Oh, and by the way, during all this period of decline, I can show you documents that the Services portrayed themselves as adequately funding readiness. Most famously, the Navy said for years that it funded 100% of ship depot maintenance, only to have hundreds of millions of dollars of shortfalls discovered every year, in the middle of the year.
Strange how that happens, year after year, whether the budget is going up or going down…
You seem to have major issues with OCO.
As you may (or may not know) the DoD budget isn’t funded for contingencies or war. The baseline budget is sufficient for baseline, peace time activities. When you fly aircraft for two or three times the hours you anticipated flying in peacetime, steaming ships twice as many days as you had planned in peacetime, and expended munitions you hadn’t planned for in peace time, that costs money that isn’t in the base. So you request OCO. OCO isn’t “free” money. It money to pay for all of that additional flying, steaming and fighting you’re doing, and the increased maintenance required. I don’t get why you think DoD can do all of that for nothing.
Are there judgement calls in there? Yep. If you fly that plane three times more than you had planned, is the next maintenance period base or OCO? Is it split? What is the percentage? Same issues with ships, tanks, bombers and the like. Did the Pentagon lean to the side of OCO? Yes. So did the President (Obama in this case) DoD and the Hill. Ratcheting that back isn’t easy, and I’ll agree that the Pentagon could be accused of dragging their feet.
But as I pointed out, at the same time DoD was told to clear this up, sequestration hit. At the very time that DoD was told to live with less OCO, their base budget was slashed. That is a very difficult environment to ask any department to cut budgets at a time when they are being cut already. What logic you’re using to blame sequestration on DoD in the name of “mismanagement” is truly and completely beyond me, and makes me think you don’t understand what happened.
Congress couldn’t come to an agreement on the debt ceiling and the 2011 Budget Control Act took effect. Automatic spending cuts hit discretionary portions of the budget, and DoD bore the brunt of that. Total DoD spending (base and OCO) from FY10 to FY19 went from $691B, $687, $645, $578, $581, $560, $580, $606, $612 to $686. That’s 6 straight years of declining of flat budgets. If you take away the OCO that you think is “free,” the baseline budget of $528B in FY10 was flat or decreased for six straight years and didn’t return to FY10 levels until FY19. That is a major chuck of money.
Keep in mind that in those eight years of decreased budgets, there were military pay raises each year, fuel costs increased, procurement increased, the cost of parts increased. Cost are going up and out of DoD’s hands, budgets are decreasing for a decade, and you blame “mismanagement?” Tell me any business that could live with that and thrive? Could your household live with a reduction of income for 9 years and live the same way? That had nothing to do with DoD “mismanagement” but was the result of the 2011 BCA and Congress.
Six years of declining or flat budgets with the military flying, steaming and running the crap out of equipment and people left a lot of broken equipment out there, and a lot of decreased readiness. While the Service chief’s always defend the budgets to Congress, they made it clear that there was a decline in readiness and have noted that for years.
First of all, I can guarantee you that I know more about OCO than you, so you don’t have to explain it to me. And OCO money is free in one key sense: it is uncapped and unrestrained by any budget deals, whether the Budget Control Act post-2011, or by the various budgets and deeming resolutions pre-2011. While budget negotiations in either time period would call for trade-offs between defense, domestic spending, and the deficit, there is never any mechanism to address those trade-offs for OCO.
In fact, if you go back and look at the detailed history of how base vs. OCO budgets were requested versus enacted, you’ll see that base budgets have been tinkered with over the last 18 years, sometimes a little up, sometimes a little down. OCO budgets only either stay the same or go up between request or enactment. That is a pretty good definition of free money.
The Pentagon hasn’t “dragged its feet,” it created the problem and is now reaping what it has sown. And in reality, the cost of maintenance bills like you’re talking about is the least of anyone’s problem.
The main problem is that the DoD built in all the base entertainment costs in CENTCOM to the OCO budget, not to mention substantial SOCOM funding, for purposes that you may know as “enduring OCO.” For those not familiar, these are costs of the military that will continue even if every single troop is pulled from Iraq, Afghanistan, and other combat zones. While maintenance of ships and planes in these tweener cases you’re talking about are a couple billion a year, the cost of enduring OCO has finally been revealed this year: $41.3 billion in 2020.
To put that in perspective, the cost of actually carrying out the wars – including all the maintenance you’re talking about, plus pay, equipment, fuel, etc – is only $25.4 billion.
So to say it another way, the real war budget should be $25 billion or less, but DoD set up it’s budget requests long ago so that off-budget OCO dollars are closer to $70 billion, even though nearly 2/3rds of those costs are things that the military can’t get along without, and thus belong in the base budget.
Whether sequestration hit or not, the fundamental dishonesty of the practice for budgeting for OCO meant that DoD was going to suffer as troop levels came down. As I said, OSD is reaping what it has sown.
OCO was never supposed to be about maintaining readiness for baseline operations until OSD perverted it to that practice in order to pay for boondoggles like FCS, TSAT, CG(X), VH-71, Comanche, Crusader, and other junk that larded up the base budget for years. Again, true readiness costs were offloaded into OCO over many years in order to prioritize bad investments in the base.
And again, I’m not saying that readiness was not degraded post-2011 or so. The readiness debacle was the combination of a few things, at the top of the list I put both DoD’s fundamental dishonesty in budgeting for the decade prior (for which the chickens came home to roost), and also the Tea Party prioritization of deficits over rational spending levels that they sought to use to cudgel Obama’s deficits in the wake of the meltdown.
