WASHINGTON: The Army’s already cut the fat from its budget and further cuts would jeopardize readiness, modernization and the ability to meet joint demands, service leaders said today. This is clearly part of a counterattack to protect the service from what its very own former Chief of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, has predicted would be a budgetary “bloodletting” as funds move to air and naval forces to counter China.
John Whitley
The Army has only recently recovered from the 2013 sequestration and the steep Budget Control Act cuts that followed, acting Army Secretary John Whitley said during a CNAS webcast. (Whitley was appointed an assistant Army secretary under Trump and is running the service pending confirmation of Biden’s appointee, the well-regarded Christine Wormuth).
“On the one hand, the Army is in a very good place,” Whitley said. “The Army has rebuilt readiness, has very high positive levels of readiness today, and is at the beginning stages of what’s so far been a very successful modernization program.
“[But] there’s a tremendous amount of risk in the Army’s budget today for a couple of reasons,” he went on. “One, those readiness gains are fragile. What we learned [in] the sequester years is, if you take your foot off the gas on readiness, you can turn around on a knife edge. It can turn around and you can lose readiness, very quickly.
Second, he said, the Army has largely self-funded its modernization. Instead of getting additional funding, the service’s budget stayed largely flat while leaders conducted grueling “night court” drills that cut hundreds of lower-priority programs to reallocate tens of billions to the top 35 modernization efforts.
As a result, he said, “a lot of what you might think would be excess or available resources where I can shave here, or I can shave there, we’ve done that” already.
So, if the Army gets cut more, it’ll have to do less with less. Currently, Whitley said, “the Army is about 25% of the department’s budget. We’re about 35% of the active duty end strength of the department, about 45% if you add in reserve forces … but we’re over 50% of the current operating tempo of the department; we’re two-thirds of the readiness demands and the readiness priorities for warfighting” across various joint combatant commanders’ plans.
(It’s worth noting that all these figures can be debated and sliced up different ways).
“The Army cannot sustain that level of commitment and operating tempo and readiness for such a wide range of things in a declining budget environment,” Whitley said. “That’s the simple math… Our OPTEMPO [operational tempo] would have to decline.
“We’re going to try to protect readiness at all costs,” he said. “We’re going to try to protect as much modernization as we can, at all costs. But there’s not a lot of room to maneuver in the Army budget.”
Gen. James McConville
Now, some of the Army’s modernization programs have been criticized – including by the other services – as redundant. For example, long-range land-based missiles take on some of the same targets as Air Force bombers. But it was joint combatant commanders (COCOMs) who asked to add the land-based option, noted Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville. And, McConville told the CNAS webcast, it was a Pentagon Cost Assessment & Program Evaluation (CAPE) review, not the Army itself, that laid out the current portfolio of air, sea, and land-based hypersonics programs. (Whitley ran that review as head of CAPE before he joined the Army Department). “We give the option to the combatant commander they have requested,” McConville told the CNAS audience. “We were following the COCOM’s requests and the direction of OSD.”
It’s the same story with Army advisor forces, air & missile defense units, heavy armor brigades and many more, Whitley said: All of them have parts to play in the COCOM’s plans, whether for day to day operations or wartime contingencies. Asked if the Army might get rid of heavy armor, as the Marine Corps is doing, he replied: “We respond to requirements… There are many missions the Army would like to unilaterally divest; we’re not allowed to.”
