No need for troops to worry about the beginning of the fiscal year approaching Oct. 1.

For the first time in years, the Defense Department is not expecting any major shocks at the official end of the bureaucratic calendar.

"This year is different. We have a moment of stability here in the defense budget," said Todd Harrison, a defense expert with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Studies, a think tank in Washington.

This time last year, the Pentagon and the entire federal government were on the verge of a 17-day shutdown that threw military operations worldwide into turmoil.

Many routine operations were declared "non-essential," civilian support staffs were furloughed and there were real concerns about whether troops and retirees would get paid on time.

This year, it appears unlikely that Congress will pass a defense funding bill before Oct. 1, meaning the Defense Department will start out the fiscal year on a continuing resolution.

Such measures, which have been used often in recent years, extend current spending levels into the new fiscal year until that year's full budget is passed.

Use of continuing resolutions has been a problem on occasion in the past, when budgets were rising every year. In those scenarios, the impact of a continuing resolution was similar to a budget cut because the funding the Defense Department received under a CR was less than it was formally planning for in the new fiscal year.

This year, in contrast, defense spending is flat. This year's base defense budget was about $496 billion, almost the same amount that the Pentagon is planning to spend in 2015, leaving no gaps to create problems and anxiety stemming from a continuing resolution.

Nevertheless, service members are still taking a hit on Capitol Hill, where there is fairly broad agreement that the pay raise in January should be capped at 1 percent, as requested by the White House and Pentagon, instead of 1.8 percent, which would match average annual growth in private-sector wages under a formula that has been in law for over a decade.

But it could be much worse. Lawmakers are showing little support for another Pentagon's proposal to make troops pay an average 5 percent of their housing costs out of their own pockets. And proposals to eliminate the commissary subsidy — and increase consumer prices — at most domestic installations is unlikely to pass.

This moment of relative calm is unlikely to last. The deal Congress forged in December granting a two-year increase in the defense spending caps known as sequestration will expire at the end of 2015.

Unless a new grand bargain is forged on Capitol Hill, service members can expect the next fiscal year to plunge the military back into budgetary disarray.

"The real problems will come next year," Harrison said.

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