The Pentagon’s top officer said yesterday if the defense budget is hit with nearly $500 billion in “sequestration” cuts, then the military would seek Congress’ approval to shift funding in its coffers to cover war costs.
In what was likely his final testimony before Congress on the fiscal year 2013 budget, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army Gen. Martin Dempsey suggested the new revelation that war funding would be subject to the looming long-term sequestration cuts is not sitting well with military leaders, who want to shield those monies.
The Defense Department said two weeks ago that so-called Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) funding for war-related activities would be factored in to the potential sequestration reductions, even though Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said last year they would not. The news came as Democrats and Republicans continued to debate how to stop the politically unpopular sequestration cuts from starting next January.
Dempsey told the Senate Appropriations Defense subcommittee (SAC-D) yesterday that sequestration would cut “about $8 billion” of the $88.5 billion in OCO funding the Pentagon requested for FY ’13–a setup he rejected.
“We have to fund that,” he said. “We’ll have to come to you for some reprogramming activity to move money from (the) base (defense budget) to cover those war-related costs.”
However, Pentagon Comptroller Robert Hale, who testified with Dempsey and Panetta at the SAC-D hearing, said the Defense Department does not have free reign to reprogram funding within its coffers.
“I would not look at reprogramming as a way to solve this problem,” Hale told the senators about sequestration and war funding. “We have some legal limits, unless you change them, on the way we can reprogram. And we wouldn’t have the authority to offset all of those changes, at least not readily in OCO without some major changes. So we could do some, but there will be very little flexibility if this goes into play or into effect as it’s currently designed.”
Dempsey, the former Army chief of staff, stressed to the sympathetic SAC-D that military leaders would have a hard time making the sequestration cuts of roughly $55 billion a year over a decade.
“A service chief, and I was a service chief, can only go back to find this money (in) about three places: training, maintenance, and modernization,” he said. “That’s it. There’s no magic in the budget at that point. And those three accounts will be subjected to all of the cuts mandated by sequestration.”
SAC-D Chairman Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) described Panetta’s description of sequestration cuts to training and equipment as “a frightening one.” Inouye, who also chairs the full Senate Appropriations Committee, further expressed concern that the sequestration cuts could increase the national unemployment rate by 1 percent.
Panetta said he understands that the Defense Department “is not a job’s program, it’s a program to defend the nation.” But, he added, “that kind of sequestration cut across the board would have a serious impact not only on the men and women in uniform but on personnel and the contractors who serve the defense establishment.”
Panetta also told the Senate panel the Pentagon will submit an omnibus reprogramming request to lawmakers for FY ’12, which ends Sept. 30.
“We have some additional needs that have developed during fiscal year 2012,” Panetta said. The Pentagon wants to shift funding it already has to cover the Iron Dome missile defense system in Israel, increased fuel costs, more-expensive transit routes to Afghanistan, and additional troops in the Middle East, he said.