House Appropriators Fear Army Cuts, Continuing Resolution
“It looks like the Army’s going to take the lion’s share of the cuts,” possibly losing a tank brigade, warned Texas Republican John Carter.
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. and Paul McLeary on May 05, 2021 at 5:01 PM
WASHINGTON: The Army’s 2022 budget isn’t out yet, but the Chief of Staff is already promising Congress a detailed Unfunded Requirements list of all the service priorities that will be left out – a list legislators will look for eagerly.
“What we’ve got right now is an Army budget that has risk built into it,” said John Whitley, the acting Army Secretary (and a Trump holdover). “It was prudent risk. It was risk taken to fund modernization and to be a good steward of the taxpayer resources, but what that means is, then when funding becomes unpredictable, you don’t have buffers, you don’t have the ability to absorb that as easily. We are going to protect modernization, but there is risk there, and there will be things we cannot do.”
While the Biden Administration has only released the topline budget for the whole Defense Department – effectively flat, or a slight cut counting inflation – there’s already considerable fear of what Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley called a “bloodletting” of the Army to fund air and naval forces. As GOP Rep. John Carter put it today, “it looks like the Army’s going to take the lion’s share of the cuts,” potentially losing a full Armored Brigade Combat Team.
https://breakingdefense.com/2021/05/house-appropriators-fear-army-cuts-continuing-resolution/
