Two influential service organizations are imploring Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) to “remove the specter” of sequestration for the Army.
“The continued effects of sequestration on the Department of Defense will cause the Army, Active, Guard and Reserve to fall into unreadiness,” wrote retired Gen. Gordon Sullivan, president and CEO Association of the U.S. Army, and retired Maj. Gen. Gus Hargett, president of the National Guard Association, in a letter sent this week.
{mosads}The sequester, “with its rigid implementation, does not provide Army leaders the funding certainty or financial flexibility to responsibly structure, fund and maintain the Army of the future,” they warned. “The fiscal process must be put back in order so that our army can maintain readiness and its ability to defend the nation. End sequestration now.”
The 2011 Budget Control Act that introduced the sequester imposed equal cuts on domestic and defense spending. A bipartisan budget deal worked out at the end of 2013 alleviated some of the Pentagon cuts across fiscal 2014 and 2015, but the automatic spending reduction are set to return in fiscal 2016.
Levin, who is due to retire in January, has said he wants to find some way to reverse the policy before he leaves office, but it’s unlikely that there will be enough time to work out a deal during the lame-duck session of Congress.
Sullivan and Hargett said continuing the sequester will reduce the Army to 420,000 active soldiers, 315,000 National Guard members and 185,000 in the Army Reserve, “the smallest ground forces since 1940.”
“Troop levels so low put at risk our role as a guarantor of world security and embolden our enemies,” they state.
They added that a force with “with tiered readiness, missed drill days, pilot training backlogs and cancelled schooling and unit soldier training” would lead to a “hollow Army.”