thedrifter
07-04-06, 01:49 PM
July 10, 2006
Hagee pitches lawmakers for gear-replacement funds
By Christian Lowe
Times staff writer
The Corps’ top general pleaded with lawmakers June 27 to provide billions in emergency funds to replace war-damaged gear — a move that would bring the service’s equipment stocks to better-than-prewar levels.
Commandant Gen. Mike Hagee said the Corps would need $6.6 billion next year to replace trucks, Humvees, radios and other gear destroyed or damaged by combat and to outfit units with the equipment and vehicles required to fight terrorism.
“This [request] stops the downward trend, and then it starts to turn us back up,” Hagee said before the House Armed Services Committee. “And it will still take a couple years for us to get all the way back up to where every single unit has all the equipment that it needs and it’s in A-1 condition.”
The drive for new gear has been nearly two years in the making. In 2004, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ordered the services to examine war losses and create a list of gear they’d need to replace. In May 2005, the Corps’ inspector general’s office concluded a study that showed deployed units were eating through equipment at higher-than-anticipated rates, cutting a Humvee’s life expectancy from 14 years to four, for example.
The Corps said last year it would need $11.7 billion to reset its force — $5.1 billion in 2006 and $6.6 billion in 2007.
Service officials also said on June 27 that the Corps’ yearly war costs will total $5.3 billion to maintain logistics support, purchase spare parts, transport troops to the war zone and supply them for combat.
The Corps is therefore asking Congress for nearly $12 billion in supplemental funding next year — over and above its fiscal 2007 budget request of $18.2 billion — to reset its force while paying for combat operations worldwide.
Hagee’s plea comes at a time when lawmakers are increasingly skeptical of the emergency funding requests, arguing that the services are asking for gear and programs that aren’t directly war-related and that service chiefs are playing on the urgencies of war to pressure lawmakers into hasty approval.
Gen. Robert Magnus, assistant Marine Corps commandant, said in March that the service would have to prepare for a time when supplemental requests are no longer granted.
“Right now, much of the planning is being done, like we said, on the backs of supplementals,” he said. “At some point, the concern is that the appetite for the very large defense budget and supplementals may be waning.”
So the Corps hopes to get its units outfitted for future fights soon, taking the extra cash while offered. The service recently was appropriated $10.4 billion in emergency funding for fiscal 2006, a sum over and above the nearly $17 billion doled out for its budget request this year.
Marine budget officials said the ’06 emergency sum was still $2.8 billion below the service’s request, including $500 million pulled out by the White House to fund new border security measures.
“If the [reset funds] came out of our top line without doubling our top line, it would take us years to fund that,” Hagee said. “The supplemental is absolutely critical.”
Hagee said once the reset tab is paid for next year, the Corps can pay for incremental war losses, at the present pace of operations, out of the wartime operations budget and won’t require more reset funds. The Corps has about 20,000 troops in Iraq and recently pulled its last combat unit out of Afghanistan.
Army woes
The Army is in worse shape, however. Its top commander, Gen. Peter Schoomaker, told lawmakers at the June 27 hearing that the service would need $17 billion in 2007 to repair war-damaged equipment or purchase replacements.
Lawmakers deferred about $5 billion in 2006 supplemental funding to next year, boosting the Army’s 2007 reset needs by nearly 27 percent.
Schoomaker said the yearly reset tab would be about $13 billion and is “determined by the rate we are consuming equipment.”
Schoomaker warned of a rapidly hollowing force if the Army doesn’t receive needed reset funding.
“My concern is that we reset our force so that we can maintain our readiness to perform in defense of the nation,” he said.
While the Army has worked to refit and repurchase some advanced equipment and vehicles one-for-one — buying a new Stryker vehicle to replace a destroyed Stryker vehicle, for example — the service is also trying to rid itself of older gear by replacing obsolete vehicles with more modern ones.
“We always try to reset ourselves forward,” Schoomaker said. “If we lose [an M35 2.5-ton truck], we try not to replace it with [an M35 2.5-ton truck] — we’d like to replace it with a modern truck.
“So you get some benefit from reset that way.”
Schoomaker said the service has a greater capacity to repair and recapitalize war-damaged vehicles at its maintenance depots, with some operating at only about 50 percent capacity.
“We have the capacity to do it,” he said. “If we have the money in time, and the money in sufficient numbers, we will get ahead of this.”
