The Defense Department will release a $496 billion budget request next week that sacrifices troop strength to preserve readiness and cuts some modernization programs to protects other procurement and research efforts of higher strategic importance, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Monday afternoon.
The budget request for fiscal year 2015, which will be sent to Congress March 4, lays out a plan that adheres to congressional spending caps in FY ’15 but spends $115 billion more than allowed under sequestration in FY ’16-’19.
“The reason we are requesting this increase over sequestration levels is because the president and I would never recommend a budget that compromises our national security,” Hagel said at the Pentagon, with the service chiefs and secretaries and several of his top DoD officials sitting in the front of the room. “Continued sequestration cuts would compromise our national security both for the short- and long-term.”
To address short-term risks, President Barack Obama will include in the government-wide budget request an Opportunity, Growth and Security Fund, which will include an additional $26 billion in defense spending, as well as other non-defense spending items and a combination of spending cuts and tax reform proposals to pay for these programs. Hagel said the defense portion of this fund would go to “bringing unit readiness and equipment closer to standard after the disruptions and large shortfalls of the last few years.”
In the longer term, though, hard decisions will have to be made, and the Pentagon is not prepared to make those decisions now. Rather, officials want to wait until they gain a better sense of whether Congress will attempt to repeal sequestration for FY ’16 and beyond.
“The reality of reduced resources and a changing strategic environment requires us to prioritize and make difficult choices,” Hagel said. “Some of those choices we must make now. For other choices–particularly those involving the ultimate size of our armed forces–we have built decision points into our budget plan. We will make these decisions when we have more clarity regarding future spending levels. Our budget will give us the flexibility to make different decisions based on different fiscal outcomes.”
He noted that DoD also created a detailed plan for the next five years that does adhere to full sequestration spending caps, as is the current law, but the differences between that full-sequester plan and the one that will be sent to Congress are significant.
For the Army, full sequestration would mean cutting active duty troops from the preferred 450,000 soldiers to 420,000, as well as dropping to 315,000 Army National Guardsmen instead of 335,000 and 185,000 Army Reservists instead of 205,000. Full sequestration would also cut 50 Light Utility Helicopters from the National Guard.
For the Navy, full sequestration in FY ’16 and beyond would mean retiring the aircraft carrier USS George Washington (CVN-73) instead of refueling it, bringing the Navy to a 10-carrier fleet instead of the congressionally mandated 11 carriers. The Navy already plans to put half its cruiser fleet in reduced operating status to save money, but full sequestration would force six additional ships to be laid up. The service would also buy its new destroyers at a slower rate, resulting in 10 fewer large combatants in the fleet by 2023.
Full sequestration would mean the Air Force would retire 80 aircraft beyond the plans laid out in the FY ’15 request, which include retiring the entire A-10 and U-2 fleets. The additional cuts would include the entire KC-10 tanker and Global Hawk Block 40 fleets. Joint Strike Fighter acquisition would be slowed, meaning the service would have 24 fewer F-35s in FY ’19.
At the same press conference, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army Gen. Martin Dempsey warned not to look at the cuts as service-specific, but rather that cuts to his joint force would be further-reaching than some people realize. The steep cuts to Army troop levels, for example, “would certainly have an effect on the Army, but it would also have an effect on the joint force because the Army provides a lot of the logistics enablers, a lot of command and control, signals, things that the other services fall in on but the Army provides.” The full toll on warfighting capability is unclear, but both Dempsey and Hagel noted that the steeper the cuts, the fewer types of missions the military can be prepared for, and therefore the greater the risk in the future.
“We can manage these anticipated risks under the president’s budget plan, but they would grow significantly if sequester-level cuts return in Fiscal Year 2016, if our reforms are not accepted, or if uncertainty on budget levels continues,” Hagel concluded. “As I’ve made clear, the scale and timeline of continued sequestration-level cuts would require greater reductions in the military’s size, reach and margin of technological superiority. Under sequestration spending levels, we would be gambling that our military will not be required to respond to multiple major contingencies at the same time.”
Hagel called his over-budget spending plan “a realistic alternative to sequestration-level cuts, sustaining adequate readiness and modernization most relevant to strategic priorities over the long-term. But this can only be achieved by the strategic balance of reforms and reductions the president and I will present to the Congress. This will require Congress to partner with the Department of Defense in making politically difficult choices–which I will address more specifically when I testify before Congress next week.”