With less than a month left until the budget conference committee is expected to have a deal in place, it is clear there is no consensus among Senate Republicans, let alone within Congress, on whether to support sequestration as a debt-reduction tool or to eliminate the across-the-board cuts and their harmful effects on defense.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said during a foreign policy speech at the American Enterprise Institute Wednesday morning that sequestration cuts, on top of hundreds of billions of dollars in other cuts over the past several years, “will tempt our adversaries to test us, scare our allies, and leave America vulnerable to attack.”

“Our fiscal challenges at home have even caused some, including a few Republicans, to question why so much defense spending is necessary,” he continued. Rubio noted that DoD is not immune to waste and should work to eliminate that waste, but he said sequestration is the wrong approach because it threatens military readiness.

Conversely, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told reporters Tuesday afternoon that “I wish the budget conference well, but I do hope at the end of the day we’ll support the Budget Control Act (BCA), it’s the law of the land.”

McConnell said the BCA and the sequestration it set up have been “highly successful” and have reduced overall government spending three years in a row.

“I think it’s a bad idea to revisit a law that’s actually working and reducing spending,” he said.

During a budget conference committee meeting on Nov. 13, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) not only voiced his support for sequestration but accused his House Republican counterparts of “feeding Senate Republicans to the wolves” by pushing so hard to alter or repeal sequestration to spare defense spending. Grassley said economic strength is a precondition for military strength, and “compromising on sequester for more money for the military, I think, is short-sighted, and hopefully those suggestions we hear primarily out of the House of Representatives won’t be pursued.”

But House Republicans are not backing down. House Armed Services Committee chairman Buck McKeon (R-Calif.) and HASC readiness subcommittee chairman Rob Wittman (R-Va.) have spearheaded an effort this month to educate other House members on how sequestration has hit military readiness, in the hopes of convincing more representatives to agree to either add flexibility in how sequestration cuts are implemented or scale back the size of the cuts.

McKeon addressed the intraparty divide on Nov. 14 after the first defense briefing for non-HASC members, saying that longer-serving House Republicans typically believe they should seek cuts in “everything but homeland security and defense” but the 87 Republicans elected in 2010 believe everything should be on the table. Since that wave of members joined the House, DoD has seen $487 billion in cuts from the BCA and another half-trillion dollars in sequestration cuts over a decade, McKeon noted.

The readiness argument resonates with Rubio, who during his speech fiercely opposed allowing the military’s power to decline because of budget battles but also said he would not agree to higher taxes as part of a deal–adding to the complex combination of views on whether and how to replace sequestration.

“In order to counter these asymmetrical advances that other nations are making, we need to stay at the cutting edge of technology, we need to stay at the cutting edge of weapons systems,” Rubio said. “That takes long-term investment. You can’t make those long-term investments if we don’t have a stable funding mechanism. So this notion that the sequester’s just going to vanish and people are going to wake up, I think unfortunately is not realistic. I did not support the sequester, I do not believe that’s the right way to balance the budget. I just think it’s better than tax increases, unfortunately, as bad as the sequester may be.”

Senate Armed Services Committee ranking member James Inhofe (R-Okla.) took the readiness argument to the Senate floor yesterday afternoon, veering from a debate about sexual assault prosecution in the military to discuss the “draconian cuts” that are “devastating” to military readiness. But with no clear common ground yet or path to agreement, it is uncertain if lawmakers will be able to do anything to save military readiness in the next three weeks.