The US military is facing a potential year-long CR. (DVIDS)

REAGAN NATIONAL DEFENSE FORUM: With Congress kicking the can on finalizing the fiscal year 2022 budget to mid-February, defense leaders are increasingly nervous that a full-year continuing resolution is in play.

That topic was a thread running throughout the Reagan National Defense Forum, held in Simi Valley Calif., where a significant number of power players from the Pentagon, Congress and industry gathered last weekend. And attendees’ nerves were unlikely to be calmed by what they heard, with one key member of Congress putting the odds of getting appropriations done at just a coinflip.

“It’s now to February 18. We know what we have to do and I’d say it’s 50/50 whether or not we’re able to do it,” warned Rep. Adam Smith, the Washington Democrat who chairs the House Armed Services Committee.

Starting a new fiscal year under a CR is a well-accepted reality for the defense community. The government has operated under a CR — a funding mechanism that keeps the government open but only at previous fiscal year spending levels and blocks new weapons programs from standing up — every fiscal year since 2010, with the exception of 2019. It’s become so commonplace that a government watchdog wrote a whole report about how DoD planners factor a CR into their annual budget plans.

RELATED: These key programs face real delays from continuing resolution

But the fact that this CR will cover the first five months of a fiscal year, combined with political gridlock in Congress that is likely only going to get worse as the 2022 midterm elections inch closer, has some seriously considering that the entire FY22 budget request may be doomed.

At the Reagan Forum, both Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall raised concerns over the potential for a year-long CR, with Kendall calling the idea “absolutely devastating” for his department.

Among the potential impacts identified: the lack of a planned pay raise for forces and key R&D programs that would not be able to scale up as planned.

“One of the biggest problems of a year-long CR is that you lose time,” Kendall said during a panel event. “Time is not a recoverable asset. You can’t get it back. And so we lose that time, we lose ground relative to our basic challenges. … As we sit under a CR, we can’t move our programs forward. And importantly, we can’t do new starts. We can’t start the things that we don’t have funded currently, and currently authorized. So that it’s a devastating outcome, to have that impact. We need to do everything we can to avoid it.”

Attendees at the conference who talked to Breaking Defense were of mixed opinions about the chances of a year-long CR. On the one hand, there was relief that a government shutdown was averted mere hours before the Reagan event kicked off. But the fact Congress kicked a CR into February, as opposed to late December or early January, was taken as a signal that a deal still has a long way to go.

In an interview with Breaking Defense, BAE Systems CEO Tom Arseneault summed up the sentiment around the event by saying, “We’re delighted to see the Congress avert the shutdown, of course, but let’s face it: what we need, what we always needed, is sort of a stable visible outlook on where the budget is, where it’s headed.

“Much of what you hear here at Reagan almost every year is: We need to go faster; we need to find ways to accelerate the manner of our work,” he said. A CR that runs for half the fiscal year will make it even harder to get new programs underway, he added, saying “Unfortunately, this kind of outcome, you know, moves in the other direction.”

Still, Arseneault was cautiously optimistic that the CR wouldn’t last a full year. “If I had to guess I think we’re gonna be able to come to a conclusion before then,” he said.

Smith, in contrast, used a panel appearance to sound warning klaxons about the state of Congress.

“I don’t have a lot of confidence” in the appropriations situation being sorted, he said. He put the blame on members being more interested in self-aggrandizing and trying to “force [their] priority, whatever damage is done,” as opposed to being willing to negotiate.

That’s why, Smith said, he says betting on a funding deal is even money.

“The most important thing is, between now and Feb. 18, to get all of the appropriators in a room and actually start negotiating,” Smith said. “You cannot start negotiating from the premise of ‘you have to agree to everything I want, and then we’ll sit down and talk.’ We have caucuses to represent, [but] even if we know in the end, we’re not going to get what it is that our caucuses are asking for, we do have to at least try.”