Senior Pentagon leaders offered a sober assessment Thursday of the impact of automatic spending cuts on the military, arguing that they are embarrassing and unsafe for the United States while imploring a stymied Congress to stop them.
Defense hawks on the House Armed Services Committee joined in the hand-wringing about the reductions although many of the lawmakers voted two years ago for the budget law that set the cuts in motion and have consistently resisted Pentagon cost-saving proposals such as closing domestic military bases and raising health care fees.
The hearing with Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and Adm. James Winnefeld, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, represented a repetition past hearings — defense officials sounding the alarm, lawmakers bemoaning the effect and nearly all agreeing that no resolution was in sight.
“I would love to see it fixed, but I don’t see it fixed. I don’t see the will to get it fixed,” Armed Services Chairman Howard “Buck” McKeon, a Republican, told reporters after the hearing. “I think it’s a huge game of chicken with tremendous consequences.”
In the Senate, lawmakers were even more blunt as they voted for a nearly $600 billion defense spending bill for fiscal year 2014 that ignores the limits of the spending cuts.
On Wednesday, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel presented the worst-case scenario for the U.S. military if the Pentagon is forced to slash more than $50 billion from the 2014 budget and half a trillion over 10 years as a result of congressionally mandated cuts.
The reductions would come on top of $487 billion that President Barack Obama and congressional Republicans agreed to in August 2011.
Among the dire prospects, the Navy would drop from 11 carrier strike groups to eight or nine, the lowest number since World War II. The Army would be at levels not seen since 1940, with cuts of more than 100,000 additional soldiers.
The service is already planning to go from a wartime high of about 570,000 to 490,000 soldiers by 2017. The current plan to reduce the size of the Marine Corps to 182,000 from a high of about 205,000 could also be changed, cutting it to as few as 150,000 Marines.
The Air Force could lose as many as five combat air squadrons as well as a number of other bomber and cargo aircraft.
“We know the world’s watching. It’s embarrassing and unsafe to be in the situation we are in, which is scrambling in this way,” Carter told the committee.
Winnefeld said the budget uncertainty has left the military in a “strategic no-man’s land.” In the first years of the cuts, the Pentagon will “grab money wherever we can, mostly out of the modernization and readiness accounts, which is particularly disruptive to our ability to defend this nation.”
Carter said that if there were some money left over at the end of the fiscal year from spending on the war in Afghanistan, the Pentagon would apply it to maintenance and try to reduce furloughs of civilian employees.
A bitterly divided Congress has shown little inclination to reverse the automatic cuts, with deficit-hawks maintaining the upper hand.
“This is not a foreign threat. This is a self-inflicted wound. And Congress needs to behave much, much better when it comes to funding our military priorities,” said Rep. Jim Cooper, a Democrat who introduced a bill with Republican Rep. Paul Ryan to at least give the Pentagon more flexibility with its money.
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