Pentagon: Budget cuts will reduce military readiness

The Pentagon’s restrained budget would reduce US military readiness, cut down on training, ground a dozen fighter squadrons and eliminate tens of thousands of civilian employees, Pentagon officials said Wednesday after the White House released its budget proposal for 2014. “We are living in a world of complete uncertainty,” Secretary of Defence Chuck Hagel said at a press briefing.

Pentagon officials outlined a grim programme of cutbacks, all the while insisting that the budget proposal still supports the US military as the “best-led, best-trained and best-equipped military” in the world. Increased investments will be made mainly in only two areas: the US cyber command and expanding the US presence in the Pacific. By 2020, 60 per cent of US Navy forces are to be stationed in the Pacific region, said Robert Hale, under secretary of defence and the Pentagon’s comptroller.

The list of cutbacks was long, and already underway in some cases due to the cutbacks of the current year: combat training and brigade exercises cancelled, fighter squadrons grounded, flying hours for Navy pilots reduced, Navy operations delayed, the precision tracking satellite system terminated, among others.

“When you add all this up, to be very candid, what we’ve had to do beginning a few months ago is to start to burn readiness. We’re not adding readiness or maintaining readiness; we’re burning readiness,” said Lieutenant General Mark Ramsay, director of the Pentagon’s force structure resources and assessment in the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Obama’s proposed 526.6-billion-dollar budget for the nation’s defence in 2014 is about 8 per cent higher than this year, when across-the-board federal sequestration cutbacks cut 41 billion dollars from the Pentagon’s operating budget.

Obama hopes to de-trigger the drastic sequestration by offering Congress 1.8 trillion dollars in deficit reductions over the next 10 years. That would mean Pentagon cutbacks of only 150 billion dollars over that period instead of the 500 billion dollars that had been feared under sequestration, Hagel said.

Grounding pilots in particular means they lose flight readiness, and officials said the expense of retraining would compete with other already constrained outlays. Hale said the Pentagon was trying to maintain a “ready force,” but added: “I use that word advisedly, because I don’t think we can say we’re going to maintain it, given what’s going on in ’13.”

Another worry was the overrun in spending on overseas military operations in the past two years, due to a “higher operating tempo” – an apparent reference to the surge of US troops in Afghanistan – and soaring transport costs. To make up the difference, the military will launch another round of base realignments and closures in 2015. Wartime operations such as the drawdown in Afghanistan will get full funding, officials said. As Marines return home, they will shift from their land-based operations of the last 11-12 years back to their specialty, amphibious expeditionary warfare, Ramsay said. Officials worry that training cutbacks would not only disappoint but reduce the morale of many overseas and home-based troops.

The Pentagon foresees the loss of 40,000 to 50,000 civilian employees through to 2018, a 5 to 6 per cent drop from the current force of 750,000. “We need to plan wisely for a long term future of budget constraints,” Hagel said. Asked if the cutbacks would affect the US readiness to counteract an attack from North Korea and its leader Kim Jong Un, officials assured that the military is ready for any contingency.

General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, noted the irony of the Pentagon’s absorbing hundreds of billions of dollars in reductions for the good of the American people and economy. “And what is Kim Jong Un doing? He’s starving his people with a military-first policy. It’s pretty hard for us to figure that out,” Dempsey said.