Breaking Defense analysis of House & Senate data

WASHINGTON: The House and Senate Armed Services Committees have found the $5 billion in cuts required under the budget deal. As HASC chairman Mac Thornberry promised, some of them are painful.

The committees released the detailed list Tuesday after close of business, formatted into categories only a legislative aide could love, such as “Increases to NDAA Reductions.” (In plain English, that one means the original National Defense Authorization Act cut something from the president’s budget request, but the revised NDAA cuts even more).

In a quest for clarity, I threw the whole thing into Excel and, after much reformatting and recalculating, came up with the 25 biggest reductions from the original NDAA. The top 25 cuts together add up to 87 percent of the total $5 billion reduction. In a beautiful mathematical coincidence, these 25 also just happen to be all the cuts that are over $25 million. They’re a mix of administrative shuffles and what Thornberry called “real programs, real capability that has to be cut.”

1. Just over $1 billion (22% of the total $5 billion cut) in “fuel rate adjustments.” This simply reflects the lower price of gas, a big part of the budget when you’re flying jet airplanes, sailing warships, and driving tanks. This adjustment doesn’t hurt anybody, except maybe OPEC and Vladimir Putin, who’s been hurt more by falling oil prices than anything the US, NATO, and Ukraine have done.
2. $453 million (9% of the total) for the “FY16 Share of Planned DOD Headquarters Streamlining/Attrition.” The Pentagon is already cutting headquarters by 25 percent over several years, but it looks like HASC and SASC want them to do it faster. Cutting “staff pukes” and “paper pushers” is always popular, but doing it in a hurry can create all sorts of unintended logjams as reports, approvals, and even vital intelligence pile up on empty desks.
3. $262 million (5%) for “Overestimation Of Army Civilian Full Time Equivalent Targets.” The Army announced earlier today that “Since 2011, the Army has actively taken measures to align our civilian workforce with our reducing Army end-strength.  As a result, there are fewer [civilians] on board today than programmed [i.e. budgeted for].” If there are fewer people on the payroll, you don’t need as much money.
4. $250 million less for “Army Readiness increase.” Army leaders from Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley on down have begged for more training and maintenance funds. The original NDAA did give them more, but the revised NDAA doesn’t give them quite as much, to the tune of a quarter-billion dollars.
5. $250 million less for the “Counterterrorism Partnership Fund.” This provides aid to countries fighting terrorism in the increasingly unstable Middle East and North Africa. Of course, some of those countries, notably Yemen, are in no condition to receive US money at the moment.
6. $230 million less for the Long Range Strike Bomber “to align with contract award delay.” This is one of those low-pain adjustments: LRSB didn’t get out the gate as fast as planned, so it’s not going to get to the expensive parts of the program as quickly, so it doesn’t need quite as much money next year. Don’t worry, the bomber program will spend plenty of billions later.
7. $192.6 million less for an “Air National Guard Readiness increase.” As with the Army hit above (No. 4), this means less money for training and maintenance.
8. $170 million less for the “National Guard & Reserve Equipment Account,” although the summary emphasizes this account is still getting $250 million more than the president requested. The Guard and Reserve are hometown troops politically popular with Congress, but this item and No. 7 shows even they aren’t immune from trimming.
9. $150.2 million for an “unexecutable increase in Air Force End Strength.” The Air Force had planned to add more personnel, but that’s not happening.
10. $150 million less for the DDG-51 Arleigh Burke destroyer program. Since a single destroyer costs about $2 billion, this probably just means delaying some equipment rather than a whole ship.
11. $125 million less for the “Syria Train & Equip program” to support moderate rebels, which has been a fiasco.
12. $110 million less for the “Afghan Security Forces Fund,” identified as “fuel savings.” In other words, the Afghans are spending less on gas, just as we are, so we don’t need to subsidize them quite as heavily.
13. $102.6 million for a “Classified Program Adjustment.” Move along. Nothing to see here.
14. $100 million less for the “Technology Offset Initiative,” noted as a “New Program.” This looks like a hit to the Pentagon’s top long-term priority, the so-called “Third Offset Strategy” to keep America’s technological edge as China and Russia catch up in stealth aircraft, smart weapons, and cyberspace.
15. $100 million less for “PAC-3 Missile Segment Enhancement.” This is the latest version of the Patriot missile, which the Army wants to upgrade for longer range.
16. $100 million less for “Coalition Support Funds,” the mechanism the military uses to reimburse foreign allies — most notoriously Pakistan — for logistical and other help to US operations.
17. $90.8 million less for “Defense Information System Network (DISN) activities,” due to “unjustified program growth.” In other words, the Pentagon asked for more money (growth), Congress decided they didn’t need it (unjustified).
18. $80 million less for MQ-9 Reaper drones. Specifically, the original NDAA increased the number of Reapers being purchased, but the revised NDAA has to trim that back a bit.
19. $77 million less for the “Airlift Readiness Account (from OMAF Mobility Operations).” Airlift is the big cargo planes the Air Force uses to haul everything from troops to tanks to humanitarian supplies. Readiness is mostly fuel, maintenance, and training. But it beats me (and Google) what an “OMAF” is. [Update: Helpful readers have pointed out this acronym simply means “Operations & Maintenance, Air Force.]
20. $66.3 million less for “unexecutable Navy Civilian Full Time Equivalent Growth for management functions.” Again, this looks like civilians the military had planned to hire but didn’t.
21. $50 million less for a “reduce[d] THAAD purchase.” THAAD is the Army’s higher-altitude, longer-ranged missile defense system, Patriot’s bigger brother.
22. $41 million less for Joint Enabling Capabilities Command, a subunit of Transportation Command (TRANSCOM) devoted to deploying command-and-control systems quickly around the world. It’s justified as an otherwise undefined “efficiency,” which usually signals someone is getting a little desperate in their quest for cuts and is ordering someone else to wave a magic wand to make spending disappear.
23. $30 million less for purchases of the Standard SM-3 Block 1B missile. Like Patriot and THAAD, this is another missile defense system, but a Navy one launched by Aegis ships (like those DDG-51s above at No. 10).
24. $28.9 million less for “ship outfitting.” That’s more stuff that’s not going on Navy ships.
25. $27.5 million less for the Navy’s “basic research program” — less than the original NDAA, that is: The program’s still getting an increase over the President’s budget. As the military wrestles with shrinking budgets and rising threats, it’s fighting hard to preserve investments for the long term.

Our complete spreadsheet of all 98 listed cuts is below: