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Defense Department officials and President George W. Bush broke ground July 3 on a new 345-bed Walter Reed National Military Medical Center at Bethesda, Md. The project, estimated to cost nearly $1 billion, will unite the historic Walter Reed Army hospital in Washington with the National Naval Medical Center in a massive 261,000-square-foot expansion that will include construction of two new buildings at the Maryland site.
Three years ago, the Base Realignment and Closure Commission called for mothballing the 99-year-old Walter Reed Army Medical Center, whose main hospital was rebuilt in 1977. In February 2007, a series of Washington Post articles exposed unsanitary and decrepit physical conditions at Building 18, a Walter Reed outpatient facility near the Washington campus; the articles unleashed a storm of criticism about the facility's condition and its lack of attention to patient needs. Since then, Walter Reed has built a new, state-of-the-art amputee rehabilitation center to serve severely wounded troops in transition.
Last summer, the 89th American Legion National Convention passed a resolution opposing the closure of the Walter Reed hospital, calling for renovations to the Washington site instead. "Closing the facility and transforming its functions would be a grave mistake and detrimental to the provision of support to families of casualties, military retiree veterans and their families," states the resolution, which came out of the National Security Commission.
Supporters of the merger argue that growth is restricted at the historic campus in Washington, and that the bigger Bethesda site - five miles away in Maryland - will give both facilities the ability to operate more efficiently.
Download the AMERICAN LEGION RESOLUTION ON WALTER REED
