U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel warned Wednesday that the Pentagon may have to stop using up to three Navy aircraft carriers and order additional sharp reductions in the size of the Army and Marine Corps if Congress doesn't act to avoid massive budget cuts beginning in 2014.
Hagel told reporters that the sweeping budget cuts over the next 10 years could leave the nation with an ill-prepared, under-equipped military doomed to face more technologically advanced enemies.
He laid out a worst-case scenario for the U.S. military if the Pentagon is forced to cut more than $50 billion from the 2014 budget and $500 billion over the next 10 years as a result of Congressionally mandated spending cuts.
Congress continues to debate spending bills. Hagel insisted that the department is not exaggerating their possible impact.
Going from 11 to eight or nine carrier strike groups would bring the Navy to its lowest number since World War II. The troop cuts would bring the Army back to levels not seen since at least 1950, eroding the military's ability to keep forces deployed and ready for combat overseas.
Hagel said the U.S. may have to choose between having a highly capable but significantly smaller military and having a larger force while reducing special operations forces, limiting research and cutting or curtailing plans to upgrade weapons systems.
That second option, he said, would likely result in the U.S. military using older, less effective equipment against more technologically advanced adversaries. And it would have a greater impact on private defense companies around the country.
Hagel said the U.S risks fielding a military force that in the next few years would be unprepared due to a lack of training, maintenance and upgraded equipment.
While noting that no final decisions have been made, Hagel laid out a few ideas under consideration.
He said that to achieve the savings, the Pentagon might have to cut more than 100,000 additional soldiers from the Army _ which is already planning to go from a wartime high of about 570,000 to 490,000 by 2017. And the current plan to reduce the size of the Marine Corps to 182,000 from a high of about 205,000 could also be changed _ cutting it to as few as 150,000.
He added that the Air Force could lose as many as five combat air squadrons as well as a number of other bomber and cargo aircraft.
“This strategic choice would result in a force that would be technologically dominant, but would be much smaller and able to go fewer places and do fewer things, especially if crises occurred at the same time in different regions of the world,” said Hagel.
He said another option would be to make fewer cuts in the size of the force and instead cancel or curtail many modernization programs.
The budget cuts come from a law enacted two years ago that ordered the government to come up with $1.2 trillion in savings over a decade. The law included the threat of annual automatic cuts as a way of forcing lawmakers to reach a deal, but they have been unable to do so.
As a result the Pentagon in January faces a cut of $54 billion from current spending if Congress fails to reverse the automatic cuts, according to calculations by congressional budget aides. The base budget must be trimmed to $498 billion, with cuts of about 4 percent hitting already reduced spending on defense, nuclear weapons and military construction. (AP)
