Defense Cuts Will Put Nations Security At Risk

A doomsday clock of budget cuts disproportionately targeting the Defense Department and set to strike midnight at the first of next year as experts are now saying it’s time to prepare for the worst.

To be sure, the facts are grim. Sequestration, the product of failure by a Super-committee last July to root $1.2 trillion of excess spending out of the U.S. budget, means an automatic round of spending cuts, half of which, or up to $600 billion over the next decade, will fall across the Defense Department. 

In the best-case scenario, Defense officials would be permitted by the Office of Management and Budget to administer the cuts themselves, choosing the programs they deem appropriate for trimming. In the worst case, the ax will fall across every defense program equally, taking roughly nine percent off the top without regard to consequences.

The incomes of about 80 Defense Force staff on overseas postings will be slashed on January 1, next year when their cost of living allowances are cut.

The staff affected have no way of protesting or negotiating as their counterpart in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs are doing through the PSA and Foreign Service Association.

Any public criticism of the unilateral move by the Defense Force would probably cost them their jobs. But I have learned of deep unhappiness in the ranks at the move, which is forecast to save $5.6 million annually.

With 157 non-operational postings overseas, the average weekly loss amounts to $685 a week.

Minister Jonathan Coleman

Defense Minister Jonathan Coleman said the decision was made at the end of November just after the election and before a new Government is formed. Dr Coleman said he had since asked the Chief of Defense Force, Lieutenant General Rhys Jones, for an assurance that he had got it right. 

The Government has required the Defense Force to cut its annual costs permanently by $350 million to $400 million, by 2015. The cuts in allowances will apply to overseas personnel on postings to embassies, instructors, trainees and advisers. They won't affect those on operations in places such as Afghanistan or the Solomon’s. And it won't affect salaries.

             

Lindsey Graham

“You cannot buy three-quarters of a ship or building,” Defense Secretary Leon Panetta wrote to Senate Armed Services Committee leaders John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) in a letter last November, explaining the crippling effects of such a measure. Management leaders generally advocate reducing or abandoning specific activities, rather than invoking across-the-board cuts, which can harm valuable endeavors.

If the hatchet strikes indiscriminately, and at a time that does not regard Defense budget planning, Panetta said the immediate result would be employee furloughs and contract and procurement curtailment; and the end of the decade would see the smallest U.S. Air Force in history in terms of personnel, smallest ground force since 1940, and smallest number of Navy ships since 1915.

President Barack Obama set the trend with his first budget proposal in 2009, proposing that over $8 billion in cuts, or half of overall budget reductions, come from a Defense Department that was waging two wars and would soon embark on a massive troop surge in Afghanistan.

If budget reductions are restricted primarily to major acquisitions, as may happen if DoD is given a vasectomy, the outcome is still damaging, said American Enterprise Institute scholar Mackenzie Eaglen, who has written extensively about military readiness and Defense budget issues.

Moreover, Republican staffers with the House Armed Services Committee projected last September: the Army and the Marine Corps risk dropping 200,000 troops from 2011 levels; the Navy 50 ships or more; and the Air Force nearly 480 fighters, with additional blows to unit technological capability, humanitarian and noncombat missions, and provision for military families and dependents.

With enormous stresses on military families, high suicide rates and growing unemployment among Guard veterans, this is not the time to renege on commitments made to our nation’s deployed warriors. MOAA is deeply disappointed that DoD even considered ratcheting back a policy designed to sustain morale and quality of life, much less proceed with these ill-considered cuts in respite leave for which already-deployed members had planned.

Here’s a quick summary of recently introduced bills of interest to the military and veterans community:

S. 2179 (Sen. Jim Webb, D-VA): Would require schools with GI Bill-funded students to meet the same educational standards currently required for other federal funding. Some institutions are targeting GI Bill-eligibles for high-cost/low-value curricula, and this reform will help both students and the government get appropriate education “bang for the buck.” 

H.R. 3895 (Rep. Jeff Miller, R-FL): Would exempt VA health care funding from automatic funding cuts should Congress fail to reach agreement on national debt reduction.

H.R. 3904 (Rep. Denny Rehberg, R-MT): Would provide retroactive early retirement eligibility to the group of Air Force majors with more than 15 years of service who were involuntarily separated last year.

H.R. 4168 (Rep. Frank Guinta, R-NH):  Would place the Clark AFB Military Cemetery under the control of the American Battle Monuments Commission to ensure proper care for this facility in the Philippines where many US veterans are buried.

