In yet another growing mission for the U.S. military, this time to stop the Islamic State of Syria and Iraq, President Obama said Tuesday in his State of the Union address that the military’s success “will take time. It will require focus.”
What was not said: It will take billions to fund. And there’s a difficult road ahead to fund it.
The military’s expanding mission against the Islamic State is only one of several unstable security challenges around the globe it must find the resources to deter or defeat. To fund these needs, Obama’s 2016 defense budget is widely expected to be about $535 billion, $35 billion over sequester-mandated levels. As a result of the sequester cuts, a result of a 2011 budget deal led by the House of Representatives and the White House, the chief of every service has come before Congress seeking relief to meet security challenges across the Pacific, the Middle East and Europe.
Obama’s omission of sequestration in the speech Tuesday night was “a significant and meaningful omission,” said Rep. Mike Turner, R-Ohio, chairman of the House Armed Services subcommittee on Tactical Air and Land Forces. “I had hoped the president would put forth a plan to reverse the devastating effects of this harmful policy.”
But there seems to be little consensus from either the White House or Congress on what, if anything, can be done on sequestration, besides lament its effects and add funding when necessary into the now-annual overseas contingencies fund that is requested on top of the defense baseline. Those supplemental funds, which add tens of billions of dollars to the defense budget, are not subject to the sequester cap and have become a familiar but hard-to-track catch-all to fund military scenarios U.S. troops may face in the coming year.
Assuming Obama’s revenue-generating proposal to raise $320 billion in revenue over the next 10 years by increasing tax rates on the wealthiest Americans is dead-on-arrival in the Republican-controlled Congress, lawmakers would have to figure out another way to pay the military’s bill. That does not ease the path ahead, defense analysts said Tuesday.
“With the revenue proposal [Obama’s] putting out there … it’s up to the Republican Congress to come up with a counter-proposal” to fund additional defense spending, said Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments senior budget fellow Todd Harrison.
It’s in those counter-proposals that analysts see a challenge — and another challenging year — ahead for Congress’ defense committees.
“Where do you get that $35 billion this year, where does it come from?” said Ryan Crotty, a deputy director for defense budget analysis at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Does defense have a strong enough voice to get the money from [other programs]?”
Tom Donnelly, a defense analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, said probably not.
“Despite an increased majority, the politics … haven’t changed that much,” Donnelly said. Rallying support for the large defense bill from fiscal conservatives, such as new House Budget Committee Chairman Tom Price, will be an uphill climb.
Despite the staggering defense spending figure, which is roughly equal to the discretionary spending allotted for all other federal programs combined, the military is still struggling to make up for missed personnel training and maintenance the Pentagon has deferred to meet increased demands. That leaves the Republican-controlled Congress in a quandary, Donnelly said. Funding anything less than the president’s request is likely to be seen as further weakening the military’s readiness in dangerous times, which is not desirable for either party as both eye the 2016 elections. But funding only the president’s request is not the desired narrative for the Republicans, either, he said.
“The political question for them is, do they need to get above the president’s number? In order to win, do they need to re-establish themselves as the party of ‘peace through strength?'”
Harrison said he anticipates that many of the debates that dominated last year’s defense bill, including base closure, aircraft sustainment and military compensation, will return, “with the exception of the aircraft carrier.” That was a high-profile disagreement between the Pentagon and Congress last year on whether to fund the nuclear refueling of the USS George Washington, which still has an estimated 25 service years left. Congress shifted funding to move forward with the overhaul.
Congress may opt again to fund slight increases to the Department of Defense’s budget caps for 2016 spending. Those tradeoffs likely will take defense bill negotiations down to the wire again — the 2015 bill was signed into law only in late December.
“I expect it to go extra innings again,” Harrison said.
