SNEAKY SUPPLEMENTAL

You’d think that, two years into a war, a sec­ondary, “sup­ple­men­tal” bud­get for the Pentagon would be for han­dling last-​​minute mil­i­tary con­tin­gen­cies. Responding to bat­tle­field emer­gen­cies. Coping with unfore­seen turns of events.
But you’d be wrong, unfor­tu­nately. Because major chunks of the Pentagon’s $82 bil­lion sup­ple­men­tal defense bill are only dis­tantly related to the fights going on in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The most obvi­ous exam­ple: the $5 bil­lion or so devoted to Army “mod­u­lar­ity.” That’s the push to break American troops into 43 smaller, more eas­ily deploy­able brigades, from the cur­rent 33. It’s part of a long-​​standing effort by the Army to reor­ga­nize its forces. And it’s some­thing the brass has seen com­ing for years, now. There’s no rea­son to lump mod­u­lar­ity in with funds for Afghanistan and Iraq.
No rea­son except for pol­i­tics, that is. With the sup­ple­men­tal labeled by the White House and the press as an Iraq/​Afghanistan bill, it becomes essen­tially impos­si­ble for any self-​​respecting politi­cian to turn it down. Voting against money for troops in harm’s way that’s polit­i­cal hara-​​kiri.
The sup­ple­men­tal also includes about $13 bil­lion for Army pay­roll, to make sure G.I.s get paid. But nearly $2 bil­lion of that money wouldn’t have ended up in this bill — if Pentagon chiefs hadn’t already taken it out of sol­diers’ pay­checks.
A few months back, the Defense Department lead­er­ship real­ized they hadn’t devoted more than a pit­tance to armor­ing up their fleet of trucks (a hardly unfore­seen cir­cum­stance, given the hun­dreds of road­side bomb attacks on con­voys). The Pentagon brass needed money for the job, fast. And so they decided to dip into the Army pay­roll — know­ing, of course, that there would be a sup­ple­men­tal bill com­ing down the pike in a few months. And know­ing that just about every Senator and every Congressman would vote for the thing.
“I always tell peo­ple, thank God for the sup­ple­men­tal. We would not be able to do any­thing… with­out them,” Lt. Gen. Joseph Yakovac told an Association of the United States Army con­fer­ence last year. “If those dont hap­pen, were in a world of hurt.“
But wouldn’t it be bet­ter if they planned for these things up front, instead of sneak­ing them through the back door? Is this any way to fund a mil­i­tary at war?
The Pentagon says it’s mak­ing hard choices about which of its mas­sive pro­grams to keep, and which of them to cut.
Well, how seri­ous can they be if theyre not fully account­ing for Iraq and Afghanistan? They basi­cally have got two sets of books oper­at­ing, Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-​​Calif., a House Armed Services Committee mem­ber, tells Defense News. If you treat [Iraq and Afghanistan] as off the offi­cial bud­get, then how are you ever going to make real adjust­ments to the port­fo­lio and the invest­ments?
THERE’S MORE: “Why this fund­ing is in an emer­gency sup­ple­men­tal [request] is hard to explain. It looks as though they want a big­ger defense bud­get with­out admit­ting it,” the Lexington Institute’s Loren Thompson tells the Washington Post.

On Capitol Hill, some Republicans and Democrats have crit­i­cized the Pentagon’s reliance on the sup­ple­men­tal request, say­ing it cur­tails con­gres­sional over­sight and dis­torts under­stand­ing of defense spend­ing. “It removes from our over­sight respon­si­bil­i­ties the scrutiny that these pro­grams deserve,” Sen. John McCain (R-​​Ariz.) told mil­i­tary ser­vice chiefs at a hear­ing Thursday. 

February 15th, 2005 | Money Money Money | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.