WASHINGTON: Army officers and officials hit Capitol Hill this afternoon to brief congressional staff on the coming round of personnel cuts. We’ve known for over a year that the Army would cut 40,000 active-duty soldiers — going down from 490,000 troops to 450,000 — but now the service is finally saying which units get cut. Further,… Keep reading →
Last week, the Republican Congress is expected to unveil its fiscal year 2016 budget resolution just as House defense authorizers start marking up their annual bill. What will that mean for the US military? Bottom line, the Pentagon should realistically expectno more than $569 billion from Congress in the final, enacted 2016 budget between base and… Keep reading →
CAPITOL HILL: Tensions within the GOP over the mandatory budget caps set by the Budget Control Act burst into the open recently. The chairman of the House Appropriations defense subcommittee repeatedly warned colleagues and the leaders of the Air Force this morning that they had no choice and must live within the Budget Control Act’s spending limits. Then,… Keep reading →
WASHINGTON: The Republican congressman who oversees the Navy actually likes Barack Obama’s 2016 defense budget — except for one small thing: It isn’t really a budget. “It would be almost a misnomer to call this a budget. It’s [just] numbers,” Rep. Randy Forbes told me this morning, in advance of tomorrow’s budget hearing. “If you… Keep reading →
ARLINGTON: No one knows what the 2016 budget is really going to be. In fact, no one can even plan properly for what it might be, the highest-ranking budgeteer in Army uniformmade clear this morning. The uncertainty is coming at the Pentagon from two sides at the same time. On the demand side, there’s… Keep reading →