H.R. 2182 and S. 1734 (Rep. Phil Gingrey, R-GA and Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-CT): Companion House and Senate bills would provide incentives to increase the commercial value of innovative antibiotic drugs and streamline the regulatory process so that pioneering infectious disease products can reach patients more quickly.  This would help vulnerable troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, many of whom have been exposed to highly resistant and contagious strains of bacteria.

H.R. 4164 and S. 2112 (Rep. Don Young, R-AK and Sen. Mark Begich, D-AK): Companion House and Senate bills would codify in law space-available travel on military aircraft for all active duty, National Guard, reserve, military retirees – including “gray area” Reserve retirees, and certain survivors.  Most Space-A rules presently are governed by DoD regulation.

The Vasectomy

The military cuts outlined by President Barack Obama at the Pentagon Thursday show “incompetence” in understanding the nation’s national security needs and the defense strategy is not “coherent” as the nation’s military leaders are ignored in the Obama administration’s defining a military direction.

Ah, you see, the army Is ah, ah, costing ah, you money, ah, ah 

I’m not talking about a coherent national security strategy, what the president laid out is very dangerous and it really does show incompetence in understanding a feasible national security strategy. He did not talk about how we go forward on the 21st century battlefield and our ability to engage, deter, and strike the enemy when necessary. We cannot sit around and say we won’t fight a second combat operation because the enemy has a vote in this.

What we need to be able to do is sit down and look at our geographical area of responsibility, and start examining the threat for the next 10 to 20 years, and come up with the requirements, and capability, and capacity that our military needs to be able to meet these threats, because if we continue to go down this path, like we did after World War II when we gutted the military to such a degraded state that the first Army battalion that showed up on the battlefield in Korea was absolutely decimated — I don’t want to see that type of things happen to the greatest military ever, and my friends and also thre of my relatives that’s still serving in the military.

The aims to cut at least $487 billion from the Pentagon's 10-year budget by downsizing the Army and Marine Corps while bulking up the Navy and Air Force in the Asia-Pacific region, and increase the military's supply of unmanned drone fleets, special operations forces, and cyber-weaponry. "Our military will be leaner," Obama said, "but the world must know — the United States is going to maintain our military superiority with armed forces that are agile, flexible, and ready for the full range of contingencies and threats." Is it a smart strategy to rely more on drones while cutting ground forces? I don't believe so, history has already taught us this critical lesson. 

It's a mistake to cut ground forces, virtually every president since World War II has cut the Army to buy more ships and planes, and from Korea to Vietnam to Iraq, all those cuts backfired. Obama thinks we'll "confront China with technology rather than people." But remember, "we cannot pick our enemies; our enemies will pick us." And, as they have for 70 years, our foes will wage ground wars and terrorist attacks because we already dominate the sea and air and space. We'll regret these troop cuts.

The devil's in the details and not every president gets it right on security strategy,  but it's indisputable that advanced technologies now allows for leaner forces with quicker results. Still, we won't know the details of Obama's plan until he submits his budget to Congress later this month. It will then be up to the legislative branch to ensure that our new strategy is bipartisan, not dictated simply by what the national budget will allow, and, most importantly, true to the federal government's primary role; "Defense of the country."

I can tell you that  the guidance he gave was not oriented towards how we have a strategy to contend with threats across the world — it’s more so based on a budget analysis.

The U.S. military would delay the most expensive weapons programs such as Lockheed Martin's F-35 fighter. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter has been delayed and hit with cost overruns. It also has been at the center of a political battle that included some of Ohio's Congressmen working to pave the way for the Pentagon to consider an alternative engine for the fighter that was under development by GE Aviation.

Unemployed Homeless Veteran

American soldiers will return home to face a new battle — unemployment. The Bureau of Labor and Statistics says unemployment rates for veterans ages 20 to 24 are close to 30 percent — nearly double that of their young civilian counterparts. One issue is that many soldiers begin their service right out of high school. Groups such as Volunteers of America, are helping vets who lack the education needed to be competitive in the current workforce.

Last month California’s overall unemployment rate dropped to 11.3 percent. Still, many troops returning from Iraq plan to reenlist simply because there are too few jobs to come home to.

Cut to active duty U.S. army from its current size of nearly 570,000 members to 490,000 fewer soldiers. The didn’t offer an exact figure on cuts to the Marine Corps, but there are 200,000 active duty Marines. A 10 percent cut would translate to 20,000 fewer Marines than there are today, and a 15 percent cut would mean 30,000 fewer Marines, or should I say, future unemployed.

We cannot afford to repeat the mistakes of the past — after World War II, after Vietnam — when our military was left ill-prepared for the future. As commander in chief, I will not let that happen again, Unfortunately, Obama’s plan does exactly that. It forgets the lessons of history.