House Armed Services Committee Ranking Member Adam Smith (D-Wash.) said committee members were pushing back against nearly all the tough choices the Pentagon had to make in its fiscal year 2015 budget request, and picking fights over each program this year would result in having to raid readiness accounts to stay within the $521-billion topline–though readiness subcommittee chairman Rob Wittman (R-Va.) vowed he wouldn’t let his account be the pay-for for everyone else’s wish lists.
Smith praised the Pentagon for making very tough choices in its budget request and said he supported many of the changes–retiring the A-10 aircraft fleet, trimming personnel costs, shifting the allocation of aircraft between the Army’s active duty and National Guard units, and more–not because he likes those options, but because they’re the least risky out of a lot of bad options.
Rather than accepting that not everything can be funded, Smith slammed his colleagues for rejecting the notion that steep cuts needed to be made and instead fighting to protect everything the military currently has or wants to buy.
“What we’re doing right now is, we’re battling over 2015 dollars. We’re trying to find a little bit of money here, a little bit of money there in order to get us through 2015,” he said at an event Thursday morning hosted by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment. “But the big problem here is the bow wave problem, and this is before you even get to sequestration– the A-10, for instance, if we could find $400 million we could save the A-10, and that’s a daunting challenge in this budget environment but it’s also not realistic because if we save the A-10 this year, over the course of five years the cost is $3.5 billion. Where are we going to find the other $3.1 [billion] over the course of four years? We just created a bow wave.”
“The worst thing that we can do is basically what we’re doing, which is to protect program after program after program and reject those cuts, because what is the first thing to go in that scenario? The first thing to go in that scenario is readiness,” Smith said. “That’s the easiest place to cut: you simply use less fuel, you fly less, you train less, you repair less, provide less ammunition for training, and slowly you create the hollow force that everybody said we didn’t want.”
Creating that hollow force because of a lack of will to make hard choices, Smith said, “would be the greatest dereliction of duty of Congress, to create a hollow force that is not prepared to go fight.”
Shortly after Smith finished speaking, Wittman hosted his readiness subcommittee markup, where he noted the military already faced steep challenges due to sequestration–severe maintenance backlogs, many combat units still not combat-ready, and a lack of funding to create much-needed crisis-response forces around the globe.
Asked afterward how he’d protect his readiness money, let alone fight for additional money to address those shortfalls, Wittman told Defense Daily that “I think our argument is pretty simple: we have to maintain readiness, we have to in many areas rebuild readiness. We can’t do that by moving money elsewhere. I think it’s a very compelling story to tell with seven air wings lacking combat readiness, with only now four of 40 brigade combat teams being combat ready, with all the other elements of where we are with force readiness.”
Though that argument resonates with Wittman, many of his colleagues may still disagree. Rep. Steven Palazzo (R-Miss.) on Wednesday proposed an amendment to purchase an additional LPD dock landing ship for the Navy and Marine Corps to meet operational needs and to protect the industrial base while the LPD production line winds down and the next class of amphibious ship prepares to start in the coming years. Palazzo withdrew the amendment because he hadn’t found a pay-for within the seapower and projection forces subcommittee jurisdiction, but he said he hoped to find other funds and revisit the issue in the full committee–a move that likely will involve pulling money from readiness accounts. Other subcommittees have added money beyond the Pentagon’s request for missile defense, Abrams tank and Stryker combat vehicle improvements, body armor, the refueling of the aircraft carrier USS George Washington (CVN-73) and much more–though the subcommittees have largely remained mum on where that money will come from.
Wittman said that, before the subcommittee markups this week, many of his colleagues came to him to ask permission to pick off bits of his readiness funding to support plus-ups in other subcommittees.
“We pointed out to them that there are other areas of the budget that they can look at,” Wittman said. “But we’ve been very, very specific to let them know that readiness is the most important element of what this entire committee does. I understand, too, that readiness doesn’t have an advocate, and so therefore our subcommittee needs to be the advocate to make sure those funds stay there.”
“I understand programs, I understand aircraft, I understand ships, I understand all those other elements, but at the end of the day, we have to make sure we have readiness and it being restored,” said Wittman, whose district includes a vast amount of economic activity around Naval Station Norfolk and Quantico Marine Base. “Modernization is important–the problem is, modernization by itself, without the support of the force structure to be trained in using these tools we give our members in uniform, doesn’t get the job done.”
Wittman said his subcommittee did include some items from the Unfunded Requirements Lists provided by the service chiefs and combatant commanders, but he justified that decision by pointing out that readiness had been hit much harder than other accounts when sequestration hit–military officials could only keep their acquisition and personnel accounts in tact by raiding readiness accounts in the short term–and they needed to begin rebuilding that readiness now or else take on unacceptable levels of risk.
Both Wittman and Smith addressed the looming Overseas Contingency Operations fund–Wittman said “it’s hard to take money from a nebulous figure” but Smith said he could envision a much larger than expected OCO bill passing this year to help pay for all the programs lawmakers refuse to cut.
What they both agreed on is that the full-committee markup–which begins at 10 a.m. on May 7–will be a long, contentious affair with many attempts to take money out of readiness accounts.
“I think that’s an apt description of where we’re at, I think it’s unfortunate,” Smith said of the attempts to add items into the bill without finding more appropriate ways to pay for them. “I think we are desperately moving things around to find those one-year savings to protect everything in FY ’15. But ‘16, ‘17 and ‘18 are coming. So like I said, I’m still examining that to see what options we can put out there, I’ve been trying to take a more realistic approach but it certainly doesn’t look like the direction the majority is taking. They’re punting on all the difficult issues, which I think is unfortunate.”