Tag: sequestration

Here is the latest military budget fight happening in Congress:

A dispute between House and Senate armed services committees over whether to slow growth in military housing allowances and raise off-base pharmacy co-payments has put at risk passage of a defense authorization bill.
“This is as bad as I’ve ever seen it,” said one armed service committee staffer, describing the impasse between House-Senate negotiators striving to reach a defense policy bill compromise two months into the new fiscal year. (Stars and Stripes)

This passage here just confirms what I have always believed that Congress rather have equipment built with no one to man it than protect personnel from cuts:

Buyer cautioned that he wasn’t speaking for the commission. But as a former lawmaker with years of experience on armed services, as a career reserve officer and as someone who has studied compensation issues for the past 18 months, Buyer said he believes the “baseline argument” that current pays and benefits are unsustainable “is false.”

“I learned immediately as a freshman congressman on the House Armed Services Committee [in 1993] about the power of the defense industrial base in Washington D.C.” Its “appetite on programmatic” defense spending “is so strong” that personnel budgets feel “tremendous pressure” and those backing other programs “will do everything they can to either cut personnel numbers or benefits to gain access to money to pay for programs.”

You can read more at the link.

Breaking promises like this was bound to happen with all the officers being kicked out of the Army:

About 40 officers selected for involuntary separation this spring will be ineligible to attend graduate school on the Army’s dime, as initially promised.

Early in their careers, these officers signed contracts agreeing to serve three additional years on active duty in exchange for the Army paying for their master’s degree. As part of the program, called the graduate school option, or GRADSO, soldiers are eligible to attend school while still on active duty and still receiving pay and benefits. After graduating, they are required to serve three days for every one day enrolled in school.
About 40 officers who signed the contracts now find themselves among 1,100 captains selected for involuntary separation as part of an ongoing Army drawdown to reach an end-strength of 490,000 by Sept. 30, 2015.
One of these captains, who asked that his name be withheld for fear it would hurt his civilian career, said he will have served 34 of the 36-month-service obligation that should have enabled him to cash in with an Army-paid-for degree. (Army Times)

You can read more at the link, but the argument can probably be made these officers did not keep their side of the bargain by not being high performers that would have prevented them from being cut. Bottom line is that expect more situations like this if the Army due to sequestration continues to make cuts.

It looks like next year there is going to be more attempts to reduce servicemember benefits if another round of sequestration is not repealed in 2016:

An already tough fiscal environment prompting proposed benefit cuts would get far worse if Congress does not repeal another round of sequestration in 2016, a top U.S. Defense Department official warned military spouses and civilians at town meetings here.

“If not, everything is on the table,” said Jessica Wright, undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness. The uncertainty means it will be difficult to predict funding for child care, family services, traumatic brain injury and other benefits, she said.

Wright is one of a number of DOD officials who have warned of impending cuts that they say will cut the size of the armed forces and take money from necessary equipment upgrades, placing readiness and national security at risk.

In fact, Wright said, the Pentagon’s proposed 2015 budget represents an attempt to reduce benefits to spend the savings on readiness. The budget includes a reduction in the housing allowance, a 1 percent military pay raise, massive cuts to commissary subsidies and potentially increased medical fees. “Quality of life is higher,” she said. “Quality of service is on the skids.”

A proposed change in commissary funding, which the Pentagon says would reduce the savings on groceries from 30 percent to 10 percent of the cost compared with groceries bought on the economy, has proved highly unpopular.

“Why did we want to do that?” she said. “None of us wants to send a servicemember into combat unprepared.’’ [Stars & Stripes]

You have to love how all the cuts are justified by the language of “readiness”.  What does bloated, over budget acquisition programs have to do with readiness?  Likely what is going on is that the Pentagon is using benefit cuts as leverage to get Congress to repeal the sequestration cuts.