Why Budget Cuts Could Cripple The Army For Many Years To Come

3/04/2014 

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As the Pentagon unveils its proposed budget for fiscal 2015 this week, two of its military departments are facing tough times and the third is facing a crisis. To comply with spending caps imposed by the 2011 Budget Control Act, the Department of the Air Force and the Department of the Navy (which includes the Marine Corps) will have to shrink end-strength, reduce maintenance, and limit modernization of combat systems. The Department of the Army, on the other hand, will have to accept cuts that could cripple its warfighting capabilities for a generation, because it is largely giving up on developing new weapons. It is also cutting more active-duty warfighters than all the other services combined.

This, apparently, is the Army’s reward for doing most of the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last dozen years. Having expanded to meet the challenges of a multi-front ground campaign in Southwest Asia, it is now compressing far faster than the other services. But because this is occurring within the framework of congressionally-mandated caps on spending, the service will have to largely forego investment in next-generation combat systems until after 2020, relying instead on upgrades to weapons first fielded in the Reagan years. And because the Obama Administration has conveniently assumed no lengthy ground campaigns for the remainder of the decade, the Army is separating from service many more soldiers than it had expected as overseas wars end.

The Army has a plan for dealing with impending budget cuts, although it somewhat resembles the British Expeditionary Force’s plan for “dealing” with the Dunkirk evacuation in 1940. Basically, the Army is going to leave a lot of warfighting capacity behind — 12 of its 45 brigade combat teams, much of its technology modernization agenda, even some elements of installation and equipment readiness. Few people outside the Army understand how the service has crafted its plan for coping with draconian budget cuts, and what those plans portend for U.S. military performance in future conflicts. Last week, I sat down with a senior Army official to discuss how his service got into this fix, and what its plan will mean for combat capabilities.

I’m going to keep this story simply by only talking about the active-duty Army. The Army Reserve and National Guard are vital components of the total Army, but they are not the soldiers who typically go to war on the first day of fighting. It takes time for the reserves to gear up for combat, so when Iraq unexpectedly invades Kuwait or Afghanistan unexpectedly allows its territory to be used as a base for attacks on the American homeland, it’s the active-duty part of the institution that has to respond first. In brief campaigns, the active-duty component may be the only part of the service that can be brought to bear before decisive engagements occur. Nonetheless, that’s the part of the Army destined to take the biggest hits in the current drawdown.

The plan during the first Obama Administration was to cut active-duty headcount from 570,000 to 490,000 through 2017, or about 10,000 soldiers per year. To protect readiness — combat training, equipment maintenance, etc. — as military budgets began to fall from their 2010 peak, all of the service’s military payroll costs above the planned 490,000 end-strength were rolled into the “emergency supplemental appropriations” that Congress provided for overseas wars. That initially helped Army planners to maintain a balance between end-strength, readiness and modernization of weapons, but when the Budget Control Act began biting into the base budgets of the services in 2012-2013, the Army has already ”booked” the savings it planned to realize from personnel cuts, and therefore the service needed to slash readiness and modernization.

Plans to replace the Reagan-era Bradley infantry vehicle have been abandoned. (Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M2_Bradley)

Recognizing that they needed to cut fix costs as fast as possible, Army leaders doubled the rate at which they planned to separate soldiers from the service to 20,000 annually, moving forward the year when end-strength would reach the planned 490,000 to 2015. But it costs money to remove soldiers from the ranks, and 20,000 was the most the service could afford to separate each year. Meanwhile, the Budget Control Act was pressing in on the service’s other accounts. The situation was further complicated when an internal review initiated by incoming Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel concluded that since the U.S. would no longer be postured for protracted stability operations in places like Iraq, the Army should shrink further to 450,000. That meant continuing cuts in end-strength through 2017 at the accelerated pace of 20,000 per year.

The Army’s Chief of Staff, General Ray Odierno, says 450,000 is the minimum level to which the active-duty force can shrink while still meeting the demands of national strategy. Odierno figures the service needs 80,000 soldiers just to run the institution — to provide training, management, and other vital functions — so once you factor in the rotational nature of overseas deployments, the only way to go below 450,000 is to give up missions. However, Secretary Hagel and Army officials say that if the service doesn’t get at least partial relief from the spending caps imposed by the budget law, the force will have to continue shrinking to 420,000 in 2019. In other words, the service will spend the entire decade continuously cutting end-strength.

Needless to say, that is not good for morale. This spring alone, the Army will need to identify up to 2,000 captains and majors for early separation from military service, and most of them won’t want to go. But the impact of the budget law on warfighting capability reaches far deeper than that. If the number of active-duty soldiers falls below 450,000, then the Army will have to decide which missions it can no longer accomplish. And meanwhile, it will have to generate almost all of the savings the law requires through 2021 by cutting readiness and modernization, since Congress seems ill-disposed to approving cuts in politically-sensitive areas such as benefits and bases. Somehow, an institution that was planning a couple of years ago to have a base budget of $150 billion annually will have to get by on $120 billion instead.

With regard to readiness, Army leaders have decided to fund training as generously as feasible while skimping on equipment maintenance and performing only the most minimal level of upkeep to installations. Many support contractors will be terminated, and once so-called “reset” funding in war supplementals runs out, the service will be hard-pressed to keep its combat systems in a high state of readiness. With regard to modernization (meaning technology investment), the service will keep funding science and technology research, and upgrades to equipment that is in the force, but largely forego development of new combat systems. Having already killed its next-generation air defense system, this year it will also eliminate a planned reconnaissance helicopter and troop carrier while cutting back on tactical communications investments.

In theory, maintaining science and technology funding while foregoing new starts could enable development of more advanced systems in the future. For instance, an “armed aerial scout” helicopter is being deferred but a joint rotorcraft research effort is being continued, potentially yielding a more capable rotorcraft design that can be pursued in the next decade. In the meantime, the Army wants to transfer Apache attack helicopters from the National Guard to the active-duty force and use them in combination with drones on reconnaissance missions so that existing recon helicopters can be retired. The National Guard would in return get Black Hawk transport helicopters that Army leaders deem better suited to the Guard’s domestic missions.

This sounds sensible until you realize that the Army will be losing around 800 helicopters net from the active and reserve components, leaving it with a smaller aviation bill but also a good deal less combat depth. Similar consequences will result from the planned cutbacks in combat vehicles and communications gear. Judging from how Army modernization efforts have fared in the recent past, there is a real possibility that the Army will make the cuts and book the savings, only to find that it cannot implement planned alternatives. That will be especially likely if the service keeps adjusting its plans downward in later years to comply with the dictates of the Budget Control Act.

The need to satisfy arbitrary savings goals that are disconnected from military strategy and missions has created frustration across the force. Army leaders feel they have been repeatedly called upon to take disproportionate cuts as overseas wars wind down, and that many members of Congress do not grasp the human or operational consequences of the reductions the service must absorb. Secretary of Defense Hagel understands those consequences — he served in the Army during the Vietnam War — and has proposed reducing legislated budget cuts by half through 2019, but there is no guarantee his approach will prevail. So the Army is forced to watch its warfighting capabilities slowly ebb away, knowing it may have no money to replace aging weapons for many years to come.