Look, the service secretaries and chiefs prioritized their modernization initiatives over readiness in the years leading up to the BCA, and to varying degrees continued to prioritize them during the bathtub of base budgets. At no point has has service secretary or chief made a real, substantive effort to rationalize the OCO gimmicks they have benefited from. Yeah, it’s been a lot of talk – but go ask the Army how important the European Deterrence Initiative is, and then remind them that for the Army it’s something like $5 billion a year to rotate troops through Europe and pay for various FSRM that has nothing to do with any actual war going on, yet it remains an OCO funded item. Total gimmick.
I’m not going to embark on a measuring exercise, but I bet you don’t.
I’m happy to see that you’ll at least acknowledge that readiness has been degraded post 2011, and that degradation was caused by the BCA, not by DoD. Not sure why you won’t really acknowledge that DoD was taking annual reductions. And you still have an issue for OCO, but as mentioned, that was supported by DoD, Congress and the White House, so I’m not sure why you focus on only one of those players.
Fact we can all agree on: DoD had 9 straight years of reduced budgets from FY10 and that was not caused by DoD and did result in a loss of readiness.
You seem to be hopping from one thing to another here.
First, this is complicated. You can’t say “the Service Secretaries and Chiefs” as though they are one entity. Army priorities are very different from those of DoN and the Air Force.
The Army had significant modernization issues that the other Services didn’t. So the Army was focused on modernization much earlier than DoN and the Air Force did. Navy by far has the biggest maintenance issues among the Services. This makes sense of course because they have the both the most expensive equipment and no one has more technologically advanced equipment. Ship depot maintenance has been a significant issue, that is very difficult fix, even under the best circumstances.
You fault the Services for “prioritiz[ing] their modernization initiatives over readiness” but the Services are constantly balancing manpower, operations and maintenance, procurement and RDT&E. It’s an ongoing discussion and effort. You can’t stop one and go all into the others. You just can’t stop procurement and fund all else. So when money was decreasing, as it was for years, DoD cut down on procurement as much as possible, paid the skyrocketing manpower bills that they had to, and maintained what they could, as best as they could. What would you have had them do? Not upgrade or purchase anything?
Adding pressure to this mix, in favor of procurement and RDT&E is the realization that fighting terrorism may have been distracting the US from the great power competition that China has been engaged and that the US had been ignoring. That further necessitated the Army especially to shift focus more to procurement and RDT&E.
Your OCO comment seems out of place in this discussion. But, got it, you think DoD used OCO when their base budgets were slashed and they shouldn’t have. If you’re going to blame the tea party for this (!!) at least take Congress and Obama to task on this as well.
EDI isn’t a program of record. You think it should be and put in the base. I’d argue it’s new and not developed yet and should stay in OCO. OK. But it’s not hidden in OCO, it’s not buried there. If Congress wants it moved, move it.
And FSRM was funded at $830M out of $16.5B since 2015. That $830M’s your biggest bitch on EDI?
If you assert that you do, I likely know you, or you likely know me, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Funny how I say something, and you feel compelled to repeat and change what I say. Do you think you’re in a good position to improve on my own thoughts?
Because DoD budgets, as proposed to OMB and Congress, are generally 90+ percent untouched. And because again, DepSecDef England expressly authorized the “cram everything into OCO policy” that has backfired.
I don’t expect anyone to have a crystal ball, but I do expect that people and organizations be accountable for their decisions. The Services clearly made readiness a backseat priority, but then complaining that something they de-prioritized isn’t being adequately funded is not exactly the level of accountability that I expect. ETA: and I think it’s a travesty what has happened to milcon. Talk about an account that takes it in the shorts, even though RDT&E spending is at a historic high, even when inflation is accounted for.
When the Navy runs shortfalls of hundreds of millions of dollars for years upon years upon years in a row, and still asserts that each new budget fully funds the executable level of ship depot maintenance, that’s not a difficult problem. It’s a simple one. The Navy is carrying out its traditional role in the three Ds.
Oh, it’s not a POR. Well, that explains everything! Talk about a bureaucratic non-response: someone hasn’t signed a slip of paper blessing something… so we will just call rotational deployments to a place where nobody gets combat pay a war-related expense. What a blessing of the bureaucracy, where lack of approvals from the necessary officials constitutes a re-defintion of reality. And the SASC did try to move it to base, which they should be commended for, and others should have followed suit.
And I understand that there was a look at moving it to base, which incidentally the Poles gave me an earful about because they thought it meant that it was all on the chopping block; but that didn’t make it in the 2020 submit. The fantasy continues.
What are you talking about?
You complained about how EDI was a big issue, and vented about FSRM:
I wondered why that $800M out of a $16B account bothered you so much. I guess you don’t know why.
I don’t know why you can’t understand that when a budget had been reduced or flat for nine years and inflation further eats away at what is left that readiness is going to take a hit. That shouldn’t be hard to fathom. You can’t just stop building ships for nine years, put all that into readiness and then just start up again. You can’t stop paying the military or not give them a pay raise - Congress will force you. This isn’t graduate school DoD or federal programming or budgeting.
MilCon isn’t even in the Defense bill. You knew that right?
Maybe we’ll measure after all. 
I said EDI was primarily composed of rotational forces and some facility upgrades. I didn’t say it was a travesty. Again, you seem to have a habit of putting things in my mouth.
Where exactly have I denied a readiness impact? Oh yeah – I haven’t. I’ve attributed DoD’s budget dishonesty to making the problem worse.
I’m embarrassed for you, because every number you have used in this thread has included milcon. Now you say that milcon doesn’t count as part of the defense budget?
Let me call DAU; I’ll reserve a slot for the GS-15 who mixes up apples and oranges and needs to be set straight.