The fiscal year 2016 budget request will reflect the recent increase in demand for U.S. military actions, but the Defense Department needs some help from Congress making ends meet in the short-term, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel told the Senate on Tuesday.
“The budget that we will be coming up here presenting, as you know, in a few months will contain what we believe will is going to be required to carry forward for the longer term this effort,” Hagel said during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on the threat of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). “We will come forward in our budget for the next fiscal year with some new requests” despite sequestration budget caps set to return he said.
But, the secretary noted, current levels of funding are not sufficient to address all the demands being placed on the military. Congress this week is debating a request for $500 million to train and equip moderate Syrian rebels, which would be included in the continuing resolution to fund the beginning of the new fiscal year, which starts Oct. 1. DoD already requested a $5 billion counterterrorism fund and a $1 billion European assurance fund in its FY ’15 Overseas Contingency Operations fund, which will not go into effect until Congress passes an actual line-by-line funding bill after the November elections.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army Gen. Martin Dempsey made clear though that adding special pots of money in the OCO budget wasn’t a sufficient solution to the problem–the base budget needs to be properly funded so it can support the additional OCO-funded missions above and beyond normal operations, he said.
“We’ve discussed this frequently about our ability to balance capability, capacity and readiness,” he said in response to a question from SASC Ranking Member Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.). “Last year we said that the size of the force that was projected over the course of the [program objective memorandum], over the future year defense plan, was adequate to the task if the assumptions made were valid. And some of the assumptions we made were about commitments, and some of the assumptions we made were about our ability to get paid compensation and health care changes, infrastructure changes and weapons systems. We didn’t get any of those actually, or very few of them, and the commitments have increased. So we do have a problem. And I think it will become clear through the fall.”
In his opening statement, Dempsey noted that the military is being tasked with reassuring allies against Russian aggression and most recently combating the Ebola outbreak in Africa, on top of hundreds of daily exercises and international engagements.
“I am growing increasingly uncomfortable that the will to provide means does not match the will to pursue ends,” he said of congressional funding. The secretary and I are doing what we can inside the department to bridge that gap, but we’ll need your help. If we do not depart from our present path, over time I will have fewer military options to offer to the secretary and to the president, and that’s not a position in which I want to find myself,” he said.