[Dialogue] Army Warns Rumsfeld It's Billions Short

[Harry Wainwright]

Published on Monday, September 25, 2006 by the Los <http://www.latimes.com>
Angeles Times 

Army Warns Rumsfeld It's Billions Short
An extraordinary action by the chief of staff sends a message: The Pentagon
must increase the budget or reduce commitments in Iraq and elsewhere.



by Peter Spiegel

 

WASHINGTON - The Army's top officer withheld a required 2008 budget plan
from Pentagon leaders last month after protesting to Defense Secretary
Donald H. Rumsfeld that the service could not maintain its current level of
activity in Iraq plus its other global commitments without billions in
additional funding.

The decision by Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army's chief of staff, is
believed to be unprecedented and signals a widespread belief within the Army
that in the absence of significant troop withdrawals from Iraq, funding
assumptions must be completely reworked, say current and former Pentagon
officials. 

"This is unusual, but hell, we're in unusual times," said a senior Pentagon
official involved in the budget discussions.

Schoomaker failed to submit the budget plan by an Aug. 15 deadline. The
protest followed a series of cuts in the service's funding requests by both
the White House and Congress over the last four months. 

According to a senior Army official involved in budget talks, Schoomaker is
now seeking $138.8 billion in 2008, nearly $25 billion above budget limits
originally set by Rumsfeld. The Army's budget this year is $98.2 billion,
making Schoomaker's request a 41% increase over current levels.

"It's incredibly huge," said the Army official, who, like others, spoke on
condition of anonymity when commenting on internal deliberations. "These are
just incredible numbers." 

Most funding for the fighting in Iraq has come from annual emergency
spending bills, with the regular defense budget going to normal personnel,
procurement and operational expenses, such as salaries and new weapons
systems. 

About $400 billion has been appropriated for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars
through emergency funding measures since Sept. 11, 2001, with the money
divided among military branches and government agencies.

But in recent budget negotiations, Army officials argued that the service's
expanding global role in the U.S.-declared war on terrorism - outlined in
strategic plans issued this year - as well as fast-growing personnel and
equipment costs tied to the Iraq war, have put intense pressure on its
normal budget.

"It's kind of like the old rancher saying: 'I'm going to size the herd to
the amount of hay that I have,' " said Lt. Gen. Jerry L. Sinn, the Army's
top budget official. "[Schoomaker] can't size the herd to the size of the
amount of hay that he has because he's got to maintain the herd to meet the
current operating environment." 

The Army, with an active-duty force of 504,000, has been stretched by the
Iraq and Afghanistan wars. About 400,000 have done at least one tour of
combat duty, and more than a third of those have been deployed twice.
Commanders have increasingly complained of the strain, saying last week that
sustaining current levels will require more help from the National Guard and
Reserve or an increase in the active-duty force.

Schoomaker first raised alarms with Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, in June after he received new Army budget outlines
from Rumsfeld's office. Those outlines called for an Army budget of about
$114 billion, a $2-billion cut from previous guidelines. The cuts would grow
to $7 billion a year after six years, the senior Army official said. 

After Schoomaker confronted Rumsfeld with the Army's own estimates for
maintaining the current size and commitments - and the steps that would have
to be taken to meet the lower figure, which included cutting four combat
brigades and an entire division headquarters unit - Rumsfeld agreed to set
up a task force to investigate Army funding.

Although no formal notification is required, Army Secretary Francis J.
Harvey, who has backed Schoomaker in his push for additional funding, wrote
to Rumsfeld early last month to inform him that the Army would miss the Aug.
15 deadline for its budget plan. Harvey said the delay in submitting the
plan, formally called a Program Objective Memorandum, was the result of the
extended review by the task force.

The study group - which included three-star officers from the Army and
Rumsfeld's office - has since agreed with the Army's initial assessment.
Officials say negotiations have moved to higher levels of the Bush
administration, involving top aides to Rumsfeld and White House Budget
Director Rob Portman. 

"Now the discussion is: Where are we going to go? Do we lower our strategy
or do we raise our resources?" said the senior Pentagon official. "That's
where we're at." 

Pressure on the Army budget has been growing since late May, when the House
and Senate appropriations committees proposed defense spending for 2007 of
$4 billion to $9 billion below the White House's original request.

Funding was further complicated this summer, when rising sectarian violence
in Baghdad forced the Pentagon to shelve plans to gradually reduce troops in
Iraq. 

Because of those pressures, the Army in July announced it was freezing
civilian hiring and new weapons contract awards and was scaling back on
personnel travel restrictions, among other cost cuts. 

Schoomaker has been vocal in recent months about a need to expand war
funding legislation to pay for repair of hundreds of tanks and armored
fighting vehicles after heavy use in Iraq. 

He has told congressional appropriators that he will need $17.1 billion next
year for repairs, nearly double this year's appropriation - and more than
quadruple the cost two years ago. According to an Army budget document
obtained by The Times, Army officials are planning repair requests of $13
billion in 2008 and $13.5 billion in 2009.

In recent weeks, however, Schoomaker has become more publicly emphatic about
budget shortfalls, saying funding is not enough to pay for Army commitments
to the Iraq war and the global strategy outlined by the Pentagon. 

"There's no sense in us submitting a budget that we can't execute, a broken
budget," Schoomaker said in a recent Washington address. 

Military budget expert Steven M. Kosiak of the Center for Strategic and
Budgetary Assessments, an independent Washington think tank, said that
despite widespread recognition that the Army should be getting more
resources because of war-related costs, its share of the Defense Department
budget has been largely unchanged since the 2003 invasion.

However, a good portion of the new money the Army seeks is not directly tied
to the war, Kosiak cautioned, but rather to new weapons it wants -
particularly the $200-billion Future Combat System, a family of armored
vehicles that is eventually to replace nearly every tank and transporter the
Army has. 

"This isn't a problem one can totally pass off on current military
operations," Kosiak said. "The FCS program is very ambitious - some would
say overly ambitious." 

Even with Rumsfeld's backing, any request for an increase could force a
conflict with the White House Office of Management and Budget, which has
repeatedly pushed the Pentagon to restrain its annual budget submission. 

"Year after year there were attempts to raise the ceiling, but year after
year OMB has refused," said a former Pentagon official familiar with the
debate. "The difference this year is the Army has said that if a raise in
the ceiling isn't going to be considered, they won't even play the game." 

Added the senior Army official: "If you're Rob Portman advising the
president of the United States and duking it out with the [secretary of
Defense], it's a pretty sporting little event." 

Army officials said that Schoomaker's failure to file his 2008 Program
Objective Memorandum was not intended as a rebuke to Rumsfeld, and that the
Defense secretary had backed Schoomaker since the chief of staff raised the
issue with him directly. 

Still, some Army officials said Schoomaker expressed concern about recent
White House budget moves, such as the decision in May to use $1.9 billion
out of the most recent emergency spending bill for border security,
including deployment of 6,000 National Guard troops at the Mexican border. 

Army officials said $1.2 billion of that money came out of funds originally
intended for Army war expenses. 

"The president has got to take care of his border mission; he needs to find
a source of funds so he can play a zero-sum game - he takes it out of
defense," the senior Army official said. "But when he takes it out of
defense, the lion's share is coming out of the outfit that's really in
extremis in the current operating environment in the war." 

Rumsfeld has not set a new deadline for the Army to submit its budget plan.
The Army official said staffers thought they could submit a revised plan by
November, in time for President Bush to unveil his 2008 budget early next
year. 

Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times

###

 

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