The U.S. military plans to preserve force readiness as a top priority, even when Congress fails to pass a defense spending bill next week. But service leaders fear cuts and cancellations would should be made to training considered vital to preparing for joint and allied high-end operations against adversaries.
A full-year continuing resolution that will keep fiscal 2023 spending levels through the remaining of 2024 means the U.S. Army, as an example, would run out of operations and maintenance funding within the European theater because it trains Ukrainian soldiers to defend against Russia’s ongoing invasion of the country, which has entered its third yr.
The financial strain is compounded by the shortage of certainty over whether Congress will pass a supplemental funding package that will reimburse the Army for expenses incurred to this point in bankrolling support to Ukraine.
The Army already spent $500 million within the European theater in operations and maintenance, and “we were counting on a supplemental to find a way to kind of replenish us for that,” Army Secretary Christine Wormuth said at a Feb. 27 Defense Writers Group event. “What which means might be by late spring, summer, we might should make some difficult selections about other [NATO] exercises, for instance, that our forces take part in.”
Moreover, the Army has been funding support to Israel to incorporate deployments of units to the Middle East within the event they’re needed, she added.
Army Under Secretary Gabe Camarillo told reporters Feb. 28 on the Pentagon that the service spent $100 million in U.S. Central Command’s area of operations in addition to one other $500 million to support the U.S. Southwest border security mission.
“I do worry. Our budget has been flat for the last couple years. We don’t have a whole lot of money under the sofa cushions, and if we don’t get a budget and we don’t get a supplemental, we’re going to probably should cancel some things,” Wormuth said.
The Army is prioritizing current operations, Camarillo said, which implies it’s “going to should look to other areas of O&M spending where they “can potentially take some risk,” including “exercises and the degree to which we take part in some across the globe. We may need to scale a few of that back within the absence of an appropriation this yr.”
For the Air Force, Kristyn Jones, who’s performing the duties of the service’s undersecretary, told reporters alongside Camarillo that so as to pay its personnel, training exercises would take the hit.
“Anything that’s already on a [Foreign Military Sales] case won’t have a dramatic impact, but the entire replenishment that we’re expecting within the supplemental is currently impacted. And even things like F-35 [fighter jet] training that we’re planning … with our allies and partners, that’s impacted by not having this appropriation as well.”
The Air Force is concentrated on attempting to ensure flight hours are maintained, however it’s also vital, Jones noted, that pilots receive training.
Despite the military’s experience in warfare, “we’re in a special strategic environment and we want to do the exercises, often joint and allied, to organize for that environment. And the shortage of our ability to do this doesn’t allow us to, again, to check the brand new techniques, the brand new military tactics that we’d prefer to have primarily for an Indo-Pacific fight,” Jones said. “That’s really where we want to stretch our muscles a bit bit more.”
Learning from sequestration
With a possible prolonged or full-year continuing resolution, the service undersecretaries said the last time the military felt such a painful budget crunch was through the 2013 sequestration, where the services were required by law to make percentage cuts evenly across spending lines.
Certainly one of the fallouts of the 2013 sequestration was an increase in aviation mishaps because vital training flight hours were cut. Military Times and Defense News took a deep dive into aviation mishaps from FY11 through FY18 and uncovered the trend.
“Safety is at all times going to come back first,” said Navy Under Secretary Erik Raven, “but we did have a look at the teachings of 2013 and sequestration, where we spread risk across the enterprise, and I feel the concerns about maintaining ready and trained forces are a part of the teachings that we’re using to tell if we get into this worst-case scenario where we don’t have our ’24 budget enacted and we’re under a CR.”
“We’re not going to repeat that very same peanut butter spread,” he added.
But trade-offs can be inevitable, he acknowledged, and “we’ll should look across the board to see methods to maintain the deal with current operations.”
Jen Judson is an award-winning journalist covering land warfare for Defense News. She has also worked for Politico and Inside Defense. She holds a Master of Science degree in journalism from Boston University and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Kenyon College.