A community delegation representing Coastal Georgia and the South Carolina Lowcountry recently joined Southeast Georgia Friends of Fort Stewart and Hunter in Washington for a series of meetings with congressional and military leaders.The delegation — led by Bill Cathcart, retired general manager of WTOC-TV in Savannah and a civilian aid to the secretary of the Army, and Hinesville Mayor Jim Thomas — presented a map that highlighted the triangle of military operations areas formed by Fort Stewart to the west; Charleston and Beaufort, South Carolina, to the north; and Jacksonville, Florida, to the south.Thomas said they met March 25-26 with four U.S. senators and eight congressmen, as well as Kathryn Hammack, assistant secretary of the Army for installations, environment and energy; Carla Coulson, director of the Directorate of Installation Services; Andy Napoli, special assistant for the Base Realignment Committee and deputy assistant secretary of the Army; and Col. Carl Konzelman, chief of Force Management Division, Army G-3/5/7.Thomas said they told military and congressional leaders the Army’s Supplemental Programmatic Environmental Analysis was deficient because it didn’t assign greater value to Fort Stewart because of its proximity to the Air Dominance Center in Savannah, Townsend Bombing Range in Long County and Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort.Hammack reportedly thanked the delegation members for their installation analysis and said they were the first delegation to make that important connection between nearby installations.“The reason the (analysis) was called deficient is that it does not factor in all the military installations and training (areas) within a region in its evaluation of an installation’s military value,” Thomas said. “We provided Congress and the Pentagon with a map that displayed all the military bases and areas from Charleston to Jacksonville.“In our opinion, this map displays a region that is truly a national asset in as far as the military’s deployability and power projection is concerned,” he continued. “The Army representatives said that the SPEA only studied the military value of the Army’s (individual) bases. (They) said the region’s value would be assessed only if a BRAC were being considered.