With fewer than 14 days left in the federal fiscal year, Defense Secretary Ash Carter warned that both of the most-likely answers to the current budget impasse would be wasteful and damaging to national security.
“Without a negotiated budget solution, we will again return to sequestration, reducing discretionary funds to their lowest real level in a decade–despite the fact that members of both parties agree this result will harm our national security,” Carter said Sept. 16 at the Air Force Association’s annual Air & Space Conference in National Harbor, Md.
Congress has until Sept. 30 to pass an appropriations bill that will fund the government for the coming year.
Sequestration is set to return in 2016 without help from Congress, which looks increasingly unlikely as the Sept. 30 deadline looms. The off-the-top cuts would cap the Pentagon budget below $500 billion. The most likely alternative is a continuing resolution (CR) that keeps the Defense Department’s budget at current levels, which at this point would be less funding than under sequestration. The Obama administration’s budget proposal for fiscal year 2016 is $570 billion.
“What we have under sequestration or a long-term continuing resolution is a straitjacket,” Carter said. “We would be forced to make irresponsible reductions when our choices should be considered carefully and strategically. Making these kinds of indiscriminate cuts is wasteful to taxpayers and industries…dangerous for our strategy, unfair to our service members, and frankly, embarrassing in front of the world.”
A CR could run for up to a year, and the longer the Defense Department is forced to operate under one, the more readiness, modernization and morale will suffer, Carter said. A yearlong CR would result in a $38 billion deficit for the Defense Department, he said.
Congress has repeatedly refused efforts by the Defense Department to save money by eliminating overhead, closing unused bases and retiring aging platforms like the A-10 Warthog. Carter said “congressional reluctance to agree to proposed reforms…amounts to a tax on how we plan and operate.”
Despite the fiscal year-end approaching and all of the uncertainty it brings, Carter reemphasized the Air Force’s role in the future of U.S. national security. After 14 years of ground war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Air Force will have a larger role in force projection and mobility of U.S. forces in far-flung locales in the Asia-Pacific region and Eastern Europe in response to an expansionist Russia.
In the Pacific, “the Air Force is playing a vital role with a stronger posture in the region, including tactical aircraft like the F-22, space and cyber forces, and ISR assets like the MQ-9, and the Global Hawk,” Carter said. “We will continue to strengthen and modernize our infrastructure in places like Guam and across the Pacific. And we will continue to deepen our security cooperation with longstanding allies like Japan, South Korea, and Australia.”
All the while, the service has been shouldering most of the burden of the air campaign against Islamic State (ISIS) militants in Iraq and Syria, where it has flown two-thirds of combat sorties in the past year, Carter said.
Despite a foreseeable lack of resources, Carter reemphasized his commitment to Air Force modernization efforts and strategic investment beyond fiscal 2016. He specifically mentioned nuclear force recapitalization; offensive and defensive space capabilities; cyber; intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance technology and precision munitions as necessary investment targets in fiscal year 2017 and beyond.