By Emelie Rutherford
The military’s top officer predicted yesterday the Pentagon will seek supplemental war funding this fiscal year, reinforcing lawmakers’ stance that the Bush administration practice of covering wartime costs via emergency spending bills is not over.
Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said during a speech in Washington yesterday he thinks “there will be a requirement” for the Defense Department to request supplemental war funding from Congress in the coming months.
“From what I can see, I certainly think there will be some requirement; I just don’t know exactly what it’ll be yet,” Mullen said at the Government Executive Leadership Breakfast at the National Press Club.
President Barack Obama had aimed to end former President George W. Bush’s practice of funding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan via supplementals, and requested $130 billion in fiscal year 2010 war funding along with the base Pentagon budget request.
Yet House Appropriations Defense subcommittee Chairman John Murtha (D-Pa.) has said repeatedly that more funding will be needed for the Afghanistan war before FY ’10 ends Sept. 30, 2010.
“There’s going to be a supplemental whether there’s more troops (sent to Afghanistan) or not because they’re going to run out of money in the spring,” Murtha said last month. Other senior lawmakers including Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) said they agree.
Obama is weighing a recommendation to send up to 40,000 additional troops to Afghanistan from Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in the war-ravaged nation. The White House has estimated every 1,000 additional troops in Afghanistan would cost $1 billion, Murtha said.
While Mullen said yesterday he believes more supplemental war funding will be needed, he also noted the “fairly dramatic drawdown plan in Iraq to come down from about 115,000 troops in Iraq today to about 50,000 by August of next year.”
The level of additional war spending remains to be seen.
“Obviously, the resources that will be required to support what we’re doing in Afghanistan will in great part…be determined by the president’s decision on whether or not he adds additional forces to Afghanistan right now,” Mullen said.
Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell told reporters yesterday at an afternoon press conference the need for a supplemental is “very contingent on what the president decides” regarding troop levels in Afghanistan.
“We’re not there yet,” Morrell said about planning to fund for additional forces.
Mullen yesterday also talked about the “very, very difficult” decisions he and Defense Secretary Robert Gates made regarding slashing weapon-system spending in the FY ’10 budget, and said more cuts are coming.
The FY ’10 reductions “involved programs which had very badly overrun in terms of costs or schedule and also, in many of them, that we couldn’t see an end to, and other ones that we just didn’t think had the value that we were clearly either paying or going to have to pay to generate a product,” Mullen said. “Secretary Gates will and I will continue to focus in that direction with the upcoming budget, the ’11 budget.”
Clearly, Mullen said, “there will be additional budget pressures.”
“People are going to have to make some tough decisions, prioritize,” he said. “We’re not going to be able to go as fast in some areas as we thought,…as some might (have) wanted us to.”
Mullen talked about budgeting for “the wars that we’re in,” including investing in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, and continuing to shift toward irregular and unconventional warfare. Looking beyond the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Mullen emphasized the need for having a flexible, adaptable, and expeditionary force.
Cyberwarfare, he said, is an area that needs to be brought into “mainstream war-fighting” and that military leaders “have to pay a lot more attention to.”
“Leaders have to be knowledgeable to be able to make decisions–war-fighting decisions, resourcing decisions, training decisions, recruiting decisions–to make sure that we address this growing area of warfare in a very comprehensive way,” he said. “And it’s one that concerns me a great deal.”