9/19/14
Odierno says sequestration threatens the Pentagon's defense strategy. | John Shinkle/POLITICO
Gen. Ray Odierno has gotten letters from some 40 members of Congress asking why they’re losing troops from their home districts. His answer: Look in the mirror.
“I wrote back and I said, ‘The reason I’m taking soldiers out of the installation in your state is because of sequestration. Not that I want to do it.’ And that’s the dilemma we have.”
The Army’s chief of staff told reporters Friday morning that he warned Congress even before today’s vortex of crises that major troop cuts would bring “significant risk.” If sequestration resumes and the Army shrinks to 420,000 troops, he won’t be able to support the Pentagon’s defense strategy.
“That was before we had [the Islamic State] and before the Ukrainian incursion,” Odierno said. “The risk has actually increased. The potential to have ground forces operating on multiple continents simultaneously causes me grave concern about the size of the military, and I think we have to review it.”
The Army will close out fiscal 2014 with a force of about 510,000 troops, down from its wartime peak of about 570,000. It cannot cut soldiers any faster, Odierno said, and in fact was embarrassed earlier this year when the drawdown forced commanders to send home some captains from Afghanistan in the middle of combat deployments.
It’ll get worse, Odierno warned, if the Army loses about $9 billion from its budget with the return of sequestration in fiscal 2016. With no ability to cut any quicker from its personnel account, the Army would have to take money away from modernization and “readiness” accounts. That means a return to a state of “tiered readiness,” in which some brigades can’t drive their vehicles, fire their weapons or do the training they need to be ready for action, he said.
Fiscal 2016 “is the breaking point,” Odierno said, warning it would bring “a significant degradation of readiness.”
Complicating matters is an unusual burden on Army headquarters units, Odierno said. Each one has been cut by about 25 percent, and yet he is sending them to Iraq, to Europe and to Africa to help with coordinating the Ebola response, as well as maintaining the normal rotations in Afghanistan and South Korea.
Enough is enough, he said, and the Army’s tasks aren’t going to get any easier. “I’m not seeing, in ‘16, peace breaking out all over the world.”
Defense advocates on Capitol Hill hope voices like Odierno’s, as well as the enduring crises in Europe and the Middle East, put sequestration back on Congress’ priority list. The world has shown that it’s too dangerous for Congress to permit sequestration to return, as it would under current law, hawks argue.
To their unending frustration, however, the military’s problems have often been lost in the broader political fight between Republicans and Democrats over taxes, spending and the size of government.
Odierno said he hopes the Army and its sibling services can break away from that context and stop getting lost in the wider gridlock.
“In my opinion, we have to have a security debate in this country and decide what we want to do,” he said. “Not a budget debate. A security debate. And say, ‘What do we want the capability to do?’”
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