As the full House prepares to debate and amend the Fiscal Year 2015 National Defense Authorization Act this week, the House Armed Services readiness subcommittee chairman said he believes the NDAA strikes the best balance of people, equipment, training and operations it could, given the fiscal constraints the committee faced..
Though the House Armed Services Committee stripped money from operations and maintenance accounts on several occasions to support keeping or buying more platforms than the Pentagon requested, Rep. Rob Wittman (R-Va.) said he believes the final outcome is a ready force–readiness means not only being properly trained and funded, but also being properly equipped with the most modern weapons possible.
“What we tried to do is provide the maximum amount of readiness and force operations and maintenance and also modernization,” he said. “We have to do all those things simultaneously; they’re all part of readiness. So trying to find the right balance there with a topline that’s fixed, I believe that we struck the right balance there.”
But he noted that the force structure and equipment levels, despite the plus-ups from the committee, still fall short of the needs of the combatant commanders. And it could still get worse, he said, noting “the very difficult situation, if not impossible situation, we will be in next year if sequester comes back into play.”
Wittman said that, with more than 300 amendments to the NDAA filed, “I think there will be a lot of back and forth about what we fund, what systems we need to keep and what we might modify or potentially set aside. But that’s a good debate and we ought to have that. I hope what comes out of the debate is that people understand absolutely what we have to do to defend this nation, and that the decisions become much much more difficult when the topline gets squeezed so much, and gets squeezed well below what we know the requirements are for this nation.”
Wittman explained the tough decisions he had to make as HASC members during their May 7 markup had to decide whether to keep or layup half the Navy’s cruiser fleet, as well as keep or retire the Air Force’s entire A-10 Warthog fleet. Some members wanted to keep as many assets as possible in the hopes that sequestration could be turned off and toplines could go up in coming years. Others wanted to let the Pentagon shrink its force as needed to provide proper training and operations funding for the platforms that remain. But, for Wittman, it came down to what platforms the services would be left with if the cruisers and A-10s were allowed to leave service.
On the A-10s, he said “it’s not as though we don’t have another platform that will be coming in to take that place,” referring to the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. He noted it had a different ground support capability than the A-10 but said it would effectively protect troops on the ground once it enters the fleet in the coming years. The A-10 “is absolutely a fantastic platform for close air support, but again, looking at where we need to go and the things we need to do, I thought we ought to be mindful of what we have coming into the future to replace it.
“The one thing different about the ships is there’s nothing, there is not a CG(X), there is not a replacement for the Ticonderoga-class cruisers,” he said. “These are it. So if we tie them up at the docks, we just don’t have them.”
Wittman said the cruisers still have about 10 years of service life left, and he didn’t see the point in laying up half the fleet for modernization if it meant working the other half of the fleet harder and eating away at its remaining service life too quickly. Instead, he said it was smarter to keep most of the ships available for combatant commander needs and upgrade a few cruisers at a time through more typical shipyard availabilities.
The Obama administration, however, seems to disagree. The Office of Management and Budget sent a memo on Monday warning that “the risk to the nation will grow significantly should Congress not accept reforms proposed in the FY 2015 budget. The bill does not include meaningful compensation reforms and other cost saving measures, rejects many of the Department’s proposed force structure changes, and restricts DoD’s ability to manage its weapon systems and infrastructure.”
If unchanged, the president’s advisers would recommend that he veto the bill, the memo adds.
Still, Wittman said he stood by the language and did not expect to see any changes as a result of the veto threat. He noted there was a long way to go before the president would see any legislation on his desk, but Wittman said of the House language, “I think we’ve done the best job possible within the top line we’ve been given.”