Ellie
Hagee pitches lawmakers for gear-replacement funds
By Christian Lowe
Times staff writer
The Corps’ top general pleaded with lawmakers June 27 to provide billions in emergency funds to replace war-damaged gear — a move that would bring the service’s equipment stocks to better-than-prewar levels.
Commandant Gen. Mike Hagee said the Corps would need $6.6 billion next year to replace trucks, Humvees, radios and other gear destroyed or damaged by combat and to outfit units with the equipment and vehicles required to fight terrorism.
“This [request] stops the downward trend, and then it starts to turn us back up,” Hagee said before the House Armed Services Committee. “And it will still take a couple years for us to get all the way back up to where every single unit has all the equipment that it needs and it’s in A-1 condition.”
The drive for new gear has been nearly two years in the making. In 2004, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ordered the services to examine war losses and create a list of gear they’d need to replace. In May 2005, the Corps’ inspector general’s office concluded a study that showed deployed units were eating through equipment at higher-than-anticipated rates, cutting a Humvee’s life expectancy from 14 years to four, for example.
The Corps said last year it would need $11.7 billion to reset its force — $5.1 billion in 2006 and $6.6 billion in 2007.
Service officials also said on June 27 that the Corps’ yearly war costs will total $5.3 billion to maintain logistics support, purchase spare parts, transport troops to the war zone and supply them for combat.
The Corps is therefore asking Congress for nearly $12 billion in supplemental funding next year — over and above its fiscal 2007 budget request of $18.2 billion — to reset its force while paying for combat operations worldwide.
Hagee’s plea comes at a time when lawmakers are increasingly skeptical of the emergency funding requests, arguing that the services are asking for gear and programs that aren’t directly war-related and that service chiefs are playing on the urgencies of war to pressure lawmakers into hasty approval.
Gen. Robert Magnus, assistant Marine Corps commandant, said in March that the service would have to prepare for a time when supplemental requests are no longer granted.
“Right now, much of the planning is being done, like we said, on the backs of supplementals,” he said. “At some point, the concern is that the appetite for the very large defense budget and supplementals may be waning.”
So the Corps hopes to get its units outfitted for future fights soon, taking the extra cash while offered. The service recently was appropriated $10.4 billion in emergency funding for fiscal 2006, a sum over and above the nearly $17 billion doled out for its budget request this year.
Marine budget officials said the ’06 emergency sum was still $2.8 billion below the service’s request, including $500 million pulled out by the White House to fund new border security measures.
“If the [reset funds] came out of our top line without doubling our top line, it would take us years to fund that,” Hagee said. “The supplemental is absolutely critical.”
Hagee said once the reset tab is paid for next year, the Corps can pay for incremental war losses, at the present pace of operations, out of the wartime operations budget and won’t require more reset funds. The Corps has about 20,000 troops in Iraq and recently pulled its last combat unit out of Afghanistan.
Army woes
The Army is in worse shape, however. Its top commander, Gen. Peter Schoomaker, told lawmakers at the June 27 hearing that the service would need $17 billion in 2007 to repair war-damaged equipment or purchase replacements.
Lawmakers deferred about $5 billion in 2006 supplemental funding to next year, boosting the Army’s 2007 reset needs by nearly 27 percent.
Schoomaker said the yearly reset tab would be about $13 billion and is “determined by the rate we are consuming equipment.”
Schoomaker warned of a rapidly hollowing force if the Army doesn’t receive needed reset funding.
“My concern is that we reset our force so that we can maintain our readiness to perform in defense of the nation,” he said.
While the Army has worked to refit and repurchase some advanced equipment and vehicles one-for-one — buying a new Stryker vehicle to replace a destroyed Stryker vehicle, for example — the service is also trying to rid itself of older gear by replacing obsolete vehicles with more modern ones.
“We always try to reset ourselves forward,” Schoomaker said. “If we lose [an M35 2.5-ton truck], we try not to replace it with [an M35 2.5-ton truck] — we’d like to replace it with a modern truck.
“So you get some benefit from reset that way.”
Schoomaker said the service has a greater capacity to repair and recapitalize war-damaged vehicles at its maintenance depots, with some operating at only about 50 percent capacity.
“We have the capacity to do it,” he said. “If we have the money in time, and the money in sufficient numbers, we will get ahead of this.”
Ellie