Two congressmen who currently serve in the military discussed what they see as a growing schism between Congress and the Pentagon, with their frustrations at the budgeting process on display.
Speaking at the Defense One Summit yesterday, Reps. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif) and Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) said they believe there is a lack of trust and honesty between the legislative and executive branch that has hindered strategy-based budgeting.
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| Photo courtesy Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) |
“There’s a disconnect between the military and Congress,” said Hunter, who is a major in the Marine Corps Reserves. He offered as an example the hearings in September about the administration’s response to chemical weapons attacks in Syria. Rather than trusting the words of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, Hunter said lawmakers were instead reading media reports analyzing Dempsey’s body language to gain insight into what he actually felt.
Kinzinger, a major in the Air National Guard, said lawmakers shared some of the blame as well, sometimes putting their own parochial interests ahead of what is best for the defense budget overall. But he said he felt the Defense Department was actively making the relationship worse recently, not trying to improve it.
“There are a lot of drilling members of Congress right now, and DoD has made a push to try to get all of us to not serve as active guardsmen and reservists,” he said, adding that the lawmakers in the National Guard and reserves were being asked to go into Individual Ready Reserve status where they wouldn’t be attached to a unit that drills on weekends. “That doesn’t help with the relationship.”
Hunter said the budgeting process had gotten a lot of scrutiny in the past year or two because of sequestration, but he said that the sequester didn’t cause a new problem, just exacerbated an old one.
“In a perfect world, DoD would come back to Congress and say, here’s what we need, it’s going to cost $1.7 trillion a year,” he said as an example of how the budget should be crafted, with the Pentagon outlining everything it would want to create the lowest-risk scenario possible. “Obviously, that’s fairy money, we’re not going to spend $1.7 trillion a year on defense…But then Congress then goes, okay, let’s pare this down so we can afford it, and let’s have a defense budget that matches a strategy that is directly related to the threat analysis. That has not been done…or it has been done but it’s been kept from us and it’s been kept from the media.”
Hunter said the budget process was fundamentally flawed because “what we need in Congress is that trust and that honesty that’s been lacking from the military leadership.”
Kinzinger added that, from his perspective, the Pentagon had gotten used to submitting budgets and being told by lawmakers, “okay, and thank you for your service.” With operations in Afghanistan winding down and budgets tight, “DoD is, I think to an extent, kind of a little hurt by the fact that we are trying to hold them accountable for where tax dollars are spent.”
The one hint of compromise the two congressmen offered had to do with personnel costs. In the past several budget submissions, DoD has included slowed pay increases for troops, higher Tricare costs and other changes to benefits. Congress each year has struck those changes and instead offset those costs with cuts elsewhere in the budget.
“If you don’t [address personnel costs], the money available for acquisition of weapons systems and training is going to be funneled then into personnel costs,” Hunter said. “That’s something that has to be addressed, and I think Congress will finally have the guts to look at that in the next authorization and make some changes.”
Kinzinger said the heart of the problem is that the average congressman “who’s never been in the military is scared because they’re afraid…that they’re going to be labeled as anti-veteran, anti-military.”
But Hunter said in no uncertain terms that the benefits system needed to be reformed. He said he disagreed with the idea that a military officer should retire at the age of 42 and then have access to taxpayer-subsidized Tricare if that retiree has found a post-military job and has access to insurance through the new employer.