As I have mentioned before, the United States faces a crisis of “strategic insolvency” with regard to the imbalance between its foreign and military policy commitments and the resources it has allocated to meet them. Rather than addressing the problem directly, the nation’s political leadership appears to be opting to “muddle through” instead by maintaining the policy and budgetary status quo. A case in point is the 2017 Fiscal Year budget, which should have been approved last year. Instead Congress passed a series of continuing resolutions (CRs) that keeps funding at existing levels while its members try to come to an agreement.
That part is not working out so well. Representative Adam Smith, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee (HASC), earlier this week warned that the congressional budget process is headed for “a complete meltdown” in December, Sidney J. Freedberg, Jr. reported in Defense One. The likely outcome, according to Smith, will be another year-long CR in place of a budget. Smith vented that this would constitute “borderline legislative malpractice, particularly for the Department of Defense.”
Smith finds himself in bipartisan agreement with HASC chairman Mac Thornberry and Senate Armed Services chairman John McCain that ongoing CRs and the restrictions of sequestration have contributed to training and maintenance shortfalls that resulted in multiple accidents—including two U.S. Navy ship collisions—that have killed 42 American servicemembers this summer.
As Freedberg explained,
What’s the budget train wreck, according to Smith? The strong Republican majority in the House has passed a defense bill that goes $72 billion over the maximum allowed by the 2011 Budget Control Act. That would trigger the automatic cuts called sequestration unless the BCA is amended, as it has been in the past. But the slim GOP majority in the Senate needs Democratic votes to amend the BCA, and the Dems won’t deal unless non-defense spending rises as much as defense – which is anathema to Republican hardliners in the House.
“Do you understand just how fricking stupid that is?” a clearly frustrated Smith asked rhetorically. A possible alternative would be to shift the extra defense spending into Overseas Contingency Operation funding, which is not subject to the BCA, as has been done before. Smith derided this option as “a fiscal sleight of hand [that] would be bad governance and ‘hypocritical.’”
Just as politics have gridlocked budget negotiations, so to it prevents flexibility in managing the existing defense budget. Smith believes a lot of money could be freed up by closing domestic military bases deemed unnecessary by the Defense Department and canceling some controversial nuclear weapons programs, but such choices would be politically contentious, to say the least.
The fundamental problem may be simpler: no one knows how much money is really needed to properly fund current strategic plans.
One briefer from the Pentagon’s influential and secretive Office of Net Assessment told Smith that “we do not have the money to fund the strategy that we put in place in 2012,” the congressman recalled. “And I said, ‘how much would you need?’…. He had no idea.”
And the muddling through continues.
