President Obama likely will veto the Department of Defense budget moving through Congress, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter said Wednesday.
Carter spoke before the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on defense with outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey. Both men used the platform – Carter’s first as defense secretary, Dempsey’s last as chairman – to be blunt on both the budgetary and security challenges the military faces.
It’s the first time in Dempsey’s 40-year military career where both “state” actors such as Russia, Iran and North Korea and “non-state” actors, such as al Qaeda, the Islamic State and others are violently destabilizing the world at once.
“For the first time in my career they are both manifesting themselves simultaneously – this is not a time to be withdrawing from the world,” Dempsey said.
Carter’s warning on the budget was not his first, but it again raises the stakes on a $619 billion congressional defense budget that Republicans are determined to move through both chambers this spring and summer.
Obama will not approve a defense budget that “locks in sequestration,” Carter said, noting the way that Congress voted to hold defense spending to sequestration-base levels by moving much of the Pentagon’s needs into special wartime accounts that aren’t limited by the sequester, but do not provide long-term planning capability.
The result is a worse situation for the military, Dempsey said, forcing the military to respond to growing threats while looking ahead a fiscal year that is also “as uncertain as I’ve seen in 40 years of service.”
At some point, Dempsey said the U.S. military will hit a breaking point where “our global aspirations are exceeding our fiscal resources.”
Iran, for example, “is concerning on a number of fronts,” Carter said. Whether in the form of the uncertainty over Iran’s future nuclear program, its detention of a Marshall Islands-flagged cargo ship and seeming provocation in the Strait of Hormuz, or its involvement in Yemen, it “creates a continuing requirement for presence in the region,” Carter said. That requirement strains the Navy, which has a limited number of surface ships it can rotate to maintain a steady presence in the region.
