The services will all lose specific capabilities ranging from F/A-18 aircraft that can’t fly to divesting the KC-10 tanker fleet, to inactivating an aircraft carrier and its air wing, senior leaders told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Readiness and Management Support March 26.
Panel Chair Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) drew the answers from service leaders as she looked at potential results if the $500 billion in sequestration caps plays out the full 10 years, and what it would do to the ability to surge forces, if necessary.
Assistant Commandant United States Marine Corps Gen. John Paxton said, “We absolutely would lose capabilities and then regeneration time would be exceptionally long.”
Marines would not mortgage near-term readinesss, he said, so it would continue to resource East and West Coast Marine Expeditionary Units and the ones behind them. Then, “we would be forced, as some of the other services would be, to some degree into tiered readiness and then you would have no surge capability and then you will be unable to do that because you would have entire squadrons where there would either be no aircraft or no trained pilots.”
Marines are pinched now, with some 46-58 percent of aircraft off the line, which is not quite half the 12 aircraft each squadron needs to maintain minimum deployable combat readiness. While aircraft are not on the line, the same number of pilots is now training on fewer aircraft. Their training has to be sequenced to get night flights and ship landings to keep qualified.
“In essence it’s a downward spiral,” he said. “Is it reversible? Absolutely. If the money would materialize, if you will, we could buy the parts, we could perhaps hire some more civilians, we could fix the backlog of depot maintenance. But it would take us months to do but it wouldn’t be days or weeks.”
This increases operational risk. In his prepared remarks, Paxton said Marines have 264 F/A-18s in the inventory, with 132 needing maintenance.
Air Force Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Larry Spencer was clear: “If we go to the sequestration level we divest the entire KC-10 fleet of tankers. We will stand down and divest all of our Global Hawk Block 40s…We would have to reduce investments in out KC-46 fleet, our F-35as. We’d have to reduce the number of buys. Same with MC-130J.”
Additionally, he said, “We’d make cuts in S&T, cuts in new engine technology, stop radar ISR sensor (work), slow readiness recovery, infrastructure. At the sequestration level we’re not talking about coming back from that. We would have to take out fleets, significantly impact our readiness and there’s no reversibility in that.”
Gen. John Campbell, Army vice chief of staff , said the land force is about people, so it is cutting brigade combats team, and trimming end strength, while defense guidance is to keep a balanced force.
“We’re really mortgaging the future of all our services here,” Campbell said. “We’re not able to put the right money into our science and technology, we’re not able to put our money into modernization of equipment and so we just keep pushing this to the right and we just keep getting smaller and smaller.”
An Army dropping below 450,000 can keep capabilities, but not balance. “We can keep more people, we can keep more force structure, but then we have zero readiness. We have no modernization.”
For the Navy, Vice Adm. Philip Cullom, deputy chief of Naval Operations, Fleet Readiness and Logistics, told senators the sea service started out as a tiered readiness force, “so we really don’t have a place to go if we’re trying to go to a lower level, a sequester level.”
Cullom pointed to what happened in the last sequester. Training was curtailed–“The two air wings that we took down to the tactical hard deck, the others were down to the minimum hours that they needed to be able to deploy.”
There was also an impact to the Fleet Readiness Centers as “for the first time in a long time at the end of the year we actually had airframes and engines that were just sitting on the floor, and a backlog behind that,” Cullom said. There were similar impacts on the public yards, he added.
The panel chairman and ranking member are both from New Hampshire, home to the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, and are well aware of sequestrations earlier impact there.
“If we go to a sequester level and we stay at that level for any length of time, we really think that really limits our options and limits the nation’s decision space,” Cullom said. “Because it compels us to go back and actually inactivate a carrier strike group, that’s both a carrier and the air wing that goes along with it, because there’s nowhere else to be able to get enough money to do that. There’s a long term impact on surge-ability as well contingency operation capacity that we would have that would support in case a contingency comes up and they have to be ready within 30 days.”
“We saw just in terms of presence, there was a 10 percent drop in global presence as a result of sequester the last time,” he said. “That was just for one year. When you start to extend that over several years, it has a cumulative effect that is decidedly not good.”
Sequestration consequences concern the Senate panel, particularly as demands for service capabilities from the combatant commanders continue.
Cullom said: “The combatant command request is for 450 ships to be able to do what they need us to do. Under sequester that could take the sustainable force down to the 240-260 range.”