Defense Official: Cuts Hit Warfighters, Weapons

This Sept. 7, 2011 file photo shows a U.S. Marine sweeping for land mines in the Helmand Province of southern Afghanistan. U.S. troops in Afghanistan have quietly achieved one small but important victory over the past year: They are finding and avoiding more improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, than a year ago. That's thanks to a surge in training, equipment and intelligence.

By DONNA CASSATA, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Warfighters heading to Afghanistan would receive less training while the Navy would be forced to buy fewer ships if lawmakers fail in the next five months to come up with an alternative deficit-reduction plan, a Pentagon official said Wednesday.

Imploring Congress to act, Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and the White House's acting budget chief, Jeff Zients, outlined the devastating effect on defense and domestic programs if $110 billion in across-the-board reductions begin on Jan. 2.

[Army Vet: Stubborn Generals Stifled Afghan Conflict.]

That approach "is a blunt, indiscriminate instrument designed to force congressional action on achieving a balanced deficit reduction plan," Zients told the House Armed Services Committee. "It is not the responsible way for our nation to achieve deficit reduction."

Compromise, however, seems highly unlikely before the November election as the issue is caught up in the political fight over taxes and spending. Democrats insist any plan to spare the military include tax increases on high-wage earners; Republicans reject any plan that calls for higher taxes.

In a testy exchange, Rep. Randy Forbes, R-Va., insisted that President Barack Obama has done nothing to address the "atrocities" of the impending cuts.

Zients pointed out that Congress wrote the law calling for the automatic cuts and has five months to act. "What's holding it up is the Republican refusal to make the top 2 percent pay their fair share" in taxes, he said.

Carter said military personnel would be exempt from the automatic cuts, but every other military account would be affected, from weapons to the number of hours commissaries operate to potential furloughs.

"Some later-deploying units (including some deploying to Afghanistan) could receive less training, especially in the Army and Marine Corps," Carter said. "Under some circumstances, this reduced training could impact their ability to respond to a new contingency, should one occur."

In the three months to the election, Republicans are using the looming reductions in military spending as a political cudgel against Obama, arguing that the commander in chief is willing to risk the nation's security as he uses the leverage in the budget showdown with Congress. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has echoed GOP lawmakers' criticism.

[READ: Obama Nominated Diplomat Seeks Pakistani Action.]

Democrats counter that Republicans who voted for the cuts are trying to wriggle out of last August's deficit-cutting agreement and they must consider tax increases as part of any congressional compromise to stave off reductions.

Twenty-two Republicans on the committee, including the chairman, Rep. Howard "Buck" McKeon of California, and 18 Democrats voted for the cuts. Thirteen committee Republicans and seven Democrats, including ranking member Rep. Adam Smith of Washington state, opposed them.

Raising the political stakes, GOP Sens. John McCain of Arizona, Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina spent two days in some of the most contested presidential states warning of the impact of the cuts on local businesses and jobs. They demanded that Obama negotiate with Republicans and Democrats to work out a solution.

Responding to the announcement sparing personnel, the three expressed frustration with the administration's handling of the issue.

"Rather than coming to the table with Republicans and Democrats in Congress to finally address the issue of budget sequestration, the Obama administration is flailing around attempting to make sequester look less devastating than it actually is. Today's announcement increases the impact of these arbitrary cuts on the readiness of our armed forces," they said in a statement.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., noted that there are "a few Republicans wandering around the country stirring up things" on the looking cuts, and he urged the lawmakers to try to persuade other Republicans to back tax increases.

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Obama Exempts Military Personnel From Cuts; Civilian Workers, Weapons At Bigger Risk

The Pentagon

President Barack Obama will protect all accounts used to pay for military personnel from deep spending cuts that would kick in Jan. 2 if lawmakers fail to pass a $1.2 trillion deficit-reduction measure, placing a bulls eye on civilian employees and weapon programs.

The move "is considered to be in the national interest to safeguard the resources to compensate the men and women service to defend our nation and to maintain the force levels required for national security," Obama writes in a July 31 memo sent to congressional leaders.

In that memo, Obama acknowledges "this action would increase the [impact] in other defense programs."

"This presumably means a bigger hit to investment accounts since the Pentagon...needs to cut $55 billion in 2013 if sequester is triggered," says Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute. In Pentagon parlance, investment accounts is a term used to describe the pools of monies it uses to develop and purchase new planes, helicopters, vehicles, ships, and other pieces of equipment.

[Photo Gallery: Obama Behind the Scenes.]

The reason those civilian personnel and weapons are in trouble comes down to a math problem.

"The formula for this is a uniform-percentage cut across all non-exempt accounts," says Todd Harrison of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. "So that $55 billion gets divided among all the various accounts."

And with the health care slice of the pie removed, "the cut would be even greater for weapon programs, operations and maintenance accounts and Defense Department civilian employees," says Harrison.

For those civilian workers, "you could have some of them getting layoff notices before Election Day in November," Harrison says.

The Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington think tank, has warned that roughly half the Pentagon's annual budget will be subject to the $500 billion, decade-long cut.

In a recent study, BPC found exempting all military personnel benefits spending removes $141 billion from the Pentagon's $729 billion pie of funds to cut.

Obama and lawmakers have yet to make exempt monies used to fund the war in Afghanistan and the broader war on terrorism, but the think tank expects that will happen soon. When it does, that will make another $88 billion safe from cuts.

And then there's another slice of funding that won't be eligible for cuts: Dollars that already will have been sent between Oct. 1 and Jan. 2, when the automatic cuts are slated to kick in. BPC assumes that will be around $125 billion.

That leaves only $374 billion a year from which cuts could be made annually.

If the automatic cuts are allowed to occur, reductions would be made from just about half of the Pentagon's yearly budget.

Pentagon observers are sounding an increasingly loud warning that such a scenario would cause Defense Department leaders few options for enacting the cuts. And that means a giant target would be drawn on the accounts into which the Pentagon dips to develop and buy new weapons.

BPC has echoed Thompson, saying the armed services would have to buy fewer numbers of weapons at a bigger overall price if the $500 billion cut to planned spending happens. That's because production lines become more efficient over time, so when an armed services cuts the number of a specific weapon it plans to buy, that program's overall cost rises.

Because operations and maintenance accounts are used to fund things like training, Pentagon and White House officials this week urged lawmakers to pass the needed massive deficit-paring legislation that would void the $500 billion cut to planned spending.

Acting White House budget czar Jeffrey Zients and Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter told a House panel that the impact of the cuts cannot be lessened by planning.

The deputy defense secretary warned of cuts to training for troops preparing to deploy to Afghanistan, canceled projects at bases, a hiring freeze, employee furloughs, and in some cases "denials of medical service." He also said the deep cuts would affect a number of weapon programs. All told, the cuts—which Democrats and Republicans say they oppose—would "create a hollow military force."

Some defense spending watchdogs, like Laura Peterson of Taxpayers for Common Sense say the Pentagon budget "certainly can" absorb a $500 billion, decade-long reduction.

John T. Bennett covers national security and foreign policy for U.S. News & World Report. You can contact him at jbennett@usnews.com or follow him on Twitter.

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