The Army’s vice chief of staff said the $613 billion Overseas Contingency Operations, or OCO, funding does not allow the Army the flexibility required to get at home-station readiness for units that are not deploying.
Gen. Daniel B. Allyn testified before the House Armed Services subcommittee on readiness, March 25.
“It also does not allow multi-year funding, which means we cannot use it for critical modernization programs in acquisition and procurement,” Allyn said. “So the restrictions truly create challenges and hard decisions under the current rule set… we would need significantly greater flexibility.”
Allyn acknowledged that OCO funding was better than not receiving any increased funding and better than the Budget Control Act levels, but he pointed out the way funding was working was a year-to-year drill and the Army needed, “predictable, consistent funding to get at the readiness we’re talking about today.”
Addressing concerns on funding for the nearly 10,000 troops that will now be in Afghanistan through the rest of the year, the committee wanted to discuss the Army’s preparations on possibly using forces in Iraq and Syria and if the service had the financial resources.
“Well, we do appreciate the increase in OCO because the increased numbers in Afghanistan are greater than what was programmed,” Allyn said. “We did however program to train the forces, to backfill the forces that are there now and to continue that in case it was required, so we will be trained and ready to continue this mission.”
With respect to the response that may be required in Iraq, Allyn added that just as the Army was capable of deploying the 3rd Brigade Combat Team of the 82nd Airborne Division, to the initial advise and assist mission, the Army would have forces prepared when called upon.
Allyn said the president’s budget for fiscal year 2016 fully funds combat training center, or CTC, rotations, where units are trained for full-spectrum mission readiness, but added that sequestration would put that at risk because units would not arrive at the CTCs as ready as they should be due to fiscal restraints on home-station training.
Since the Army may receive $5.1 billion less than asked for in FY16, Allyn said the Army had to make some hard choices on where to draw funds to pay personnel, which is nearly 50 percent of the entire Army budget.
“We only have two places to draw from – we’re going to pay for our people because that’s a sacred trust and we’re going to meet that requirement, so it either comes out of O&M [operations and maintenance] or modernization,” he said. “We’ve reduced our modernization 25 percent even in the president’s budget submission, so we’re facing a very tough balancing act.”
Turning to sequestration, Allyn said it would severely impact the Army’s ability to maintain installation readiness and to protect the industrial bases, which are key components to maintaining a ready force.
“It will cut essential funds for military construction, sustainment, restoration and modernization on our installations,” he said. “Sequestration will degrade the industrial base’s ability to sustain the lifecycle readiness of warfighting equipment while also degrading the capability to surge to meet future demands.
“To achieve our required readiness level in fiscal year 2016, we need Congress to support all of the cost-savings measures the Army has proposed,” he said. “These include compensation reform, a new round of base realignment and closure and the aviation restructuring initiative.”
Army leadership has called for compensation reforms that include slowing the growth of the basic housing allowance, adjusting TRICARE, adjusting the commissary subsidy and slowing growth in basic pay.
One congressman offered that if compensation cuts occurred there would be manning level problems and a loss of talented non-commissioned officers and officers.
“I will say first and foremost, our great Soldiers and leaders are meeting the demands that are placed before them and are volunteering to stay… our retention rate remains very, very high, over 113 percent of the goal last year,” Allyn said. “I believe the important thing we must do is [to] sustain their trust through predictable funding that is consistently delivered and enables us to have them trained and ready for missions.
“I will highlight that the cost of a Soldier has doubled since 2001, so it is important to keep that in mind, and we believe some of the compensation reform we are proposing is reasonable without putting the balancing of the budget on the backs of Soldiers,” he continued.
In regards to the Army’s Aviation Restructuring Initiative, or ARI, the vice chief said, the plan was a budget-driven effort to increase readiness and modernization while increasing the capacity and capability of the aviation force across the total Army. The initiative would eliminate 700 aircraft from the active component and 111 from the Guard and Reserve while simultaneously increasing readiness and saving $12 billion along the way.
“It accelerates the UH-60M modernization by 3-5 years, which is really, really important for the defense of the homeland,” he said. “It is the most critical capability that our governors need in response to crises in the homeland.”
He added that should the Army not execute ARI, it would incur additional costs by buying aircraft and performing maintenance at the expense of modernizing systems and maintaining readiness.
Allyn emphasized the need to modernize cyber and the network as rapidly as the technology becomes available and not on its current multi-year plan to address the Army’s vulnerability to cyberattack. Under a multi-year plan and under sequestration, network modernization would take a $400 million cut and, “that is absolutely unacceptable,” he said.
“Basically, a snowplow effect has gone into our modernization program,” Allyn said. Now we are underway in a critical effort in divestiture to ensure that every resource dollar we put into our modernization program delivers the best effort to offer the best possible equipment to our deploying Soldiers, which is what we owe them.
“No adversary deserves a fair fight,” he said. “If we fail to increase our modernization efforts, the gap will close [between adversaries] and we cannot allow that to happen.”
