The service chiefs spent Wednesday morning outlining the effects of full sequestration to the House Armed Services Committee, after committee chairman Buck McKeon (R-Calif.) told them in his opening statement he was “disappointed and troubled by the lack of specificity” in the Defense Department’s Strategic Choices and Management Review that analyzed the effects of several budget scenarios.
McKeon told the chiefs that he saw little new information in the SCMR, so for the next two hours and 40 minutes the four officers detailed the personnel drawdowns, canceled acquisition projects, deferred maintenance and degraded readiness they would face if sequestration were allowed to drag on for another nine years, as current law calls for.
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| Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jonathan Greenert testifies with the other services chiefs to the House Armed Services Committee. Photo courtesy Defense Department. |
“By the end of [fiscal year 2014], we’ll have significantly degraded readiness, in which 85 percent of our active and reserve brigade combat teams will not be prepared for contingency requirements,” Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno said. He will spent FY ’14 through FY ’17 restructuring his force, with readiness and acquisition suffering , and from FY ’18 to FY ’23 he will “begin to rebalance readiness and modernization, but this will come at the expense of a significant reduction in end strength and force structure.” By that, he meant an 18 percent reduction in force over seven years.
For the Navy, which relied on unspent prior year funding to keep programs on track this year, full sequestration would mean losing one Virginia-class (SSN-774) submarine, one Littoral Combat Ship and one Afloat Forward Staging Base, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jonathan Greenert said. He would keep a hiring freeze in the civilian workforce, delay the delivery of the new aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78) and the refueling and complex overhaul of the USS George Washington(CVN-73), and cancel procurement of 11 tactical aircraft. As a result of the canceled buys and canceled maintenance, the fleet would have only 255 ships in 2020, down 30 from today.
The Air Force would cut as many as 2,500 airmen, or 4 percent of its force, and about 550 aircraft, or 9 percent of its inventory, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh said. He would favor recapitalization over procuring new aircraft in almost all instances due to budget restraints, he said.
And the Marine Corps would do something that Commandant Gen. James Amos called “unprecedented in a time of peace” –his force would shrink from his desired 186,800 Marines to only 174,000, which could only support global operations if the Marines were on a 1:2 dwell time instead of the normal 1:3. In other words, a Marine would deploy for six months and then be home for only 12 before deploying again.
All four service chiefs said they couldn’t meet the military’s year-old defense strategy that centers around operations in the Pacific and the Middle East if full sequester stayed in place.
The Army and Navy could look to support contracts as a way of freeing up money in the budget to fund operations and equipment. Odierno said he was looking at a 25 percent reduction in overhead costs, which would include cutting some knowledge-based contract and other contract work that civilians could do. He said he prefers to keep his civilian workforce intact to whatever extent is possible, and he noted that contract labor was more expensive, even if more flexible, than civilian labor. Greenert agreed, saying he hoped for a 28 percent reduction in overhead costs and was also eyeing contract support to achieve that.