The Army’s top civilian said Monday the service could lose more than $7 billion in buying power under an extended continuing resolution (CR), calling on Congress to pass a budget required to avoid setbacks to the service’s modernization push.
Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy told reporters at the Association of the United States Army conference in Washington that top officials remain committed to the service’s six modernization priorities, and underlying 31 programs, while noting that tough choices are ahead to ensure adequate funding to move from prototyping to initial production.
“With continuing resolutions, there’s no flexibility. We lose buying power immediately,” McCarthy said. “From a readiness standpoint, commanders can’t buy parts. The whole machine starts to slow down.”
Congress passed a CR to keep the government open through at least Nov. 21, while the move locks in defense spending at last year’s funding levels effectively halting the Army from moving forward on initiating new programs.
“We have to get a budget deal. We need to work hard with the Congress to get this done. We have prototypes landing all over those six portfolios, and they’re showing results. It’s an exciting time for us to make some hard decisions so we can start to scale those across the formations. We’ve got to get a budget deal through,”
McCarthy and Gen. James McConville, the Army chief of staff, echoed previous comments the two have made that officials must be prepared for increasingly tougher choices of where to divest from legacy systems to continue fully funding modernization (Defense Daily, Sept. 4).
“We have to modernize the Army. We can’t do it without the resources. We need to field this equipment at the speed of relevance,” McConville said.
The Army has instituted the “night court” process, which resulted in finding $33 billion additional dollars that would be cut from lower priorities to fund modernization over the next five years, with plans to continue the process as programs move toward procurement.
“We have nothing but hard choices in front of us,” McCarthy said. “When you hear us use words like ruthless and aggressive, we have to be within the research, development and acquisition accounts because you’re very fixed with what you have. And every investment program has divestiture, so we’re going to make hard calls on weapon systems.”
Gen. Mike Murray, head of Futures Command, oversees the Army’s modernization enterprise and told reporters on Monday that the Army will remain committed to fully funding new platforms in the face of potential declining budgets and tougher divestiture decisions.
“There are more hard decisions coming. People say ‘well, how do you do that.’ We’re going to have to focus our resources on what’s most important for the future warfighter to deter and, if necessary, defeat. We fundamentally believe that these future systems are what’s most important to the warfighter,” Murray said. “My guess is, regardless of the Army’s budget, we may have to get creative but we’re going to find a way to fund these signature systems.”