Both Congress and voters need to accept that tough decisions must be made regarding military spending–and soon–or the lack of a decision will equate to a vote to decrease readiness, the House Armed Services Committee ranking member told defense reporters Thursday.
Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) said he supports politically unpopular moves for the military in the name of getting the most national security out of the funding that is available: he wants another round of Base Realignment and Closure, he supports keeping the budget deal’s 1-percent cut to the Cost of Living Adjustment for working-age military retirees, and he supported raising TRICARE premiums when the idea was floated a few years ago to help keep the Defense Department’s personnel costs manageable.
“I’m willing to support things that really do save money, and I just think we need more members of Congress who are willing to do that,” he said. “Or, like I said, we’re going to have a hollow force, guaranteed.”
The way Smith sees it, there’s a constituency for everything the military does now and could propose doing in the future. For lawmakers to protect those constituencies and refuse to make cuts rather than making smart, strategic decisions for the budget as a whole is to abdicate military oversight authorities and to leave the men and women in uniform in the position of having a lot of equipment but not enough training.
“You buy less fuel, you train less, you don’t make repairs in installations,” he said. “So basically you put a force out there that isn’t trained to do the mission when you have to do it. And when you stack that against the 1 percent cut to COLA, what’s the decision? It’s very frustrating to me to see that decision. And it’s the same on BRAC. … How do you shrink the force by the amount we’re talking about and not do a BRAC? So I think we need to start making less parochial and more sort of long-term decisions on how to handle the budget.”
A good starting point for that type of strategic decision-making is the acquisition reform effort HASC has underway. Smith and committee vice chairman Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) are heading up the effort, which Smith said would in part involve cutting out some middle management. Smith said too many decision-makers are involved in any given program, which means that DoD is paying a lot in personnel costs but also that DoD does not hold anyone personally accountable for decisions. If a program manager were empowered to make a decision on his own, Smith said he believes programs might move faster, cost less and result in a better product.
On Wednesday, Smith spoke at an event with four defense think tanks to discuss the upcoming Quadrennial Defense Review. Regarding military acquisition reform, he cited the current Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carrier and the Joint Strike Fighter, as well as the canceled Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle and the Future Combat System, as examples where “the eyes got bigger than the belly – you imagine, well what if it could do this? Let’s try to make that happen. Let’s leap ahead. What we learned is, it’s enormously expensive to try to do something dramatically different.”
Smith said taking a more measured approach to modernization could avoid wasting money on cost-overruns and program cancelations going forward.
“There’s some real savings to be made there if we’re willing to step up and make some of the personnel and acquisition changes that would help get us there,” he told reporters Thursday.
Asked if he believed, as the defense industry seems to, that fiscal year 2015 would be the worst of sequestration and that defense spending would rebound in FY ’16 and later, Smith was less optimistic. He said he believed there would be a sustained period of suppressed spending, both on defense and government-wide. He told reporters that a smaller force means less equipment, and even steps like reducing the number of aircraft carriers in the Navy fleet, which several lawmakers have made clear they will not allow, need to be considered.
Asked what might make lawmakers accept that the time is right to make these hard decisions, Smith’s answer was grim. Much like passing a budget and softening the blow of sequestration seemed politically impossible for a while, so does tackling reform on military compensation, acquisition and basing.
“What changed [in the budget debate] that was we finally saw what it looked like to not pass a budget, to have sequestration kick in, and slowly but surely the impact of that became real,” Smith said. “Trouble is, what is the impact of a hollow force? The impact is, when a crisis hits, you are less prepared to deal with it and you place the men and women in the armed forces at greater risk. But until that crisis hits, you simply hear the dire warnings. Will people heed those warnings?”
“It is possible the same thing will happen and folks will recognize that we simply can’t fund readiness to the degree we need to if we don’t make some of these choices. And that could shift the balance of what’s acceptable,” Smith said.