation without having all the information themselves," he said.

The BRAC Commission staff was intrigued from the start by the concept of a joint readiness center, according to Peart. "We met with the BRAC staff four times; most communities got only one [session]. The meetings were scheduled for an hour, but they usually lasted two or three. We talked about the joint readiness concept in all the meetings," Peart said.

"They were very much interested in the concept," he said of the BRAC team. "They wanted as much information as they could get from us about it."

The commission staff made clear that they thought the Department of Defense, in making its recommendations for closing and rearranging military bases, had paid too little attention to homeland security, Peart said, and "at the core of what we're proposing is a homeland security function."

The commission's vote left the 911th personnel in place, but the fate of the wing's eight C-130 aircraft is up in the air. "What happens to the airplanes has to be sorted out," Peart said. "The people stay in place, but the mission has to be redefined."

Peart expressed confidence that if the C-130s were sent to other bases, the 911th eventually would receive other aircraft to replace them.