Author Topic: Army could lose 100,000 soldiers due to sequestration  (Read 1479 times)

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famousdayandyear

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Army could lose 100,000 soldiers due to sequestration
« on: April 24, 2013, 03:15:51 pm »

http://www.federalnewsradio.com/1103/3297515/Army-could-lose-100000-soldiers-due-to-ongoing-sequestration-cuts

Army could lose 100,000 soldiers due to sequestration

Wednesday - 4/24/2013, 7:22am EDT
By Jared Serbu

Of all the military services facing budget pressure this year, the Army is in the direst of straits. The budget Congress finally passed a month ago will help matters, but the service says it's still more than $15 billion short of funds in fiscal 2013.

Army senior leaders told the Senate Armed Services Committee Tuesday that the elimination of a continuing resolution and the passage of a formal budget only fixed about a third of the funding problem they face this year. The sequestration cuts that Congress left in place will force them to find $7.6 billion in savings in the next six months.

On top of that, the Army is short $7.8 billion in its Afghanistan wartime account because of higher-than-expected operating costs.

That's just the 2013 problem.

A long term problem

If sequestration remains in place for the next 10 years, as it is in current law, the Army will have to cut, at a minimum, another 100,000 soldiers beyond the reductions it already has planned, said Gen. Ray Odierno, the Army chief of staff. He said those reductions would have to begin immediately in 2014.

Gen. Ray Odierno, chief of staff, Army
"And by the time we paid separation benefits for these soldiers, the costs to separate them would exceed the savings garnered," he said. "The maximum amount we can reduce the force without breaking readiness and including excessive separation costs is somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 soldiers per year. But this would only save $2 billion per year. So right now, almost the full weight of sequester will again fall on the modernization and readiness accounts, where such drastic cuts will take years to overcome. The net result will be units that are overmanned, unready and unmodernized. The steepness of the sequestration cuts forces us to be unready and hollow."

Odierno told the Senate he began his career as a young officer in the "hollow" Army of the late 1970s and does not want to leave the service in the same condition. But he said that's the inevitable result under current law.

"We can't allow this to get away from us in a way that's going to take us five or 10 years to recover," he said. "The steepness of these cuts will not allow us to maintain the right balance between end strength, modernization and readiness."

John McHugh, the secretary of the Army, said the service already has had to make damaging cutbacks to readiness in 2013: 80 percent of Army units will see degraded levels of training this year.

"The things that we've already done will, in some instances, take multiple years to fix, regardless of whether sequestration continues," he said. "We're just creating holes that can't get fixed overnight. For instance, at the Aviation Center of Excellence at Fort Rucker, sequestration will require the reduction of more than 500 training seats. Those don't just get recreated in a year's time. To take another example, we'll only be able to rotate two brigade combat teams through our national training center. All of those other teams will be put back into the queue, and it's not like they'll make up that readiness in a six month period. Those are holes that we're going to be dealing with for some time even in the best of circumstances. We're going to be significantly challenged for some time."

Indiscriminate hits across the board

McHugh and Odierno said the sequestration cuts are too large, but more importantly for the Army, they're too sudden. They argued that if the spending reductions have to happen, they should be pushed to the "out years" so that the Army has time to plan and make intelligent decisions.

That's not the way the Army's making budget cuts right now, partially because of the indiscriminate nature of sequestration. In order to protect current operations in Afghanistan, items like training, readiness and civilian pay are taking an indiscriminate hit.

Odierno said he worries it's only a matter of time before those decisions create big human capital problems and cause the Army's most talented people to look for something else to do.

Offline Ford289HiPo

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Re: Army could lose 100,000 soldiers due to sequestration
« Reply #1 on: April 24, 2013, 05:39:29 pm »
It's time that Odierno makes some cuts to General Officer positions. At last count, there were over 70 Generals/Admirals in the ranks of SOF. That's entirely too many for units that are supposed to be a small percentage of the total force. Many of those positions could easily be commanded by an O5 or O6.
I wonder when the lies will stop and truth begin, even as grim as the truth may be. And then I remember that for 70 years, the reign of terror in Russia called itself "the people's government." We have so far to fall, yet we are falling fast and Hell yawns to receive us.

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Re: Army could lose 100,000 soldiers due to sequestration
« Reply #2 on: April 24, 2013, 07:04:15 pm »
It's time that Odierno makes some cuts to General Officer positions. At last count, there were over 70 Generals/Admirals in the ranks of SOF. That's entirely too many for units that are supposed to be a small percentage of the total force. Many of those positions could easily be commanded by an O5 or O6.
I'll agree we have way too many generals and admirals, but it's a travesty that a nation of this many citizens has such a small defensive force. There is so much fat to cut in the federal budget, but I don't trust this bunch of traitors to address it.
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Offline Ford289HiPo

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Re: Army could lose 100,000 soldiers due to sequestration
« Reply #3 on: April 26, 2013, 01:41:47 am »
I'll agree we have way too many generals and admirals, but it's a travesty that a nation of this many citizens has such a small defensive force. There is so much fat to cut in the federal budget, but I don't trust this bunch of traitors to address it.

I agree with you. We do have a small force for the amount of land area that needs to be covered. IMO, our major military problem is three-fold, not repeating the issues with the glut of flag officers, we also have units strung out all over the globe as if we were still fighting the Cold War, and the exceedingly high price of new equipment.
Whiz bang doo-dads and gizmo's may be cool, but a soldier needs effective and reliable weapons systems that are easy to maintain and replace.   
I wonder when the lies will stop and truth begin, even as grim as the truth may be. And then I remember that for 70 years, the reign of terror in Russia called itself "the people's government." We have so far to fall, yet we are falling fast and Hell yawns to receive us.