By Emelie Rutherford
A senior defense official told a spending-wary Senate committee yesterday that the Pentagon could seek additional war funding next year beyond the $117.8 billion already requested.
Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn told Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) that he could not assure the panel the Pentagon will not need more for operations in Afghanistan and Iraq in fiscal 2012, which begins Oct. 1.
“I cannot do that,” Lynn testified, when asked for such as assurance. “It’s possible….We’ve tried to be conservative with our estimates of what those war costs would be.”
Conrad, during the hearing on the budgets for the departments of defense and state, lamented that in past years presidential administrations “were nowhere close” in estimating war costs in advance, and had to return to Congress to seek additional funds. President Barack Obama is aiming to request all the war funding for FY ’12 at one time, submitting the $117.8 billion request to Congress last month along with the $553 billion proposal for a base defense budget.
The exchange between the budget-dictating senator and No. 2 Pentagon official came during a congressional hearing where lawmakers warned about the need to further restrict the defense budget. The Budget Committee will craft a budget resolution setting a target figure for the FY ’12 defense budget.
Expressing exasperation with the $1.5 trillion federal budget deficit, Conrad told Lynn and Deputy Secretary of State Thomas Nides to tell their agencies “there are more cuts coming.”
“I don’t know of anything that is more clear to me than the cuts…that will be imposed on your agency could be draconian and could come much quicker than anyone anticipates if there is not a more-comprehensive, long-term (federal-budget-reducing) deal that involves tax reform and the entitlements,” Conrad said. “I know that with certainty.”
He noted that the Pentagon’s proposed base budget would increase in the coming years, from $553 billion in FY ’12 to $571 billion, $586 billion, and $598 billion in subsequent years.
“Every year, people need to understand, the spending is going up, and we’re talking about somehow it’s going down,” Conrad said.
The senator said that while in the past 24 years on the Senate Budget Committee he “supported…every penny that’s been requested by every president for our national defense and our national security,” this year is different.
“We’re going to have to change course,” he said. “It’s as clear as anything can be to me.”
Conrad served on Obama’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform last year. He was one of the members who supported a proposal, which failed to garner enough votes to compel congressional consideration, that called for reducing defense and non-defense discretionary spending over the next decade by $1.7 trillion.
Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), the ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, agreed with Conrad that defense spending is on the table.
“The message is clear, we need to do something now, and the Defense Department cannot be absolved of these challenges,” Sessions said. “We have got to ask our Defense Department to do more with less.”
The Alabama senator, though, warned about cutting too far, and Conrad said he would not allow funding reductions that harm troops.
Lynn said spending reductions need to be made in a “balanced way.”
“We need to take (reductions) not just in one account, but we need to take them across all accounts,” he said. “We need to reduce force structure, investment in operations in a seamless way so as not to unbalance and hollow out the force. We need to take tough decisions early. We’ve tried to do that with some of the weapon systems decisions in the past couple of budgets, not always popular but I think important decisions that we need to take. And we need to be sure that we don’t overreach, that we don’t cut into the true bone of that high-quality military that we have.”