WASHINGTON — A week after the White House made its budget request, there are more questions on Capitol Hill about how defense is funded than answers.
The open-ended nature of budget deliberations was evident at the McAleese/Credit Suisse conference here, as lawmakers described for the defense industry crowd an unsettled effort to advance military spending.
The House Armed Services Committee's ranking member, Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., speculated that when the dust settles, Congress will meet somewhere between the president's proposed $603 billion defense budget and the $640 billion proposed by hawkish lawmakers. But Congress could just as easily deadlock and punt to another stopgap continuing resolution to fund the federal government, he said.
"There are a lot of irresistible forces and immovable objects confronting each other and how that is all going to get resolved, nobody knows," Smith said, adding later: "We don't know how much money is going to come, but here are enough people in enough power positions that have made commitments to increase the defense budget that I would guess when it's all said and done, that number will be above $603 [billion]."
Among the tough stuff to reconcile, Smith said, is that White House budget director Mick Mulvaney wants a balanced budget within ten years, Republicans refuse to raise taxes, and Americans are opposed to cutting specific programs. Meanwhile, the president has promised to rebuild the military and not to cut entitlements.
"So our mission in Congress is to balance the budget without raising taxes or cutting programs, which is impossible," Smith said. "Among the things they give you when elected to Congress, a magic wand is not one of them."
Smith called for a new national security strategy that reflects the budget reality and not the Defense Department's endless appetite. "Right now, we are not doing that, we are still on Fantasy Island, saying this is what we've got to have," he said.
Smith, echoing past remarks, called for base closures and a less ambitious nuclear modernization strategy as a means of controlling expenditures.
Rep. Mike Turner, center, speaks on the House floor in 2015. Turner, R-Ohio, sent a letter to the House Budget Committee chairman backed by other House Republicans which supports increased defense spending.
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HASC AirLand Subcommittee Chair Rep. Mike Turner, R-Ohio.
A hawkish House lawmaker, Turner has for year spearheaded efforts to secure more military funding, and this week he is gathering colleagues' signatures on a letter calling for repeal of the 2011 Budget Control Act, which contains a budget-cutting provision dubbed sequestration.
"We are doing that to get members on the record, to think of the consequences of sequestration and come to the conclusion that they are pledged to vote for repeal," Turner said.
The letter has 122 of the 150 signatures he is seeking. Such a measure would need 218 votes to pass the House and 60 votes in the Senate.
Repeal would create head room for both hawkish lawmakers to add to the president's 2018 request for defense and to advance the president's budget-cap busting supplemental request for 2017. That supplemental, which largely forgoes the cap-exempt emergency funding known as OCO, would otherwise "run right into the wall of sequestration," Turner said.
"We have to go forward with knocking down sequestration, which would allow us to take up the issue of 2018 [defense spending], and stop the fictional budgeting of raiding OCO," Turner said. "It would allow for the type of budget that would allow for State and rational contracting and modernization."
Virginia Republican Rob Wittman takes over as chairman of the influential House Seapower and Projection Forces subcommittee.
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HASC Seapower Chairman Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Va.
How can shipbuilding capacity get boosted to accommodate the larger Navy in line with its Force Structure Assessment? According to Wittman, a study is on the way to game out exactly how to get the Navy from 274 ships to 355 — and 12 aircraft carriers — over the next 30 years.
"How do we get that muscle memory back? How do we ensure we have the right skill set in the industry? How do we make sure we have no hiccups there," Wittman said. "Those are all important things I assure in the weeks and months to come we will be addressing."
The congressman has asked the Congressional Budget Office to lay out how it would get there in a 30-year scenario, in 25, 20 and 15 years, and what types of ships would make up the fleet. Another open question is whether it's possible to fund ships incrementally.
Once the study is in hand — likely in May — it will guide the Seapower Subcommittee's markup of the annual defense policy bill. To execute the ramp-up, Wittman said, "we have to make sure we have the right resources in the right places to make sure we get those ships built, that they get built on time and on budget."
"We cannot afford anything less, and if we do anything less we hinder our ability to move forward," he said.
Wittman acknowledged that growing the fleet will need personnel and maintenance funding to match. But he said he is comforted by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis' commitment to such spending.
"We are failing in maintaining aircraft and ships, we're behind," he said. "All of these things don't get us to the inventories we need in addition to what we have and maintaining those platforms."
Joe Gould was the senior Pentagon reporter for Defense News, covering the intersection of national security policy, politics and the defense industry. He had previously served as Congress reporter.
