President Barack Obama will seek smaller cuts to the military when he releases his 2014 budget on Wednesday, though the request is probably dead on arrival in Congress/.../
Unless both parties can reach a deal that has eluded them for nearly two years, “it seems likely that DoD will see its budget cut to $475 billion in FY 2014 through the blunt, indiscriminate mechanism of sequestration,” Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington think tank, wrote last week in a budget briefing.
To show just how far apart the budget request can be from actual spending, that’s 11 percent less than what the Defense Department previously asked for to fund its base budget for the same period.
“Moving from one crisis to the next without resolution of the underlying issues has created a fog bank of uncertainty,” Harrison wrote. Chief Naval Officer Adm. Jonathan Greenert used the same phrase Monday to describe the budget situation during a speech at the Sea Air Space Exposition at National Harbor, Md.
“Because of this uncertainty, DoD and Congress have not yet begun to grapple seriously with major structural issues in the defense budget—issues that over time will erode the military’s ability to support a well-trained, modernized force of sufficient size to meet the nation’s security commitments,” he wrote.
Even with the spending reductions, the Pentagon needs to make significant changes to avoid bankrupting key areas of the budget, according to Harrison.
For example, if personnel, operation and maintenance costs keep rising, they may consume the “entire defense budget” by 2024, leaving no funding for weapons procurement, military construction or family housing, he wrote.