Secretary of Defense Ashton Carton came out guns blazing Wednesday against a proposal by the House Armed Services Committee to redirect $18 billion from war funding to pay for items not covered in the Defense Department’s fiscal year 2017 budget proposal.
Carter, along with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, were on Capitol Hill to testify before the Senate Appropriations Committee on Defense (SAC-D). At the same time, HASC Chairman Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) was overseeing the lengthy committee markup of the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act, in which he proposes the shuffling of funds.
“I have serious concerns with the proposal from one of the defense committees to underfund DoD’s overseas war fighting accounts by $18 billion and spend that money on programmatic items we did not request,” Carter told SAC-D.
HASC has pitched transferring $18 billion from the wartime spending account, also called the overseas contingency operations (OCO) fund, to the base budget, effectively forcing the next president to ask for supplemental funding should she or he decide to sustain operations abroad.
Carter said he was confident SAC-D would not consider such a proposal, which he called “deeply troubling” and flawed for several reasons.”
“It is gambling with war-fighting money at a time of war, proposing to cut off our troops funding in places like Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria in the middle of the year,” he said. “It would spend money on things that are not DoD’s highest unfunded priorities across the joint force,” he said. “It buys force structure without the money to sustain it and keep it ready, effectively creating hollow force structure and working against our efforts to restore readiness.”
The additional $18 billion in base expenses will pay for end strength increases, a pay raise for troops, additional training hours, and more procurement. All of those areas are connected to the readiness problem, Thornberry said.
“It doesn’t address the much bigger strategic risk DoD faces of $100 billion in looming automatic cuts,” he said. “In fact, it is a step in unraveling the Bipartisan Budget Act, which provided critical stability which DoD needs now and desires for the future.
The plan calls for maintaining the $610 billion topline agreed to by the White House and Congress under last year’s budget deal, but set base expenditures at $574 billion. The remaining $36 billion for Overseas Contingency Operations will allow the services to support operations in the Middle East and Europe until around April 2017.
“It is another road to nowhere with uncertain chances of ever becoming law and a high probability of leading to more gridlock and another continuing resolution–exactly the kind of terrible distraction we’ve seen for years that undercuts stable and efficient use of taxpayer dollars, dispirits troops and their families, baffles friends and emboldens foes,” Carter said.
“I cannot support such maneuvers as secretary of defense.”