Editorial: Fully fund the military without using tricks

[CommunityEditor]

The White House has made clear that it intends to halt the use of supplemental funding bills, those “emergency” measures that critics have long contended obscure the true scope of the wartime defense budget.

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld came to Washington eight years ago vowing to do away with supplemental funding, declaring that the Pentagon needed to establish a single budget and do a better job of anticipating contingencies, rather than relying on Congress to provide extra cash whenever the need arose.

It didn’t work out the way Rumsfeld planned. In his tenure and the years since, these “shadow budgets” have grown from $8.6 billion in 2000 to a peak of $189 billion in 2008, and funded not only the costs of fighting two wars, but also many programs no reasonable person could view as “wartime emergency spending.”

Meanwhile, the base defense budget also has grown swiftly in this decade, pushing total defense outlays to a record $692 billion last year, before declining slightly this year.

Now the Obama administration is taking its turn and trying to force the wars’ costs back into the base defense budget. It’s a laudable idea. But it will come with its own form of reverse sticker shock.

Take, for example, the president’s plan to add 15,000 active-duty soldiers to the Army’s ranks next year. To cover their $1 billion price tag, the administration is proposing to cut a variety of hardware programs, not just in the Army’s budget, but in the budgets of all the services.

The Army would take a $700 million hit, delaying its new Family of Medium Tactical Vehicles program by a couple of years. Among other cuts, the Navy would lose replacements for its Hellfire missiles, the Marine Corps would reduce machine gun ammunition stocks and the Air Force would exchange night-vision equipment for C-130 infrared countermeasures.

The White House insists that these cuts will little affect readiness, and this may well be true. But it could be the beginning of many hard choices that will seem minimal in isolation but, taken together, may prove dangerous in the future should a need for these programs suddenly become apparent.

Sources in Israel say, for instance, that the country’s military relied more than it wanted to on dumb bombs in the campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon three years ago. The reason: a shortage of precision guided munitions, and the need to save stocks of those weapons in the event they were needed elsewhere.

The road ahead for the U.S. military is filled with competing needs, in terms of both manpower and hardware. The Army intends to add another 5,000 active-duty troops in 2011, which will cost another $333 million or so. The Navy has a looming shortage of fighter aircraft. The Marines need a new amphibious assault vehicle. The Air Force must modernize its fighter and tanker aircraft fleets.

Inevitably, the Pentagon and Congress will be tempted to further cut back on hardware in order to hold down the budget top line. But they will do so at the risk of leaving vulnerable the same troops they insist they support.

Each trim, even if small, increases the risk that readiness could suffer — not from a lack of manpower or lack of will, but from the cumulative effect of a thousand budget cuts.