Defense Watch

December 2005

Army: War Duties Should Warrant a Bigger Budge

By Sandra I. Erwin

The Pentagon’s annual budget ritual is just about complete, and despite rampant rumors about draconian cuts and program cancellations, it appears that next year’s spending plan will reflect the status quo.

That is bad news for the Army, which has been making a case for the past several years that the green machine deserves a larger share of the total budget that generally has been divvied up in approximately equal shares among the services.

After nearly three years of fighting a draining, frustrating war in Iraq, many in the Army believe it deserves a bigger piece of the pie.

Although the Army received $160 billion in emergency war supplemental appropriations in 2005, its actual “base” budget is about $100 billion, compared to $126 billion for the Navy/Marine Corps and $127 billion for the Air Force.

That allocation of resources strikes some as unfair.

“We need to improve our position in the base budget,” said Lt. Gen. Joseph L. Yakovac Jr., military deputy for Army acquisition.

The Army in 2006 will request $147 billion in supplemental funds. Without the additional war appropriations, the “Army is going to have problems,” he told defense contractors at a conference in Dearborn, Mich.

To illustrate his point, Yakovac showed a list of the Defense Department’s “top 20” research, development and acquisition programs. Of those 20 programs, only three are for new Army hardware (Future Combat Systems, Stryker light armored vehicles and the Meads missile-defense system), and two are for upgrades to the Chinook and Apache helicopters.

These numbers highlight the unfair distribution of resources in the Defense Department, Yakovac said. “If we are the heavy lifters, why don’t we have some more things that are really long term on that chart? I don’t know the answer.”

The answer may or may not be found in the Quadrennial Defense Review, which the Pentagon is scheduled to complete in February. The much-ballyhooed QDR, according to insiders, is not expected to upset the current state of affairs, although it may end up redefining the jobs and responsibilities of each of the services.

For the Army, this means possibly having to do more with the existing resources, Yakovac noted. The QDR, he said, could end up requiring the Army to expand its role in homeland security and disaster relief, and to ensure the Guard and Reserves are adequately equipped. “None of this comes free … Maybe they should allocate more money so we can provide for disaster relief.”

At a recent roundtable with reporters, Army Secretary Francis Harvey declined to speculate on what may come out of the QDR, but he acknowledged the inter-service competition for dollars and for relevance.

“Everybody needs to fight hard for what they need,” Harvey said. “But it’s not a ‘we-versus-they.’” Every service will see its budget shaped by its contributions to the national security strategy.

Each service in its own right is making its case for relevancy in providing for the nation’s security and fighting the war on terrorism, said Mark Herman, vice president of Booz Allen Hamilton Inc., who helped organize QDR wargames during the Clinton administration.

But it is possible that, over time, the Defense Department may decide to shift more resources to the Army, although that will not happen in the immediate future, Herman said. The Pentagon’s discretionary budget usually gets salami sliced one-third to each service, and that is not likely to change dramatically.

While the QDR may not specify funding priorities, the Defense Department leadership may be compelled to re-evaluate its traditional approach to setting budget goals, contended Michèle A. Flournoy, senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The historical division of the budget should not be treated as an untouchable baseline,” she said. “We’ve undergone a basic shift in the security environment, placing new demands and missions on the military. That may well require a shift in budget allocation.”

As the Pentagon puts the final touches on the quadrennial review and the services wrap up their 2007-2011 draft spending plans, it is safe to predict that this year’s QDR will be “more about tweaking than about major overhauls,” said Herman. Otherwise, “It’d be an admission that they’ve screwed up the past four years and now they are going to fix it.” Most likely, it will be a “validation and a slight course correction kind of QDR, but I doubt it will be a ‘throw it all to the side and start over.’”

Recent comments by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld reinforce this view. He offered a slight hint of what may be the underlying thinking of the QDR. Asked about the outlook for defense spending, he said, “You’re constantly asking how you can arrange this enormous sum of money that the Department of Defense has each year … You’re constantly every year looking at how you can arrange that in a way that you have the kinds of capabilities you need for conventional conflicts, and also how you can be arranged to deal with the obviously increasing number of asymmetrical and unconventional threats that we face in this world.”

But Rumsfeld did drop one clue that the Pentagon may be considering a reapportioning of resources to the ground forces doing the heavy fighting in Iraq. “We have to take those funds and move them around in a way that provides for the kind of consistency and continuity that we need as a nation … but also arrange them so that we can do a better and better job every year in dealing with the kinds of things that were discussed earlier about ‘improvised explosive devices’ and insurgents.”

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