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The $259 billion in defense cuts announced Jan. 26 by the Defense Department drew criticism from Congress, even though these reductions are the direct result of the Budget Control Act of 2011 that Congress approved last year.
It is unclear — given the cuts ordered by the budget act and the risk of additional reductions next year if Congress cannot resolve differences on deficit reduction — what critics of the defense plan might be able to do about it. Chances are small for any budget increase in 2013, the first year of the five-year defense plan, so finding more money to save something lawmakers want to protect would require offsetting cuts in some other part of the defense budget, Rep. Adam Smith of Washington, ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, said in a Jan. 25 interview.
Rep. Buck McKeon, R-Calif., the House Armed Services Committee chairman, said the proposal would put the nation at risk. “To achieve these reductions, the president has abandoned the defense structure that has protected America for two generations, turning 100,000 soldiers and Marines out of the force,” McKeon said. “To compensate for this loss, he will build on unmanned assets and Special Forces. To be clear, these asymmetric assets are a vital component in defending America; but they are insufficient to meet the manifold security challenges America faces.”
The size of force cuts was a key complaint during the post-Cold War drawdown, when size of the military was cut by about one-third, but lawmakers were unable to do anything about it because they were unable to find money to pay for extensive increases in the number of people on active duty.
McKeon said the new budget plan “ignores a critical lesson in recent history: that while high technology and elite forces give America an edge, they cannot substitute for overwhelming ground forces when we are faced with unforeseen battlefields.”
Sen. John McCain of Arizona, ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he is “deeply concerned that the size and scope of these cuts would repeat the mistakes of history and leave our forces too small to respond effectively to events that may unfold over the next few years.”
Force cuts also mean service members are losing their jobs, said Rep. Todd Akin, R-Mo., chairman of the seapower and force projection subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee. “With a tough economy, many of these brave men and women will end up on the unemployment line,” Akin said.
“For every soldier or Marine getting fired, there had better be a government bureaucrat getting fired,” Akin said.
