source GAIA package: Sx_DefenseNews_M5201410310250023_9E88.zip Origin key: Sx_DefenseNews_M5201410310250023 imported at Thu Jan 21 13:48:30 2016
If sequestration budget cuts remain in effect, the US Army will take a $14 billion hit in 2016, jeopardizing modernization and its ability to respond to a major conflict, Army officials told reporters Friday.
With no sign of a reprieve from Congress, Army senior leaders have been ringing the alarms. The Army assembled two flag officers and its director of aviation on Friday to flesh out for reporters Army Chief of Staff Gen. Raymond Odierno’s gloomy tidings from the service’s annual AUSA convention last week.
“Ending sequestration is the root of all the issues, and anything else you’re doing is a half-attempt or a Band-Aid, or a bridge,” said Maj. Gen. Gary Cheek, the Army’s assistant deputy commanding general for operations, plans and policy.
With seven of the Army’s 10 divisions on overseas missions, if the demand holds amid sequestration in 2016, the active component might have to call on Reserve and National Guard troops, the Marine Corps or field ad hoc units that create holes in Army units elsewhere.
“If seven [divisions] are committed, and we have seven next year and seven the year after that, we probably can’t sustain the personnel tempo and we start to get real problems,” Cheek said.
Under sequestration, more than 137 Army acquisitions and modernization programs could be affected, surpassing 2014, when budget cuts impacted 99 programs, according to Brig. Gen Frank Muth, director of the Army’s Quadrennial Defense Review office.
After dropping the Ground Combat Vehicle, Armed Aerial Scout, Unmanned Ground Vehicle upgrades and the Mounted Soldier System programs, Muth said, the aviation, communications and ground combat vehicles are now vulnerable.
Since 2011, the Army has cancelled 21 programs, delayed 125 and restructured 124, he said. Its research and development account has fallen from $31 billion to $20 billion since 2011, and within that, acquisition funding dropped $21.3 billion to $13.5 billion.
“That is a lot of buying power we have lost across the board, which has directly affected our ability to modernize our kit and equipment, especially after 12 years of war,” Muth said.
The Army continues to pursue its aviation restructuring plan, meant to reap $12 billion in savings or cost avoidance by cutting three of the service’s 13 combat aviation brigades by 2019, retire its fleet of Kiowa Warrior scout helicopters and replace them with the National Guard’s Apaches. Overall, the Army will lose 687 aircraft, including 600 Kiowas.
Cheek downplayed a rift with the Guard over the plan, saying, “there’s no angst, there’s no anger, there’s no hatred and we work with them on a wide array of missions, amicably and professionally.”
In August, the Army inactivated its first OH-58 Kiowa unit, and it is transferring its UH-72 Lakotas to Fort Rucker, Alabama, according to Col. John Lindsay, Army director of aviation. One Reserve Apache battalion has already begun to trade Apaches out of its formation for the UH-60 Black Hawk.
The restructuring plan also cancelled a cockpit and sensor upgrade for the OH-58, and there will be no new training fleet for Fort Rucker, which would have cost more than a billion dollars. Those dollars were reprogrammed to train the aviation force, Lindsay said.
As for training and readiness, officials said they might see a return to 2013, when the Army canceled seven $30 million combined arms training rotations. Then, if a major conflict had broken out in Korea or the Middle East, the Army would have been at risk of sending a mix of brigades whose training was, “not where it needed to be,” Cheek said.
“Things are going to take longer, your likelihood of casualties is higher, the expenses of doing things will be greater, and overall inefficiency of the force is greater,” Cheek said. “It’s not necessarily mission failure, death and destruction, but we believe our job is to train our soldier to the highest level we can.”
The Bipartisan Budget Act of 2013 restored about $1 billion to the Army’s budget, funding training that has since allowed the Army to confidently send troops around the globe. Then the assumption was the budget deal was a one-off to buy the services breathing room.
However, Army officials asking for yet another reprieve on Friday said even as they work to cut the force to 450,000 after 2015, that sequestration would fund an active of 420,0000 — a number that is out of step with the recent spate of global flare-ups and contingency plans.
“We want to say, ‘We think these numbers don’t match what you’re asking us to do,’” Cheek said. “If we get sequestration, we’ll execute what we’re told but we have great concerns.”
Army officials worried about sequestration’s impact note that there are 150,000 soldiers deployed overseas, 130,000 of them in the active component. Among them, Army has forces in Kuwait, Eastern Europe, Africa, Korea and in the Pacific, many on what are considered prevention missions in relatively modest numbers.
The tension between budget cuts and the demand for soldiers overseas fueled Odierno’s public call last week for a larger debate on national security.
Yet analysts have expressed some skepticism at the Army’s hard luck claims, and were bearish on the chances of a national debate.
Overseas contingency operations (OCO) funding has insulated the services, including the Army, from the worst repercussions of sequestration, and it is likely to do so again in 2016, said Mackenzie Eaglen, of the American Enterprise Institute.
Still Eaglen agreed with Odierno’s assertion that the true impact of sequestration has been masked. Its “slow bleed” on the Army budget, she said, is a “mixed blessing since it means troops are making do with less but not so little that there is urgency to reverse the status quo.”
“The budget deals to soften sequestration and the extra OCO funding keep deferring the day of reckoning, and by extension the national debate, because the pain is there and its real but it could be worse,” Eaglen said.
Todd Harrison, senior fellow for budget studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, called the fixation of Army leaders on protecting end-strength, “misguided.”
After Vietnam, the Army resisted downsizing as much as they could have and kept a force it could argue was undermanned and undertrained, a “hollow Army,” Harrison said. Today, the Army is in danger of making similar choices.
“You can get smaller and be ready or stay larger and be hollow,” Harrison said. “There is a counter-argument that you get so small that you can’t regrow and execute war plans, and that’s fair. But what are those plans?”
The albatross of personnel accounts make up nearly half of the Army’s budget. Even as soldiers are cut, the service does not immediately reap the savings, and the accounts themselves are an “immovable object,” a bill that must be paid, Cheek said.
Congress has prevented measures that would free up funding for the Army, including base closures and compensation reforms, Harrison noted. The Pentagon has proposed changes in the rate of growth for pay and housing allowances, as well as a restructuring of its medical benefits — to no avail.
“The number one thing the Army needs from the Hill right now is compensation reform, and that would translate into fewer people they have to let go,” Harrison said.
Will there be a groundswell of popular support for bigger military budgets, or even a national debate about national security? It is an important topic, Harrison said, but the American people won’t be interested after 13 years of war.
“We’re a war weary nation, especially when it comes to large scale, protracted wars in the Middle East,” Harrison said. “We are very weary of that kind of warfare right now. So I don’t think Gen. Odierno will find a receptive audience in the American people.” ■
