Rising Army, Marine Corps costs may trigger budget war

The Pentagon is bracing for a prolonged budget war that may begin once President Bush rolls out his fiscal 2008 budget request Monday.

That war will play out in the E-ring offices of senior defense and military officials as well as the halls of Congress, with each service battling over money to invest in new weaponry as well as to cover rising Army and Marine Corps personnel costs.

"They're starting to man the barricades, but there's no shooting yet," said Gordon Adams, who was Office of Management and Budget associate director of national security in the Clinton administration. "Right now, it's guerilla warfare about the budget. We may have open warfare by '09."

Despite Defense budgets that surpass Vietnam-era spending levels, service leaders are becoming increasingly concerned that the mounting financial needs of the Army and Marine Corps will eat into other accounts, especially Air Force and Navy procurement dollars, independent defense analysts said Wednesday.

Until now, the Pentagon has largely divvied up the services' shares of the defense budget the same way every year: the Army receives 24 percent, the Air Force 29 percent, and the Navy and Marines a combined 31 percent. It is a delicate balance that has kept the services from moving aggressively to raid each other's accounts to pay for their additional needs.

Army Chief of Staff Peter Schoomaker launched a risky bid last fall to get the Army more money to pay for modernization and transformation efforts and cover the costs of base closures and relocating troops from Europe to the United States. But Schoomaker made it clear he was not interested in taking money from the Air Force or Navy.

But Bush's recently announced plans to grow the ground forces by 92,000 troops over the next five years -- an expansion intended to ease the stress of constant deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan -- could upset the interservice peace over budget shares.

Those extra troops will cost roughly $90 billion through 2013, and another $15 billion to $20 billion annually after that, estimated Steve Kosiak, a budget analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

Army officials plan to pay for the beginning of that increase in the wartime spending bill accompanying the fiscal 2008 budget, but say they will have to wrap those costs into the base budget request in fiscal 2009 and beyond.

That money has to come from somewhere -- and the Air Force and Navy are "very, very nervous" that the Pentagon will plunder their accounts, said Robert Work, another CSBA analyst.

Work added that he foresees a "period of renewed interservice rivalry" over defense dollars.

Air Force and Navy leaders will undoubtedly plead their case to the administration and Congress that their arsenal of high-tech jets, ships and submarines are vital at a time when Iran threatens to become a nuclear power and China rises as one of the world's most dominant military forces.

"Even though we have a lot of money, we have a lot of problems," said Work, a retired Marine Corps officer.

Indeed, Air Force Chief of Staff Michael Moseley told the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee Jan. 18 that their systems are crucial to current and future conflicts. And, in a pre-emptive move, he warned that Congress should not deplete their budgets to pay Army and Marine Corps bills.

Just as a rising tide lifts all boats, former Pentagon comptroller Dov Zakheim observed that the military services could lean on Capitol Hill to get more funding "without forcing decrements among the other services."

Fighting over budget shares goes against the Defense Department's guiding principle of maintaining a unified fighting force, said Zakheim, who doubts there will be open warfare over resources. "I think they will try desperately to avoid it ... It conflicts with a culture of jointness that now pervades the services, especially in wartime."