This interview is from yesterday. General Gen. Ray Odierno is blunt, and to the point.
Interview: US Army Chief Says Budget Cuts Are Hurting Force
Q. What is the real impact of past and future budget cuts on the force? Why are you so alarmed? And what is the way out of it?
A. Well, it is a bunch of cumulative things that have occurred: continuing resolutions [CRs], which we submit budgets, the House Armed Service Committee passed these budgets, but since we have not gotten a total governmental budget, we do not execute them, so we go to a CR. So it is not in line with how we think we should spend money in order to keep our force up. Then you have a shutdown. Then on top of that, you have sequestration, where we have a bunch of very heavy cuts that we have to take.
So let’s forget about the number on sequestration. It is about the up-front cuts in sequestration that does not allow you to properly manage sequestration where you can sustain readiness, you can sustain modernization, as you reduce end strength. So what we are being forced to do is cut readiness, cut modernization, because we cannot cut end strength fast enough. Because it becomes too expensive to cut it, and you do not get any savings if you cut it very fast because you have to pay benefits.
Q. So what is the net impact from a readiness standpoint?
A. So let me put it in very simple terms. A brigade [of soldiers is] not going to the National Training Center. They do not have dollars to train at their home station. So we still have brigades, but if we ask them to go, they are not going to be trained properly. So what does that mean? That means when they go, it is going to take them longer to do it. They might have more casualties. So to me, that is unacceptable. And so the problem with us is, we are realistic about the future. What I am telling you is we have to deploy people in the future. They are not going to be ready right now. That is a problem for me.
Q. What is it going to take to drive this point home? Is this a credibility issue for the service chiefs and the defense leadership?
A. The bottom line is everybody has got to realize between now and 2019, we have significant risk because we will not get rebalanced until then. And so that is a six-year period where we are going to be unbalanced. And what I worry about is this world we live in is incredibly uncertain. I do not know what is going to happen. There are lots of possibilities out there.
I certainly hope we do not have to deploy soldiers, but my job is to make sure we are ready to deploy them. And if we have to do it in the next six years, we have significant problems, because I think they will not be trained or equipped the way we think they should be as American soldiers to do their job.
Q. There has been a sense that the Pentagon has been waiting for Congress to come and ride to the rescue with more money, sort of forestalling the hard decisions. Was it a mistake to wait as long as you did?
A. So, you know, if we get a budget, we can plan towards that budget and we have planned towards these budgets. So we have a sequestration budget. We have planned for that. We know what it means. We know what a ’15 to ’19 budget would look like. So we are prepared to execute that. Again, the bottom line is sequestration was a tool that was supposed to force compromise in Congress. It was not a tool developed to properly manage the downsizing of the Department of Defense or the Army. And that is the problem. The tool was not right.