Jamie McIntyre: Pentagon unprepared for Bush action

CNN Correspondent Jamie McIntyre was the first to pick up word that the Pentagon was caught off-guard by President Bush's plan to not send Congress a request for additional funds, which the military leaders have come to expect.

Q: What is it you are hearing in the Pentagon?

MCINTYRE: For several years the Pentagon has been relying on supplemental budgets for items that weren't taken care of in the regular defense budget, and this year they were expecting to get between $5 billion and $7 billion to pay for a wide range of things, including peacekeeping in the Balkans, unfunded liability for health care improvements, fuel and spare parts for ongoing operations, and even a quarter of a billion dollars to repair the damaged USS Cole.

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The U.S. military

This week the White House told the Pentagon that the president has decided not to submit a supplemental budget request, at least not one anytime soon, until there's a complete review of the strategy that the Pentagon is employing, and what it has and what it really needs.

That took the Pentagon by surprise, because they say they need to have this request go up (to Congress) soon because they've got bills to pay, and they say if they don't get the money, they're going to have to cut back on military training and re-program some funds.

It seems a little ironic to many of the people in the Pentagon that this is the result of actions of a president who campaigned on a theme of rebuilding the military and promised that "help is on the way."

Q: What do independent observers think of the Pentagon's claim?

MCINTYRE: I think there's a recognition by members of Congress and by defense experts that the U.S. military, in order to continue operating at the pace it's operating at now, needs to be able to pay its bills for things like fuel and spare parts, and if they don't get that, they're going to have to cut back on the pace of operations.

What some Republicans in Congress are scratching their heads about is why President Bush decided to not go ahead with the supplemental requests. They understand the president's plan to have a total review of Pentagon programs and decide where he wants to spend the money. That makes a lot of sense to them. But he's talking about things in next year's money, and the year after. This is money that is needed for the current budget year.

They're hopeful that, once the Joint Chiefs of Staff make a strong case for it, once Republican members of Congress who support the president make a case for it, he may change his mind. In fact, the Senate Armed Services Committee chairman, Sen. John Warner of Virginia, has written a letter to the president, signed by eight other influential members of Congress who are defense hawks, urging him to take a two-track approach. They want him to split this up: to go ahead and have the study and the review for the major weapons programs and acquisition programs, but at the same time to give the Pentagon an infusion of cash in order to make good on his campaign promise that he'd take care of the military.

It's either that or the Pentagon has no choice to cut back on some of the things it's doing.

Q: Why not budget some of these multi-year missions in the normal way?

MCINTYRE: There's been discussions over the years for that. Former defense secretaries William J. Perry and William S. Cohen argued that these kinds of expenses ought to be in the regular budget.

For instance, the United States knows that its going to keep peacekeeping troops in the Balkans, it's going to have to be enforcing the no-fly zones, and those operations ought to be in the regular Pentagon budget. But each year, the administration and the Congress have opted instead to handle these with supplemental requests, partly because they need to stay under the budget caps that were agreed to under the balanced budget amendment. So these expenditures are classified as emergency expenditures.

The problem is the Pentagon has come to rely on that. They were expecting to get this supplemental bill because that's the way these expenses have been handled, and so it comes as a bit of a shock when they discover that there's no immediate plans to submit the what-had-become-routine supplemental request.

Many people would argue that the Pentagon wastes a lot of money and could perhaps find this $5 billion to $7 billion in the current budget by simply reprogramming things or simply canceling programs. But the Pentagon argues that after years of doing that they've come to the point where it's increasingly difficult to come up with that kind of money without killing an existing program or stopping an existing operation.

The Pentagon will continue to fund its front-line deployed troops in places like Korea and Bosnia and Iraq. So where do they cut back? They have to cut back on training in the United States, in places where they can absorb the budget cuts. That's why when they have to cut back, it's in places like training.

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Military chiefs call for tens of billions more in defense spending
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August 31, 2000

U.S. Department of Defense
Joint Chiefs of Staff
House Armed Services Committee
Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld

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