Julian E. Barnes and Nathan Hodge
Wall Street Journal
WASHINGTON—The Obama administration is proposing a cap on war spending through fiscal 2021, a move that anticipates savings from winding down the war in Afghanistan and imposes further discipline on the Pentagon's budget.
For the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1, President Barack Obama is seeking $525.4 billion for the basic operations of the Defense Department, plus $88.4 billion to support troops in Afghanistan.
The proposal is $6 billion lower than the 2012 base budget of $531 billion, approved by Congress, which was a cut of $22 billion from the administration's proposal for the current year. In 2012, Congress appropriated $115.1 billion for the Afghanistan war.
As part of its fiscal-2013 budget request, the administration is proposing to limit "overseas contingency operations" appropriations—the amount spent that is beyond the regular Pentagon budget—to a total of $450 billion from fiscal 2013 through 2021.
The administration is casting the proposal as a "multi-year" cap that would allow for flexibility from year to year and that could be adjusted in the event of an unanticipated national emergency.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta already has previewed the broad outlines of the defense-spending plan, which anticipates a reduced global U.S. military footprint while shifting more investment to U.S. special-operations forces and high-tech weaponry.
But by proposing limits on the emergency spending measures used to fund wartime operations, the plan quickly drew fire from Republicans.
"The president's budget is a clear articulation of Mr. Obama's priorities: reduce resources for our struggling armed forces and redirect them to exploding domestic bureaucracies," said Rep. Howard McKeon (R., Calif.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. "This budget reflects a true reduction, in real terms, of military spending while we have troops in combat."
Funding for overseas contingency operations was exempted from the spending limits imposed under last year's budget-control deal between the White House and Congress.
Todd Harrison, a defense-spending expert at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a think tank with close ties to the Pentagon, said the president's proposal "would make it harder for [the Defense Department] to circumvent the budget caps…by closing the war-funding loophole."
With nearly $90 billion in war costs expected for fiscal 2013, much of the wartime spending is likely to take place in the early years of the nine-year period as the U.S. troop commitment in Afghanistan winds down.
At the same time, budget planners anticipate some form of overseas U.S. military involvement for the better part of the next decade. The administration's earlier budget forecasts through 2021 already include a "placeholder" war-spending figure of $50 billion a year, hence the $450 billion figure.
This new proposal, if passed by Congress, anticipates the same total wartime-spending amount.
Charles Knight, co-director of the Project on Defense Alternatives, a group critical of current defense-spending levels, said he was skeptical about wartime-spending projections, particularly if military operations prove more costly than anticipated.
"If there is a new war, or if Afghanistan needs another surge and OCO [overseas-contingency-operations funding] needs to go back up to $125 billion, is it conceivable that DoD is going to take a one- or two-year hit of $75 billion subtracted from its base budget?" he said. "Considering that such a circumstance would happen in the political frame of 'wartime,' it seems to me that neither the cap nor the necessary base-budget adjustments are plausible in terms of fiscal planning."
At present, the Air Force needs three to four drones to keep one aircraft aloft 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. But the Pentagon now believes they can, at least for short periods of time, use fewer aircraft, allowing them a bigger surge capacity.
Thanks to such efficiencies, the new defense budget proposes cutting the planned purchase of new Reaper drones in half, reinvesting that money in additional ground stations to collect and analyze the video feeds collected by the planes. Under the new plan, the Air Force will buy 24 additional MQ-9 Reapers and will keep the less heavily armed MQ-1 Predator in service. In 2012, the Air Force ordered 48 Reapers.
Personnel issues are also highlighted in the new budget. During the height of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, Congress approved increases in pay and benefits for the active-duty military, driving up personnel costs. The Pentagon on Monday proposed a 1.7% pay increase for 2013, in line with the private-sector wage increases. But the department said, "in an effort to control costs," it was proposing lower raises for 2014 and beyond.
Health-care costs have more than doubled since 2001, from $19 billion to $49 billion. To control those costs, the Defense Department is proposing an increase in enrollment fees, increased pharmaceutical co-pays and a plan to index all of the fees to reflect health-care cost inflation.
"The cost of military pay and allowances, along with those for military health care, make up about one third of the department's budget," according to documents released by the Pentagon.
