Congress’ Budget Games Mean Less Cash, More Chaos for Pentagon

Better get money out of the ATM now, because the U.S. military is preparing guidance to slash nearly everything that isn’t related to ongoing missions, as prep for congressionally imposed budget cuts. Photo: U.S. Navy

The Pentagon has no idea if Congress will vote to cancel the automatic budget cuts scheduled for the military on March 1. That uncertainty has prompted the Pentagon to take the precaution of slashing cash from nearly everything it does that isn’t directly related to fighting the Afghanistan war and paying troops. Flight hours will be cut, ships will stay in port, and contracts will be suspended.

It isn’t known how much money the preemptive cuts, announced Thursday, will actually save the Pentagon. Specifics aren’t yet available. And if all this sounds chaotic, that’s because it is. Nearly everything the military does requires months of planning, which it can’t do unless it has a sense of how much money it has. Cutting the budget for certain would allow that planning to happen, even if the Pentagon doesn’t like it, but Congress and the White House have instead punted on the automatic cuts, so the only certainty the Pentagon has is confusion.

Accordingly, the Navy and the Air Force, the services dependent on large and expensive weapons systems, are steeling themselves for a bitter 2013. They’re the forces that are supposed to be the backbone of the Obama administration’s post-Afghanistan defense strategy, which focuses on the hard-to-reach places on the other side of the Pacific Ocean.

The Navy expects to put out a guidance for the fleet as early as Friday explaining the impact of the cuts. A Navy source tells Danger Room that its priority will be the “forward fleet” — that is, preserving money for the operations of the ships and subs currently out to sea. (Navy estimates for the past year have pegged the forward fleet at around 93 ships at any given time, out of the 295 ships and subs it possesses.) That’s sent Navy planners scrambling to figure out what they can cut without impacting the present operations and immediate-term requests it can expect from the chiefs of the military’s regional commands. While the source would not confirm any specific cuts ahead of the Navy’s announcement, it is likely to strip cash from Navy bases; keep docked ships in port longer; and cut back on maintenance and upgrades for ships returning from sea.

Air Force Secretary Michael Donley told reporters on Friday that the self-imposed austerity was intended to prepare for the prospect of the Defense Department losing at least $50 billion in automatic cuts for the remainder of the fiscal year. That will likely mean “curtailing non-readiness or mission-essential flying and travel,” a pause in hiring civilians, and forgetting about upgrading its bases. The new belt-tightening “wouldn’t mitigate the impact” of the automatic cuts on its core functions; they’ll only help the Air Force deal the management crunch associated with waking up March 2 to a much smaller budget. Beyond sequestration, Donley and the Air Force chief of staff, Gen. Mark Welsh, anticipated that the Air Force will have to shrink if it wants to remain capable of its core missions — but it still wants to build a new long-range bomber and is committed to its version of the expensive F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

A memo released late Thursday by Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter instructed the military to begin “reductions in flying hours, steaming days, vehicle miles, and other operations/training/support activities that address force readiness.” The services are supposed to identify cuts to “large programs” and “significant” changes to “joint programs” that they buy or operate together. (While it’s not identified in Carter’s memo, perhaps the most prominent of these is the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter family of jets.) Upcoming “ship maintenance availabilities and aviation and ground depotlevel maintenance activities” are to be cancelled; “contracts and studies” to are to be “review[ed] for cost savings”; and facilities maintenance upgrades are to be paused.

According to Carter’s memo, defense programs “closely associated with the new defense strategy” — that is, the “rebalance” to Asia and the Pacific region — are to be spared, but only “to the extent feasible.” Neither the Pentagon nor the services have specified which programs, planes, ships or R&D are “closely associated” with the new strategy. But it likely means drones, special operations forces, new jammers, next-gen sensors, and cyber weapons. It also probably means the retrofit of the USS Ponce, which the Navy is turning into an “Afloat Staging Base” to ferry commandos, Osprey tilt-rotors and other gear.

During a Thursday press briefing, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said he did not yet know how how much money the impending self-imposed cuts would save. But Panetta said that if Congress could not cancel the automatic defense cuts, deferred as part of the New Year’s Day “fiscal cliff” deal to take effect March 1, they will “hollow out the defense force of this nation,” creating a force unprepared to fight. Those defense cuts would take out 9.4 percent from nearly every defense program — although Frank Kendall, the Pentagon acquisitions chief, recently warned that Pentagon lawyers reviewing the law establishing sequestration fear the cuts could actually be 12 percent. Overall, the Pentagon would be required to lose around $500 billion over the next decade, or nearly as much as the Pentagon’s annual non-war budget.

The sequester cuts were envisioned in 2011 as a mechanism to force Democrats and Republicans to compromise on a package of tax hikes and spending cuts that amounted to a cross-ideological bargain, impacting both social spending and defense spending. No one, the theory went, thought automatically slashing defense and non-entitlement social spending according to a legally-fixed ratio was sensible, so Congress and the White House would come up with a smarter plan to reduce the deficit. That theory has epically failed. Yet sequestration, the bete noire of so many congressional defense hawks, remains a looming prospect on March 1, because Republicans refuse to raise taxes and Democrats refuse to re-focus the cuts entirely on social programs.

Polls taken last year indicate that defense spending is a popular target for budget cuts. What worries the Pentagon isn’t just the depth of Congress’ impending automatic cuts, so much as it is the fact that the cuts impact everything the military does equally, making it difficult to prioritize between necessary and unnecessary goals. Panetta pointedly warned on Thursday that the “uncertainty” surrounding Congress’ budget negotiations means “not knowing whether the strategy that we’ve put in place can survive” — as the Navy and Air Force can currently attest.