Amid a government shutdown, an Army and a Marine Corps lieutenant general testified before the House Armed Services readiness subcommittee and implored lawmakers to stop the workforce furloughs and the budget uncertainty, lest their attempts to reset the force after 13 years of war will be severely hindered.
Asked how sequestration cuts had most hindered the equipment reset efforts in fiscal year 2013 and going into FY ‘14, Army Lt. Gen. Raymond Mason replied that the health of the workforce is “the place where we’re taking an incredible amount of risk.” Sequestration in FY ‘13 forced the Army to cut 2,000 civilian personnel associated with the reset effort, on top of cuts already planned as part of a workforce drawdown.
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| Army and Marine Corps officials say the helicopters, ground vehicles, radios and more they’ve used in Iraq and Afghanistan needs billions of dollars of work to be fixed up and returned to troops for future operations. Photo courtesy U.S. Army. |
Continued furloughs–either due to sequestration or due to the government’s current shutdown–only make the situation more dire, driving the most knowledgeable and talented workers to go to private industry for better job security, Mason said.
“I feel like I’ve abandoned my workforce,” he said, having to furlough his staff this week for the second time this calendar year and not knowing how long this shutdown would last.
As for the equipment itself, the Army had planned to do about $4 billion in depot maintenance work in FY ’13 but deferred about $1.7 billion of it to FY ’14, though Mason noted the Army still cannot afford to do that work this year due to budget cuts. That deferred maintenance included more than 800 vehicles, 32 helicopters and 10,000 pieces of communications gear, he told lawmakers.
The Marine Corps has taken a different strategy, prioritizing this depot maintenance work for the reset effort above most other funding priorities, Lt. Gen. William Faulkner, deputy commandant for installations and logistics, said. That means for Marines, “where we will see the impacts is in readiness” if sequestration continues and the reset effort cannot be fully funded in the Overseas Contingency Operations fund.
Faulkner noted that despite the service favoring aiming to complete the depot work regardless of funding levels, even they faced a hurdle with the summer’s sequestration-induced furloughs. After six days of civilian furloughs, more than 1,200 pieces of equipment, including vehicles, radars and communications gear, could not be brought into the depots as planned.