Defense hawks persuaded enough of their budget-conscious House colleagues to approve a budget for fiscal 2016 that adds $96 billion to the Pentagon’s wartime budget with no requirement to cut elsewhere to offset the extra funding.
But that temporary victory does not ensure that the Defense Department will get all or any of the weapons it has spent the last two months urging Congress to fund. Not only is there a tough battle ahead in the Senate and opposition from the White House, but the one-year money does not allow the Pentagon the multi-year flexibility it needs to be able to fund major weapons systems.
“We will be in the exact same place as we currently are next year,” said Center for Strategic and International Studies budget analyst Ryan Crotty. “And we’ve set the precedent to use [the Overseas Contingency Operations account] to lighten the load. Maybe it will skate through easier [next year].”
The funding would not help the Pentagon establish a long-term defense plan or reliably set numbers of aircraft, weapons or personnel it will be able to support over the long term.
“We need to have a base budget so the Pentagon can plan,” Crotty said. But he doubts that the fiscal 2017 budget will be any different, due to the 2016 presidential and congressional elections — when no one will want to be seen as soft on defense. “All of the politics of this will be the same but amplified.”
In the House budget passed Wednesday evening, the $96 billion in defense spending that President Obama had requested above the sequester caps was moved into the Overseas Contingency Operations account, or the wartime fund. That way Republicans could say the Defense Department’s base budget was within the sequester caps.
In the end, defense hawks were able to use the dire warning by the military that sequestration-level funding would gut its end strength, weapons systems and readiness to the point where it would not be able to carry out the nation’s defense strategy.
“There is no cap on the dangers facing the world,” said House Armed Services Committee chairman Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas.
But the extra funding is not likely to win support from the White House.
Defense Secretary Ashton Carter warned as much in remarks to the House Armed Services Committee last week: “You don’t need me to tell you that the president has said he will not accept a budget that severs the vital link between our national and economic security …[the principle of] — matching defense increases with non-defense increases dollar-for-dollar — was a basic condition of the bipartisan agreement we got in 2013.”
With the caps in place, the Army would need to shrink its end-strength from 475,000 to 420,000 troops, “increasing the risk that in a crisis, we will have too few soldiers who could enter a fight without proper training or equipment,” said Army Secretary John McHugh.
According to the secretaries of the services, other cuts they would have to make include:
• The Marines would have to cut end strength, meaning they would deploy more frequently with less time at home, and realignment to the Pacific would be slowed.
• The Navy would have to reduce its fleet from 275 ships to 260.
• And the Air Force would have to reduce combat air patrols and would have to defer put off 14 Joint Strike Fighters.
