A plan set forth by congressional Republicans to fund the defense budget through protected war spending will not be sufficient to tackle the Army’s modernization needs, an effort which in any case is a lost cause if sequestration-level cuts are reinstated in October, Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Daniel Allyn said May 12.
As the Pentagon struggles to shore up the various military services after 13 years of combat, “the bill payer for better nuclear capability, better shipping and more air power is a smaller Army despite the magnitude of the risk and threat that’s out there,” Allyn said during a breakfast hosted by the Association of the United States Army outside Washington, D.C.
The GOP budget resolution, which has been passed by the Senate, would boost Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) spending to fully fund priorities laid out in the president’s fiscal year 2016 base budget.
“Every time we take from one entity to lift another, it creates a gap, a gap for which we have no backfill and a gap for which OCO, quite frankly, is insufficiently flexible to meet the requirement for multi-year challenges that are out there,” Allyn said.
“In order for it to meet the needs of our army, it must have greater flexibility, it must be less restrictive and must enable us to sustain readiness and modernization efforts as we go forward.”
Not only has the Army budget suffered at the hands of sister services, but internally Allyn said the Army’s modernization programs have paid the bills to preserve the service’s end strength. “We do that at our peril, especially in the near term,” he said.
Service officials are therefore looking at everything in their inventories for “candidates for divestiture,” he added, citing the controversial Aviation Restructuring Initiative (ARI), as an example. The ARI will eliminate 700 aircraft from the Army’s active aviation units for a total savings of more than $12 billion, as Chief of Staff Gen. Raymond Odierno has testified before Congress.
The ARI will divest three airframes entirely: the OH-58D Kiowa Warrior scout helicopters, a fleet of A- and C-models used for trainers and the entire fleet of 180 TH-67 Creek trainers.
“The savings when you divest fully are in the B[illion]s,” Allyn said. “The savings when you divest partially are only in the M[illion]s. And, frankly, for the modernization requirements that we have in the near term, we’ve got to find more Bs to put at that effort.”
An Army Equipment Modernization Strategy blueprint recently was published that also addresses the need to upgrade and retool thousands of ground vehicles and soldier equipment.
“We are looking across our portfolios, starting with our combat vehicle modernization effort, to ensure that we get the most important capability the fastest,” he said.
“We are in a tough balancing act right now as they president’s budget is before Congress, to ensure that we equip our soldiers and our units with the best possible capability,” Allyn said. He then compared the force of today to the under-trained and poorly equipped force first sent to fight in the Korean War.
“We had an Army that had been faced with about five years of insufficient resourcing post-World War II,” Allyn said. “We had an Army whose modernization efforts were seen as unimportant compared to the needs to grow the nuclear force, grow the strategic airlift force and to grow our aircraft carriers.”
“Sounds like anything anybody has heard lately around town?” he asked.
Army leaders have been focused over the past 18 months on restoring the force’s proficiency at combined arms maneuver, which Allyn said “had been dulled for the past 13 years as we responded to counterinsurgency requirements on the battlefield. Our combat training centers are humming.”
The service has been able to raise the percentage of available units ready for deployment from 10 percent immediately after sequestration was lifted in fiscal 2014, to 30 percent at present, Allyn said. That is still not enough trained divisions, he added.
In response, the Army has developed a “readiness sustainment model,” that seeks to keep two-thirds of available units trained and ready for deployment at any time.