A group of defense budget analysts on Wednesday criticized the House Armed Services Committee’s annual defense bill for gutting readiness, putting pork over operations and attempting to circumvent sequestration spending caps.
The Fiscal Year 2015 National Defense Authorization Act, set for floor debate in the House next week, shows “how old-fashioned and irrelevant they have made themselves,” Gordon Adams, a professor of international relations at American University and associate director for national security and international affairs at the Office of Management and Budget, said during a media teleconference hosted by the Pentagon Budget Campaign, a defense spending watchdog group.
Adams slammed HASC members’ decision to force the military to keep older equipment the Pentagon says it cannot afford, and particularly HASC’s decision to pay for these platforms with operations and maintenance money and Overseas Contingency Operations money – despite the amount and the breakdown of the OCO request still undetermined.
“The trend here is predictable, it is inevitable,” he said of the decision to take more than a billion dollars out of readiness and put it into hardware. Its not unprecedented for defense lawmakers to put a lot of equipment over the training and maintenance dollars needed to support that equipment. But Adams likened the lawmakers to being on an island of their own, in “a parallel future where budgets are going to grow,” and he said their decisions essentially defer the real decision-making to the Senate Armed Services Committee and the appropriations committees.
Former assistant secretary of defense for manpower, reserve affairs, installations, and logistics Lawrence Korb, who currently works as a senior fellow for the Center for American Progress, took a similarly negative view of the HASC bill, though he put some of the onus on the Defense Department for beginning the process with a misleading budget request. He commended the Pentagon for adhering to sequestration spending caps – which the department did not do in its last budget request – though he said the Opportunity, Growth and Security Initiative that would provide $26 billion in FY ’15 and a request for an additional $115 billion in FY ’16 through FY ’19 serve to circumvent sequestration.
Korb said the military, now facing the possibility of being forced to keep aircraft and ships it planned on divesting, could “play games” with its pending OCO request to help get around sequestration by adding more operations and maintenance money into the request than it would have if HASC had not raided those accounts to pay for more hardware. But he added that “I think we need to be well aware that defense, unlike other agencies, is not living within the sequester.”
Asked if DoD could truly stick to sequester limits and fix the budget it may get from Congress via reprogramming requests, Adams said “I just don’t think it’s likely” because the same committee leadership that created the unbalanced spending plan for DoD would be the ones who would have to sign off on the request.