Several years of budget cuts from efficiency initiatives and sequestration have shrunk the Pentagon’s operations and maintenance accounts so much that the Defense Department may begin funding more “unanticipated contingencies” in its Overseas Contingency Operations fund, despite crisis response and humanitarian assistance/disaster relief being primary missions of the military.

Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. James Winnefeld told the House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday that the Pentagon’s $58.6 billion Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) request for fiscal year 2015 did not cover enduring missions, though it does contain funding for operations outside Afghanistan.

Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. James "Sandy" Winnefeld, Jr., testifies before the House Armed Services Committee concerning Fiscal Year 2015 Overseas Contingencies Operations Budget request on July 16, 2014.  Photo courtesy Department of Defense.
Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. James “Sandy” Winnefeld, Jr., testifies before the House Armed Services Committee concerning Fiscal Year 2015 Overseas Contingencies Operations budget request on July 16, 2014. Photo courtesy Department of Defense.

“There’s an awful lot in this request that is outside Afghanistan but that supports Afghanistan and is an integral part of our operations in Afghanistan,” he said. But beyond that, he and the other witnesses admitted that more and more types of missions are being thrown into the OCO request as sequestration and budget caps, as well as Congress’s refusal to let the military branches retire certain plane and ship fleets or make pay and benefit reforms, squeeze money out of the base budget’s operations and maintenance account.

“As the sequester has impacted the department, it has really squeezed our ability to absorb within the department unanticipated operations,” he said. For example, the military’s lengthy response to the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown in Japan were paid for in O&M, though it raided the fund and prevented the military from conducting other missions. Now, with the O&M account in even worse shape, paying for something like that out of OCO instead “starts to build just a little bit of room for us to be able to manage unanticipated contingencies that can arise anywhere in the world.”

Winnefeld said he thought about $53 billion of the $58.6 billion representing funding in or related to Afghanistan, and the rest covered other geographic areas. Toward the end of the hearing, he said that “essentially all” of the FY ’14 OCO request deals with Afghanistan and admitted this year is “a little bit different.”

HASC ranking member Adam Smith (D-Wash.) said during his opening statement that “I understand why we would do it,” given that government shutdowns, continuing resolutions and sequester cuts have made long-term planning and funding nearly impossible.

But during his question and answer time, Smith went on to say that “there’s always going to be something unanticipated in the defense world, you try to budget within the parameters of that and not have a separate fund in case something comes up. Most of the other budgets, they have things that come up and surprise them as well,” he said, but they rarely rely on supplemental budgets to pay for their unexpected costs.

At the end of the hearing, Rep. Steven Palazzo (R-Miss.) asked Winnefeld what the OCO request would look like in the coming years, as the U.S. military continues its drawdown from Afghanistan.

Beyond 2015, “the Afghanistan OCO will … be even smaller in the years following. The way we constructed this request, we’re opening it up to other areas of agility we think we need to have for other types of operations around the globe that are contingency operations that would not be in Afghanistan.”

Newly confirmed DoD Comptroller Michael McCord added that people widely refer to the OCO account as covering operations in Afghanistan, but the fund is actually meant for Operation Enduring Freedom, which includes other locations around the Middle East and even the Philippines.

“We’ve had limited operations on the Horn of Africa that have been considered OEF, but we’re going farther across Africa in this proposal.”

McCord added that congressional reaction to this FY ’15 request would shape what missions and geographies the Pentagon tries to include in future years.

The Pentagon sought to protect research and development and procurement–to ensure a successful future force–at the expense of some of its current platforms when it submitted the FY ’15 base budget. Congress added back funding for the current platforms–citing the need for current capability and capacity–at the expense of operations and maintenance accounts. If Congress is willing to let the Pentagon pay for missions such as disaster relief in the OCO budget, citing them as unanticipated costs, that could provide a framework for future budget requests, helping DoD buy all the platforms it needs while still funding its overseas presence.

However, several congressmen have said they would like to see the OCO budget go away, including HASC readiness subcommittee chairman Rob Wittman (R-Va.). He told reporters Tuesday he would like to see the budget cap for defense discretionary funding raised so that OCO can be eliminated, pushing all defense spending into a single budget and allowing for better debate and oversight.

Some groups that monitor defense spending were unhappy about the new budgeting strategy. William Hartung, director of the Center for International Policy’s Arms & Security Project, said in a statement that “it’s clear that the war account continues to be used as a slush fund to pay for Pentagon projects that have nothing to do with the war in Afghanistan or the larger fight against terrorism. One place where Armed Services Chair Buck McKeon (R-Calif.) and the administration clearly have it wrong is in suggesting that the OCO should be some sort of global fund to pay for any ‘unexpected’ operation that can be even remotely connected to fighting terrorism. Budget discipline and good planning demand that any activities outside of Afghanistan be vetted through the normal budgeting process to prevent waste or improper use of resources. Congress should do its job and substantially scale back this year’s OCO request.”