The vice chiefs of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps on Tuesday offered lawmakers a vision of a military that has been depleted by inconsistent, unpredictable funding and warned that the trend would continue if Congress does not immediately emerge from its 9-year budget impasse.
Army Vice Chief Gen. Daniel Allyn set the tone of the hearing before the House Armed Services Committee.
“The most important actions you can take, steps that would have both positive and lasting impact, will be to immediately repeal the 2011 Budget Control Act and ensure sufficient funding to train, man and equip the FY17 NDAA authorized force,” Allyn told HASC. “Unless this is done, additional topline and OCO funding, while nice in the short term, will prove unsustainable, rendering all your hard work for naught.”
Allyn is referring to ongoing efforts to launch a supplemental funding amendment to the current fiscal year’s spending plan. Lawmakers have offered various plans for this supplemental bill ranging from $16 billion to $42 billion. The government is operating under a continuing resolution (CR) that freezes defense spending at 2016 levels through April.
The 2016 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) did halt the drawdown of end strength in the Army and Marine Corps, but the bill has not yet funded any increase in troop strength or added money back into the services’ acquisition or modernization accounts.
HASC Chair Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, was noticeably concerned that Congress has not been able to fund the military services to the level where each can fulfill its mission under the National Security Strategy.
“Not to toot our own horn, but thank goodness we tried to stop the shrinkage in end strength in last year’s NDAA,” he said, referring to the 2016 law. “We haven’t fixed anything but hopefully we have kept it from getting worse.”
Each of the service representatives is working with the Office of the Secretary of Defense to figure out where and how to spend any supplemental FY 2017 funds. Still, they each warned in turn that readiness for a high-end fight and modernization – which have both suffered as a result of unstable funding and an operational focus on the wars of the past 15 years – cannot be restored overnight with a one-time infusion of cash.
Vice Chief of Naval Operations Adm. William Moran said that loss of readiness can be “insidious,” appearing suddenly, though it has become systemic, and requiring years to recover from.
“We have gotten used to executing our budget inefficiently with nine consecutive continuing resolutions,” he said. “This has forced us repeatedly to take money from cash accounts that are the lifeblood of building long-term readiness in our Navy.”
Army
Allyn testified that just one third of the Army’s 58 Brigade Combat Teams (BCTs), a fourth of its combat aviation brigades (CABs) and half of its division headquarters are in a position to fight a war with 30 days’ notice. All the rest would require longer than that to prepare for a high-end fight or are in need of men, equipment and/or training, he said. Only three BCTs could fight a war tonight without further personnel, training or equipment.
The Army has drawn up an unfunded priorities list that identifies $8.2 billion in immediate needs toward which it would put supplemental funding in the current fiscal year.
“We are working aggressively with OSD staff to figure out exactly what that would look like,” Allyn said. “The Army needs stable, predictable funding.”
Navy
Moran said the service currently meets about 40 percent of combatant command requests for Naval forces.
“The ongoing demand for Naval forces far exceeds our long-term supply and that need continues to grow with no end in sight,” Moran said. “Supply is best summed up in one fact: Your Navy today is the smallest it’s been in 99 years.”
Recent reports indicate – and Moran confirmed to Thornberry – that 53 percent of all Naval aircraft are unable to fly, a rate twice the historic norm. A full 62 percent of the service’s F-18 Hornet strike fighters are grounded at any one time for lack of maintenance. Those legacy aircraft were built to have a 6,000 hour service life but are being refitted and flown past 8,000 hours, Moran said.
Without the promise of more funding quickly, the situation will continue to deteriorate, he said.
“In fiscal ’17 alone, if we do not see some kind of supplemental come in this fiscal year, without a CR, within a month we’re going to have to shut down airwings, we’re going to have to defer several availabilities for our surface ships and submarines at maintenance facilities,” Moran said. “We are just flat out of money to be able to do that. That said, we are where we are, which makes it urgent to fund, fix and maintain the fleet that we do have.”
Marine Corps
Gen. Glenn M. Walters, assistant commandant of the Marine Corps, said his service faces substantial readiness challenges associated with a high-end future war because it has molded itself to prevail in the insurgent wars of the recent past.
“A continued focus on deployed unit readiness combined with fiscal uncertainty” has resulted in a Marine Corps that “is insufficiently manned, trained and equipped across the depth of force to operate in an ever-evolving operational environment,” Walters said. “The Marine Corps is fundamentally optimized for the past and has sacrificed modernization and infrastructure to sustain our current readiness posture.”
Over the next several years, the Marine Corps needs to add about 3,000 personnel a year to continue its global operations at the current level, Walters said. It also needs about $9 billion overall to cover deferred infrastructure maintenance projects.
Another top priority is recapitalizing its legacy F-18 fleet, its heavy lift helicopter fleet and providing more training flight hours for its pilots. Where 16 to 18 flight hours per month is the minimum required to maintain proficiency on most aircraft, Marine Corps pilots are averaging between 12 and 14 hours per month, Walters said.
Air Force
Gen. Stephen W. Wilson, Air Force vice chief of staff, said that with an average aircraft age of 27 years, the service is the smallest and equipped with the oldest platforms in its history. It ended fiscal year 2016 short 1,555 pilots and 3,400 maintainers in an active force of 317,000 airmen and 50 fighter squadrons, he said.
Recent budget instability has forced the service to make “unacceptable choices between readiness, force structure and modernization.”
Wilson said the Air Force needs to rebuild itself to 350,000 active duty airmen over the next five to seven years. If it is able to achieve that end strength, accompanied by stable funding, the service could regain the readiness it needs within six to eight years, Wilson said.