House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) said Thursday he is suggesting to the Defense Department that it request more funding in upcoming disaster relief bills likely to come up in Congress soon.
Back in September, before the last continuing resolution (CR) keeping the government open through early December passed (Defense Daily, Sept. 8), Thornberry said one way to partially limit the bad outcomes of a CR on defense spending was to get additional money through anomalies on areas like missile defense and readiness (Defense Daily, Sept. 6).
However, the CR never had any anomalies. Thornberry told reporters at a roundtable ahead of the Heritage Foundation’s unveiling of its fourth annual Index of U.S. Military Strength that this did not happen for two reasons.
First, the deal President Donald Trump made with top Democrats in Congress to pass a CR moved things much faster than anybody expected. The chairman said the day the deal was made he was speaking with Secretary of Defense James Mattis about getting some defense anomalies into the CR but there was no chance with the quickly-completed deal.
Second, Thornberry said in a broader way the DoD and Congress are to blame for being too accepting of CRs. “We have gotten so used to CRs we think, ‘well it’s just going to be that way, we’ll have to live with it,’” also adding DoD does not ask for anomalies.
“It’s just automatically, October first will be a CR. I’ve even given some of my committee a hard time about that assumption.”
Continuing resolutions typically are divided into general provisions that apply to all appropriations covered by the CR and anomalies that apply to a single account and deviate from general provisions.
Now Thornberry has started suggesting to DoD that they not wait until December for more ballistic missile defense spending because North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un is not waiting until then. The department should ask for extra funding through upcoming hurricane relief bills because the U.S. needs more interceptors in the California and Alaska-based Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD), the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD), and the Aegis missile defense systems.
“I didn’t hint, I told them there’s going to be more disaster money, get your act together, and if you have a pressing need that we can get a head start on between now and December get it up to us,” Thornberry said.
He wants Congress and DoD to get started but added, “unfortunately, we have conditioned the department in a bad way. And we’ve got to all break out of that.”
The chairman also said sometimes he has tension with Mattis because the secretary does not want to talk openly about U.S. defense weaknesses to prevent adversaries from learning where the U.S. is vulnerable. However, Thornberry said he has to talk about them openly to some extent to convince his fellow members of Congress to fix the problems and raise funding.
Thornberry also tied the budgetary problems to the Budget Control Act (BCA) but said he believes current defense budget talks may finally lead to it being amended or repealed.
“I believe, however, that something will happen with the Budget Control Act. It is a topic which Republicans and Democrats agree on broadly, even if there are some differences about which parts or how you do it.”
The chairman said he is “pretty optimistic” that everybody acknowledges the BCA levels are “tragically inadequate” for defense spending.
Along these lines, Thornberry and 152 House Republicans sent a letter to President Trump supporting his endorsement of $700 billion in national defense spending for FY 2018.
Trump said in his recent address to the United National General Assembly (UNGA) that the U.S. will spend almost $700 billion on military and defense spending and that “Our military will soon be the strongest it has ever been.”
The House-passed FY 2018 defense appropriations bill calls for $658.1 billion in spending, including both base and overseas contingency operations (OCO). However, the Senate’s bill calls for less money at $595.2 billion, including OCO (Defense Daily, July 31).
“We agree a funding level of $700 billion is essential to make our military as strong as it has ever been,” the letter reads.
Focusing on how every day of a CR delays military readiness, “any budget negotiation must make the national security of our nation a top priority. It is essential we fund our military as the right level as soon as possible” the letter adds.
Defense Department spokeswoman Dana White commented during a press briefing that “we appreciate the chairman’s leadership” in helping DoD obtain a full budget.
White reiterated Thornberry’s sentiments that the government is already under a CR for the first 10 weeks of the fiscal year and that “Continuing resolutions hurt the readiness of our forces and their equipment. The longer the CR lasts the more damage they do. That is why it is imperative that Congress passes a full-year budget and eliminates the budget caps and the Budget Control Act.”
“We encourage the Congress to exercise the rightful stewardship of taxpayer dollars and pass a fiscal year ’18 budget before the CR ends on Dec. 8,” she added.
At the Heritage event, Thornberry tied the BCA and CRs to military readiness issues and the increasing pace of mishaps and deadly incidents.
The chairman highlighted “it is alarming to me” that there have been about as many service members killed in accidents as people killed in the recent Las Vegas mass shooting and more than killed in combat this year.
“The trends are bad and we’re not meeting our obligation. So is the military doing enough? Well, you know, I don’t know.” Thornberry said the T-45 Navy trainer aircraft problem perplexes him.
“I have no doubt the Navy is taking this issue seriously” but he does not understand why the Navy cannot figure out what is causing the oxygen problem and fix it. This refers to how the Navy has previously grounded its T-45C Goshawk trainer aircraft as well as F/A-18 fighters due to a recent increase in physiological episodes (PEs) related to the aircrafts’ onboard oxygen generation system.
On Sunday, a T-45 based at Naval Air Station (NAS) Meridian, Miss., crashed killing an instructor and student pilots.
In a call with reporters, Capt. Sara Joyner (nominated as rear admiral-lower half), the official in charge of the physiological episode investigation, said they are using new devices to monitor breathing issues. However, officials said the problems are at the intersection of machines and human pilots. They said stress, minor illness, and other personal issues can mix with cockpit/OBOGS designs at the margins and during certain operations to cause some PEs (Defense Daily, Oct. 2).
Thornberry is convinced these as well as the deadly Aegis DDG-51 destroyer collisions, among others, are cumulative effects of underfunding the military.
“I cannot flip a switch and put zillions of more dollars in to operations and maintenance and make this go away. It’s cumulative, it occurs over time, the training you lose will never be regained.”
The chairman said some of the maintenance for the F/A-18 is to replace F/A-18As with F/A-18E/Fs because it takes twice as much money to maintain the older models. He said he has talked to maintainers who are looking for spare parts in museums and the aircraft boneyards to work on the older F/A-18s.