The Pentagon calls it “risk,” but it’s really Washington’s most hotly debated unfunded mandate: the growing gap between the military’s budget and what it is being asked to do.
An independent analysis by the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments estimates that gap will grow to between $200 billion and $300 billion over the next five years. But there’s no way to know for sure, because the Pentagon doesn’t study it.
“The readiness situation is worse than most people think. It’s worse because we don’t know how bad it is,” said center senior fellow Todd Harrison, an expert on Pentagon budgeting.
The widening gap can be blamed on years of political pressure on the defense budget as lawmakers from both parties sought to protect other priorities such as entitlement spending and reducing the federal debt. Defense spending has been shrinking because of factors that have nothing to do with military strategy, even as the world is growing more dangerous.
“Everywhere you look there’s cuts being made because of ideology,” Rep. Doug Lamborn, R-Colo., a member of the House Armed Services Committee, told the Washington Examiner.
Even before Russia seized the Crimea and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria emerged as a more dangerous threat than al Qaeda, few politicians wanted to be seen as supporting a U.S. retreat from its role as the premier superpower — the Obama administration least of all.
But neither Congress nor the administration has been willing to remove the caps on defense spending built into the Budget Control Act of 2011, which called for a $487 billion reduction in planned spending over 10 years, or the $50 billion a year in sequestration cuts that are set to run through 2023.
As a result, congressional staffers and analysts say, troops are not getting the training they need to be able to respond to unexpected crises. Commanders have been complaining for several years that they don’t have enough money to operate and keep their weapon systems combat-ready.
Funding for the war in Afghanistan and the current fight against the Islamic State come from a separate account not subject to the budget caps. But everything else the military does is feeling the pinch.
“My estimation of readiness at this point is we are really on shaky ground and the risk out there is just getting higher and higher,” said one congressional aide, speaking on condition of anonymity. “While we’re meeting the day-to-day demands, there’s a lot of shallowness out there.”
The pinch could get worse. President Obama’s five-year plan for Pentagon spending is $115 billion higher than that allowed under sequestration from fiscal 2016 through 2020.
“If you thought our choices in [fiscal 2015] were difficult, hold onto your hats because it could get a whole lot worse and will get a whole lot worse in [fiscal 2016] if sequestration remains in place,” Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James said in a Sept. 15 speech.
Lamborn, whose district includes the Fort Carson Army base, said a brigade that recently deployed to Afghanistan was less prepared for war than previous ones. “That is a direct result of sequestration,” he said, noting that the soldiers’ training “wasn’t as good as it could have been in a better budget environment.”
House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon, R-Calif., said “we’re going to have a serious, serious problem” if sequestration cuts are not reversed.
But that’s a sticky political problem and likely to remain so at least through the November elections.
There hasn’t been significant change in positions since a supercommittee appointed to find a grand bargain under the 2011 budget law failed because Democrats, backed by Obama, would not budge on entitlement spending, and Republicans held the line on tax increases. Meanwhile, Tea Party lawmakers who won election by promising a rollback in federal spending have been unwilling to let their only tangible achievement disappear.
The budget deal worked out last year between House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and Senate Budget Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray, D-Wash., was far less ambitious. It restored $63 billion in sequestration cuts and trimmed the budget deficit by $22.5 billion in exchange for $85 billion in budget savings for fiscal 2014 and 2015, including a reduction in cost-of-living increases for military retirees and increases in government user fees.
There also are concerns about how scarce money is spent. The Pentagon can’t audit its own spending, and the process to become audit-ready isn’t expected to begin before the end of this year.
The Defense Department “lacks accurate and complete data regarding the utilization of its facilities,” according to the Government Accountability Office, a fact that has proved to be an obstacle to the administration’s plans to close unneeded bases and shift money to readiness.
The rising costs of new weapons also are a concern. For example, the Pentagon plans to buy more than 2,400 F-35 fighters to replace several older models flown by the Air Force, Marine Corps and Navy at an estimated cost of more than $1 trillion — the most expensive weapons program ever. The program has been plagued by delays, cost overruns and controversy. Most recently, GAO found that the annual estimated operating costs for the F-35 fleet, $19.9 billion, would be $8.8 billion a year higher than the combined operating costs of the aircraft it would replace.
Numbers such as those give even defense hawks such as Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a former Navy pilot who has been a frequent critic of the F-35, second thoughts about defense spending.
Lamborn said he and other lawmakers on the Armed Services Committee are working with their fellow members, trying to educate them on the need to reverse mandatory spending cuts to ensure U.S. troops are ready to cope with a dangerous world.
“We’ve made some progress, but we haven’t fully resolved that issue,” he said.
Meanwhile, lawmakers are pressing the Pentagon to provide better data on how budget cuts affect the ability of troops to do their jobs, said a second congressional aide, also speaking on condition of anonymity.
“There’s an honest discussion that needs to take place on what is an acceptable risk,” the aide said.
