The entire U.S. military is terrified of the impending budget cuts scheduled to hit Friday. But the Army thinks the cuts are demonic.
“The fiscal crisis that we face today can be summed up by three numbers: six, six and six,” Maj. Gen. Karen E. Dyson, the director of the Army’s budget office, told reporters on Wednesday. Seriously.
Dyson’s talking about three different figures that hit this year — not all of which actually add up to six, but whatever. First is a $6 billion shortfall to the Army’s operations and maintenance account, the pot of money that funds the stuff the Army currently does, resulting from Congress’ failure to pass a defense budget for 2013. Then comes another anticipated shortfall, between $5 and $7 billion, that the Army faces in Afghanistan this year.
The final 6 is actually 12 — the $12 billion that the Army will lose if automatic, across-the-board budget cuts take effect as scheduled on Friday. Half of that is for the Army’s operations and maintenance funds. Strictly speaking, that’s four sixes, not three, but the Army clearly wants the Number of the Beast to ring in people’s heads when they think about the impact of budget cuts.
But as much as the brass might want to associate the budget cuts with the devil, the Army’s specific, planned cuts do not sound like they’ll consign soldiers to eternal damnation. It’s talking about soldiers taking trash to the landfill or being unable to renovate their kitchens.
Maj. Gen. Robert Dyess, the Army’s director of force development, anticipates that the longer so-called “sequestration” cuts persist, the more difficulty he’ll have purchasing next-gen hardware that’s currently in research and development. Only Dyess wouldn’t say which R&D projects are likely to remain in the lab: he said he probably wouldn’t be able to say until June. But Dyess said to expect delays in the hardware the Army’s purchasing, generically — though he punted on saying any major systems will actually be cancelled.
Training is likely to get sacrificed. Dyson said the Army will prioritize giving full training to units heading to Afghanistan, Korea or any other global hotspot. Other units, some 78 percent of the Army, are simply going to train less, reducing their readiness to deploy in a crisis.
Life at the Army’s 75 installations worldwide is set to get a lot more annoying. The Army’s resource management director, Brig. Gen. Curt Rauhut, expects to cancel upgrades to buildings and facilities, and stop hiring contractors to make repairs. So if a water main bursts, a roof leaks or a window breaks, soldiers will have to shower elsewhere and get some tarp or plywood to fix the hole. Youth sports for the children of soldiers are probably going to be cancelled. And with base workers and contractors cut, the Army might have to do more of its own dirty work.
“Do we want our soldiers to do refuge removal, trying to find a tactical vehicle to pull a Dempsey Dumpster off-post and take it to a landfill? Do we want them riding around on lawnmowers cutting grass? Do we want them to do custodial services?” Rauhut said. “I would tell you that our force today, I think we’d rather have them flying helicopters, doing live-fire exercises out on the ranges.”
This is what sequestration has become: diabolical descriptions of soldiers mowing lawns. Dyson told a story about a military family she knows making a decision not to renovate their kitchen due to the sequester. It’s rather far from former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s dire 2011 warning of eliminating all nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Something that really would be diabolical: if training and readiness decline significantly, the Army might have to extend the deployments of units in Afghanistan, to avoid sending unready units to replace them. That would happen at precisely the time that the military is drawing down from the war, a painful irony. “That won’t be done lightly, I can tell you that,” Dyess said. But the Army is currently seeing the devil in a lot of budgetary details.
Army's Demonic Numbers for Budget Cuts: 6, 6, and 6
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Army's Demonic Numbers for Budget Cuts: 6, 6, and 6
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Army's Demonic Numbers for Budget Cuts: 6, 6, and 6
