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11/25/2013 @ 12:01PM |670 views
Congressional Leaders Ignore Military Pleas, Raising Specter Of Death And Defeat
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A casket team from the 1st Special Forces Group carries the flag-draped coffin of Sergeant 1st Class Nathan R. Chapman at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. Many officials in Washington — including apparently some congressional leaders — are too far removed from the human dimensions of the military enterprise to grasp the consequences of the policies they embrace. (Wikipedia: U.S. Army Photo)
This isn’t the Thanksgiving-week commentary I wanted to write. I wanted to compose an essay about how fortunate we Americans are. But with the clock ticking down to a mid-December deadline for negotiators to find a solution to the government’s fiscal impasse, a troubling pattern is emerging in the behavior of congressional leadersthat I can’t ignore. Simply stated, they are ignoring the persistent pleas of military leaders that budget sequestration is destroying military preparedness and putting the lives of our warfighters at great risk in future conflicts.
Let’s look as some of the things Pentagon leaders have said. In July, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel said sequestration-driven cuts in modernization plans might mean “a less desirable outcome and more casualties” in future wars. In September, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno warned that another year of sequestration would result in 85% of combat brigades being unprepared for overseas contingencies; Odierno estimates that nearly half of the Army’s brigades could disappear over the next seven years if there is no relief from sequestration, leaving his service unready to conduct “even one sustained major combat operation.”
Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh says that if sequestration continues at the planned level in the current fiscal year, “within three to four months, many of our flying units will be unable to maintain mission readiness.” Just last week, a member of Welsh’s leadership team revealed that at one point in July, the service’s main combat command had only eight aircraft available on short notice that were not already committed to ongoing operations. Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jonathan Greenert says that because of sequestration, he has no choice but to scale back his Fleet Readiness Plan for supporting the rest of the joint force and overseas allies in foreign conflicts.
And the Pentagon’s chief financial officer, Robert Hale, warned an audience last week, “if there’s a major contingency operation, I think we’ll regret what we’ve had to do in terms of military readiness.” It doesn’t take a lot of reflection to realize why we might regret being unready. We’ll regret it because hundreds or thousands of our warfighters might die due to inadequate training and equipment.
Senior military officers have been warning Congress about the human costs of sequestration for many months now, but it isn’t clear that most of the leaders on Capitol Hill are listening. Just last week,Politico ran a story about the difficulty House readiness subcommittee chairman Rep. Rob Wittman is facing in getting congressional leaders to attend classified briefings on how sequestration is degrading military preparedness. Majority Leader Eric Cantor showed up, but Speaker Boehner and most of the other leaders on both sides of the aisle were no-shows.
That shouldn’t come as a surprise. The defense budget got barely a mention in wrangling over the debt ceiling and continuing resolution. It’s as though national security just isn’t important enough to attract the attention of legislators engaged in the serious business of political gamesmanship. Apparently 9-11 is such a dim memory and so few veterans are left in either chamber (20% in the House, 18% in the Senate) that military matters don’t enjoy the following they once did. The “lions” who once protected the military from capricious behavior by other legislators – Daniel Inouye, Ted Stevens, Ike Skelton, Bill Young, Jack Murtha, et. al. — are gone, creating a vacuum of leadership.
The main problem with sequestration for the military isn’t that it cuts the defense budget. With overseas wars ending, that was inevitable. The problem is that it imposes deep cuts abruptly, in a manner that forces Pentagon managers to find most of the savings in training and technology accounts. With more time to adjust, much of the savings could be found by shrinking forces, reducing unneeded infrastructure, and eliminating overhead functions that don’t add value. But the Budget Control Act doesn’t leave time for that, so the process cuts muscle from the outset while a lot of fat is left untouched.
Readiness has been hit hardest, because money for training is spent relatively quickly. Modernization is being impacted more gradually, as the delayed effects of cuts to weapons programs slowly accumulates. But since military planners build their budgets for many years into the future, they are already preparing to kill combat systems if sequestration persists. So there is no funding in the Air Force sequestration budget for a new Combat Rescue Helicopter even though a third of the rotorcraft in the current, decrepit fleet aren’t ready to perform missions on a typical day. The Army can’t find money for a new armed aerial scout to replace 30-year-old scout helicopters, and the Marine Corps can’t find money for a successor to its 30-year-old amphibious landing craft.
It isn’t clear most congressional leaders have given any thought to what it will mean if U.S. troops have to deploy to combat zones later in the decade without adequate training or the technological edge to which they have become accustomed. The unspoken assumption on Capitol Hill seems to be that there won’t be any wars, or that we will win without having to use ground forces. That is not clear thinking, because America’s enemies usually choose to attack where our defenses are weak. When that day comes, historians will blame this generation of congressional leaders for failing to adjust a foolish budgetary process, even though the danger it was creating was readily apparent to anyone paying attention.
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