Defense Secretary Ash Carter has a fired off a letter to Congress warning of the dangers of failing to pass a budget and instead relying on a continuing resolution to fund the military for the next six months.
“In the letter, Secretary Carter says that he is particularly troubled by information that Congress may be considering a CR through May of next year,” spokesman Peter Cook told reporters on Tuesday. “A short-term CR is bad enough, but a CR through May means DOD would have to operate under its constraints for two-thirds of the fiscal year.”
Cook says continuing to fund the Pentagon at last year’s levels would make it “more difficult” to the fight the Islamic State, which he says is making “careful but steady progress in tightening the noose” around Mosul, in Iraq.
“Now, in the secretary’s words, this is unprecedented and unacceptable, especially when we have so many troops operating in harm’s way,” Cook said.
A senior armed services committee aide said Tuesday that the plan on Capitol Hill was still a continuing resolution lasting through the end of March, not May. The aide also said he expected the CR to not be a “clean CR” and, as a result, to provide some relief to programs such as the Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine and the Boeing KC-46A tanker.
In Carter’s letter, addressed to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan, he repeats his objections to continuing resolutions in principle as an inefficient way to run the Pentagon, and urges Congress to limit the duration of any continuing resolution it passes.
Carter argues that the most pressing area that would not be funded if spending is not increased would be in the operations and munitions accounts that fund counterterrorism operations and assistance in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.
In addition, he says the European Reassurance Initiative, which is designed to reassure nervous NATO allies threatened by Russia, would be “hamstrung at FY16” levels instead of quadrupling as planned for FY 2017.
“These are areas we cannot afford to short-change,” Carter writes.
Carter said a CR would cost the Pentagon hundreds of millions of dollars in needless contractual penalties, because the DoD will lack authority to start 57 new programs, have to delay 87 planned increases in production rates, and be unable to initiate multi-year procurement.
“As a result, the CR would undermine critical programs such as the KC-46 Tanker, Apache and Blackhawk helicopter procurements, and the Ohio Replacement submarine,” Carter warned.
“This is an unprecedented situation,” Carter said. “We have never been governed by a continuing resolution during a Presidential Transition, nor have we had a CR for DoD that went as late as May.”
