The Senate majority leader’s “position is irresponsible. . . . We won the war but we are in danger of losing the peace. [Our adversary] is counting on the United States and Europe losing interest–and losing our will–and not staying the course. . . . Funding in the supplemental would support . . . the only [friendly] government that now exists.”
George W. Bush criticizing Harry Reid? No–Joe Biden complaining about Trent Lott’s slow-walk on the supplemental appropriation for Kosovo in April 2000. Two months earlier, General Wesley Clark, the U.S. commander in that war, told the Senate, “Force readiness could be adversely affected if we do not receive timely passage of the . . . supplemental funding.”
Biden and Clark were correct; during the Balkans wars the Army routinely postponed repairs and juggled training schedules while the Clinton administration and the Republican Congress went through a highly choreographed handbag fight over war costs. In those halcyon days, the supplementals averaged about $2 billion per year, less than 1 percent of defense spending. The two 2007 defense supplemental requests will total about $170 billion–not counting the billions of vote-buying pork tacked on by the Democratic congressional leadership–that is, almost 40 percent of the 2007 baseline defense budget request. The Democrats today are sinning on a far larger scale.
At the core of the Democrats’ posture over the supplemental appropriations bill is the pretense that a delay won’t really affect the soldiers and Marines now fighting or preparing to deploy. Rep. John Murtha, one of the chief architects of the Democrats’ supplemental strategy, claims the Army wouldn’t be in “dire straits” until June. Indeed, Murtha complains that the Pentagon’s warnings of real consequences “gets under my nerves.” Separately, he complains to Time that the “readiness of the Army’s ground forces is as bad as it was right after Vietnam.” So which is it?
In fact, the supplemental fight is not just a tempest in a Beltway teapot. A delay even of several weeks in resolving the military funding issue for 2007 could have a serious ripple effect, introducing a potentially crippling uncertainty into the Iraq “surge” effort. Uncle Sam may be a rich man, but his Pentagon lacks liquidity.
About two-thirds of the “baseline” defense budget–what it costs simply to have a military establishment–is spent on personnel and weapons; those are the Pentagon’s capital and human investments, and they are very inflexible spending requirements. The remaining third is the “operations and maintenance,” or “O&M” account, but even this spending is mostly obligated well in advance. Even worse, it gets spent rapidly. As William Lynn, Pentagon comptroller for most of Clinton’s second term, put it, “We have very little control over half of it. It’s things like utilities. It’s contracts for civilian employees. It’s day-care center workers. . . . You can’t just say we’re not going to pay rent . . . so we can pay” for the war.
Hence, when you go to war, you need a supplemental appropriation. And because war is an unpredictable trade, you need the money as soon as you can get it–wars are not fought one fiscal year at a time. Lynn, who kept the Pentagon books during the Balkans wars, explained, “If you wait until the third or fourth quarter [of the fiscal year] to deal with it”–the third quarter of the 2007 budget year began April 1–“it has an enormous impact on readiness.”
And, in fact, the pinch is already being felt in Iraq. Major General William Caldwell, the chief spokesman for U.S. forces in Iraq, reported at a recent press briefing that the training of Iraqi forces had slowed due to lack of funds. “It is starting to have some impact today,” he said, “and will only, you know, have more of an impact over time.”
The impact would be directly felt by U.S. forces in the late summer, just as the surge is at its height and when its effects would presumably start to be fully felt. The real bill-payers for delays in approving supplemental funding would be those units then preparing to deploy, to sustain whatever momentum the surge generates. As the Joint Chiefs of Staff explained in an April 2 letter to Congress: “Spending restrictions will delay and disrupt our follow-on forces as they prepare for war.” They would also “compromis[e] future readiness and strategic agility”–that is, make it tough to respond to any unforeseen crisis.
Finally, these money problems would hit an Army and Marine Corps stretched to their limits by the demands of fighting many wars for many years. Soldiers and Marines are now surging on two fronts at once. The services and those who serve in them are far from “broken,” as anyone who remembers the post-Vietnam military will affirm, but people in uniform do feel they have been shabbily treated. There is always a distance between soldiers and society, but soldiers tend to see us better than we see them, and we do not fool them when we pander to them with a too-abstract profession of love for “the troops.”
The Democrats do not have the votes to override a presidential veto. The American people gave them a small majority to correct the Bush administration’s course, and that has happened: We have a new strategy, a new defense secretary, and a new commander in Iraq. The American people did not give the Democrats a mandate to direct the war; that will not happen unless they win the White House in 2008. The Democrats should quickly approve an appropriations bill that President Bush can sign, lest they hurt the ones they say they love.
Tom Donnelly is resident fellow in defense and national security studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
