Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel’s July 31 Pentagon briefing on the results of his Strategic Choices and Management Review were grim, but some of the options he did not discuss could be even worse for the Navy and Marine Corps, according to a team of experts from four national security think tanks who met Aug. 1 with Pentagon officials who had conducted the review, commonly known as SCMR.
Under what is considered the most likely option for the armed services to absorb the deep funding cuts of full sequestration, the Navy would suffer sharp reductions in its aircraft carriers, amphibious force and the surface combatants, air squadrons and personnel associated with them, the group concluded. In that option, Marine Corps personnel would be cut to 150,000, a number it has not seen since before the Korean War. The Corps wants to trim its force to 182,100.
And although the cuts in major Navy warships and Marine personnel would be less under the alternative sequestration adjustment, the Pentagon might choose to cancel the F-35 Lightning II, or Joint Strike Fighter, which the Marines are counting on for their entire tactical air capability in the decades ahead and the Navy wants as a crucial part of its future carrier air wings, the group said.
The four think tanks had combined in the spring for an independent analysis on how the military should adjust to sequestration and reconvened to compare their proposals with what Hagel had described July 31.
Their conclusions were that the SCMR findings were fairly similar to many of their ideas, except that the Pentagon was far less willing to make early reductions in combat readiness than the think tank members and did not consider deep reductions in the Defense Department’s civilian workforce, which all four of the independent analysts recommended.
All of the think tanks had proposed deep cuts in military personnel, particularly in the Army, and the SCMR did the same. The SCMR also agreed with them on cutting the number of Air Force tactical air squadrons and bomber force, although the levels of reductions varied widely.