Wall Street Journal
WASHINGTON—The Obama administration is proposing a cap on war spending through fiscal 2021, a move that anticipates savings from winding down the war in Afghanistan and imposes further discipline on the Pentagon's budget.
For the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1, President Barack Obama is seeking $525.4 billion for the basic operations of the Defense Department, plus $88.4 billion to support troops in Afghanistan.
The proposal is $6 billion lower than the 2012 base budget of $531 billion, approved by Congress, which was a cut of $22 billion from the administration's proposal for the current year. In 2012, Congress appropriated $115.1 billion for the Afghanistan war.
As part of its fiscal-2013 budget request, the administration is proposing to limit "overseas contingency operations" appropriations—the amount spent that is beyond the regular Pentagon budget—to a total of $450 billion from fiscal 2013 through 2021.
The administration is casting the proposal as a "multi-year" cap that would allow for flexibility from year to year and that could be adjusted in the event of an unanticipated national emergency.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta already has previewed the broad outlines of the defense-spending plan, which anticipates a reduced global U.S. military footprint while shifting more investment to U.S. special-operations forces and high-tech weaponry.
But by proposing limits on the emergency spending measures used to fund wartime operations, the plan quickly drew fire from Republicans.
"The president's budget is a clear articulation of Mr. Obama's priorities: reduce resources for our struggling armed forces and redirect them to exploding domestic bureaucracies," said Rep. Howard McKeon (R., Calif.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. "This budget reflects a true reduction, in real terms, of military spending while we have troops in combat."
Funding for overseas contingency operations was exempted from the spending limits imposed under last year's budget-control deal between the White House and Congress.
Todd Harrison, a defense-spending expert at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a think tank with close ties to the Pentagon, said the president's proposal "would make it harder for [the Defense Department] to circumvent the budget caps…by closing the war-funding loophole."
With nearly $90 billion in war costs expected for fiscal 2013, much of the wartime spending is likely to take place in the early years of the nine-year period as the U.S. troop commitment in Afghanistan winds down.
At the same time, budget planners anticipate some form of overseas U.S. military involvement for the better part of the next decade. The administration's earlier budget forecasts through 2021 already include a "placeholder" war-spending figure of $50 billion a year, hence the $450 billion figure.
This new proposal, if passed by Congress, anticipates the same total wartime-spending amount.
Charles Knight, co-director of the Project on Defense Alternatives, a group critical of current defense-spending levels, said he was skeptical about wartime-spending projections, particularly if military operations prove more costly than anticipated.
"If there is a new war, or if Afghanistan needs another surge and OCO [overseas-contingency-operations funding] needs to go back up to $125 billion, is it conceivable that DoD is going to take a one- or two-year hit of $75 billion subtracted from its base budget?" he said. "Considering that such a circumstance would happen in the political frame of 'wartime,' it seems to me that neither the cap nor the necessary base-budget adjustments are plausible in terms of fiscal planning."
At present, the Air Force needs three to four drones to keep one aircraft aloft 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. But the Pentagon now believes they can, at least for short periods of time, use fewer aircraft, allowing them a bigger surge capacity.
Thanks to such efficiencies, the new defense budget proposes cutting the planned purchase of new Reaper drones in half, reinvesting that money in additional ground stations to collect and analyze the video feeds collected by the planes. Under the new plan, the Air Force will buy 24 additional MQ-9 Reapers and will keep the less heavily armed MQ-1 Predator in service. In 2012, the Air Force ordered 48 Reapers.
Personnel issues are also highlighted in the new budget. During the height of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, Congress approved increases in pay and benefits for the active-duty military, driving up personnel costs. The Pentagon on Monday proposed a 1.7% pay increase for 2013, in line with the private-sector wage increases. But the department said, "in an effort to control costs," it was proposing lower raises for 2014 and beyond.
Health-care costs have more than doubled since 2001, from $19 billion to $49 billion. To control those costs, the Defense Department is proposing an increase in enrollment fees, increased pharmaceutical co-pays and a plan to index all of the fees to reflect health-care cost inflation.
"The cost of military pay and allowances, along with those for military health care, make up about one third of the department's budget," according to documents released by the Pentagon.