As House appropriators ratcheted up warnings to the Pentagon to cut its budget or else, the Navy fought back Tuesday in equally stark terms: Fund the Navy and Marine Corps at the levels they need, or risk the lives of sailors and Marines.
“When Marines are called, we will go. And they’ll either go late or they’ll go with shortfalls in equipment and training that would absolutely put young Americans’ lives at risk,” said Marine Commandant Gen. Joseph Dunford.
“This means more ships and aircraft out of action in battle, more sailors, Marines and merchant mariners killed,” said Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Greenert.
The statements were queued up for their Senate Armed Service Committee testimony and repeated by leadership, Chairman Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., who asked the services to confirm in more specific detail what the costs will be if the Navy and Marine Corps are funded with sequestration spending caps.
The questions were meant to drive home to congressional budget committees a strong message as they prepare to release the Defense Department’s fiscal 2016 spending limits: that refusing to raise the caps puts the responsibility for the added risk to young sailors and Marines directly on Congress’ doorstep.
The Navy was instructed last month by House appropriators to identify up to $13 billion in budget cuts it would lose if Congress does not lift the Pentagon’s spending caps. The cuts would rip apart the Navy’s modernization plans and exacerbate readiness gaps caused by repeated wartime deployments of its carrier groups and aircraft and a lack of funding to modernize as Defense Department budgets focused on the ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who serves on both the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Budget Committee, did not reveal which way the numbers might go, but provided the services a rather ominous “hang in there.”
Lawmakers and the armed services noted the Pentagon can save some money by eliminating inefficiencies. Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus lifted a sheet of paper to show members why weapons are so difficult to acquire on budget: “Here’s what we have to do to buy anything,” Mabus said, pointing to an outline of the tangled process. “It’s spaghetti.”
Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., as he has with each of the services, noted that the Pentagon’s civilian staff keeps growing despite restricted budgets that result in end-strenghth cuts.
Mabus replied the problem is with the Defense Department’s overhead and headquarters staff “growing exponentially,” not the Navy.
“It’s not the department,” Mabus said.
But a Washington Examiner analysis of the fiscal 2016 budget shows that the Navy’s civilian staff is slated to grow by 8,000 among similar growth across all the services and the Pentagon’s overhead accounts.
And there was bipartisan concern about whether more upgrades are needed for the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship.
McCain said the committee remains skeptical and that the Navy needs to convince lawmakers “what problem the upgraded LCS is trying to solve.” Reed questioned the ships’ survivability and what needs to be hardened on the ship to better protect it from missiles.
Greenert defended the ship, reminding the committee that the Littoral Combat Ship “is not a destroyer or a cruiser.”
McCain also pushed the Navy and Marine Corps to say when their versions of the Joint Strike Fighter will be ready. The Marine Corps said its version is still slated for the summer, while the Navy said its version “still [has] a way to go for the software.” It said its start date could slip to late fiscal 2018 or early fiscal 2019.
In a strange twist, Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, used her time for questioning to pitch a new product. It was not clear if the product was pitched to her by a constituent or supporter.
Hirono asked Mabus if counterfeit parts were an issue for the Navy. Service-wide, counterfeits have become a small but growing and serious problem, particularly in aircraft and ship software systems. Hirono asked Mabus if the Navy had a way to determine whether a chip was a counterfeit. When he responded that he relied on the highly trained workforce to identify fakes, she countered, “I am aware of a product that may help.”
Nine chairs away, McCain, who modified President Eisenhower’s “military-industrial” complex to “congressional-military-industrial” complex, just looked on.
