President Donald Trump last week signed a memorandum calling for Defense Department officials to prepare for rebuilding the military, delivering on a promise he trumpeted at almost every campaign stop.
The memo includes few details about how the rebuilding will take place or where the necessary funding will come from. Instead, it formally directs the Secretary of Defense and other administration officials to prepare plans that would be expected of any new administration, defense analysts say.
Most importantly for the defense budget, Trump is calling for a fiscal year 2017 supplemental budget amendment to provide for immediate readiness needs, “including any proposed reallocations.”
“Nothing in there says anything about increasing the defense budget,”Todd Harrison, director of Budget Analysis at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) told Defense Daily in an interview after the memo was posted on the White House website Jan. 30. Trump signed the document on Jan. 27 following a ceremonial swearing ceremony for Secretary of Defense James Mattis.
“The only budget part of it said he wants Mattis to prepare a supplemental for FY ’17 and a memo from [the Office of Management and Budget] would have been sufficient for that,” Harrison said. “Calling for a revision in the FY ’18 president’s budget within 90 days, that’s normal for a new administration.”
Trump’s memo directs Mattis to work with OMB on the supplemental and revisions to the fiscal 2018 defense budget request “necessary to improve readiness conditions and address risks to national security.”
While the memo does not spell out how large the supplemental would be, the services have drawn up unfunded priorities lists in advance of an expected $40 billion or so in defense spending for fiscal 2017, according to defense analyst and consultant Jim McAleese. That amendment is expected sometime before the end of March, he said.
The Trump Administration’s 2018-2022 Defense Department program objective memorandum (POM) for the Five Year Defense Plan (FYDP) should be released, along with the entire federal budget, in the April-May timeframe, McAleese said.
An incoming administration that comes in with a new Defense Secretary would be expected to draw up its own version of the National Security Strategy and a spending plan for the coming fiscal year. Neither move requires a memo from the president, Harrison says.
“A lot of it consists of things that don’t need to be done through executive action,” Harrison said. “All it requires is for the president to say to Mattis ‘here’s what I need you to do.’”
Besides boilerplate language that the “policy of the United States [is] to rebuild the U.S. Armed Forces,” the memo directs Defense Secretary James Mattis to conduct a review of the military’s readiness within 30 days. The review will take stock of “training, equipment maintenance, munitions, modernization and infrastructure.”
Mattis is directed to deliver a report “identifying actions that can be implemented within the current fiscal year and that are necessary to improve readiness conditions,” the memo states. He then has another month to draw up plans to achieve the levels of readiness identified in the review.
“That plan of action shall address areas for improvement, including insufficient maintenance, delays in acquiring parts, access to training ranges, combatant command operational demands, funding needed for consumables (e.g., fuel, ammunition), manpower shortfalls, depot maintenance capacity, and time needed to plan, coordinate, and execute readiness and training activities,” the memo states.
Three items called for in the memo already are required by existing law. It requires Mattis to produce a National Security Strategy for Congress, which every administration is required to do.
It also calls for official review of the nation’s nuclear posture “to ensure that the United States nuclear deterrent is modern, robust, flexible, resilient, ready and appropriately tailored to deter 21st-century threats and reassure our allies.”
A parallel review of national ballistic missile defense capabilities also is ordered, “to identify ways of strengthening missile-defense capabilities, rebalancing homeland and theater defense priorities, and highlighting priority funding areas.”
The legal ground for both of these reviews also was laid before Trump took office, Harrison said.
While some see the memo as delivering on Trump’s promise to rebuild the military, some feel other executive actions already have jeopardized the benefits of directing increased defense spending. Trump last week also imposed a hiring freeze on most of the government except the military. Civilian workers at U.S. military depots and shipyards are not exempted from the freeze, according to a statement released Tuesday by Democrat members of the House Armed Services Committee.
“Because of Trump’s order, hundreds of maintainers across the country who are employed for renewable terms are at risk of being laid off, and thousands of these maintainers are now unable to be hired, promoted, transferred, recruited, and in many cases simply do their work,” the statement reads. “The work that these maintainers do lies at the heart of the military readiness problems that Congress has been attempting to fix. But in the coming days, the impacts of the freeze will compound as layoffs of these depot workers begin nationwide, at precisely the time when it is crucial that we reverse the military readiness impacts caused by sequestration.”
The 2017 National Defense Authorization Act provides direct hiring authority to move term and temporary employees into permanent positions, as a means to solve the maintenance backlog. It also provides authority so that DOD could quickly hire cyber professionals. Both authorities are stripped under the hiring freeze, according to ranking HASC member Adam Smith ( D-Wash.).
“This is government by bait-and-switch for the U.S. military. In the same week that President Trump says he is rebuilding the military, he signs an order striking at the heart of U.S. military readiness,” Smith said in a prepared statement. “That is unconscionable and it directly affects the support we provide to U.S. service members in the field, not to mention the national security of the United States. This boneheaded, ideological attack on the functioning of our government is having real consequences. Sooner or later, the American people are going to catch on.”