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DoD Budget Seeks Cuts in BAH, Commissary, Tricare Benefits

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Photo Credit: Military TimesThe Pentagon on Monday proposed the deepest and most far-reaching cuts to military compensation in the 40-year history of the all-volunteer force, explaining that such cuts are necessary in order to pay for more modern gear and high-tech weaponry.

Some highlights of the Defense Department’s budget proposal for fiscal 2015 include the first-ever rollback in Basic Allowance for Housing; a military pay raise that would match last year’s 1 percent hike, the lowest in the volunteer era; massive cuts to commissary subsidies; and potentially increased health care fees for both active-duty families and retirees.

Together, the proposals signal an end to a decade-plus wartime era of rising pay and benefits for troops. Even after the proposed cuts, military compensation would remain comparatively more generous than it was in the 1980s and ’90s. But the Pentagon has never before sought to pare back existing benefits in the all-volunteer era.

Moreover, personnel costs would be slashed further by significant reductions to the size of the force, including the smallest Army since the before the Second World War.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said the changes are part of an overarching decision to protect big-ticket programs and research projects by saving money on people.

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Cuts in U.S. Defense Spending Force Hard Strategic Choices

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Photo Credit: gregwest98Big budget cuts over the next decade will force the Pentagon to make painful cuts to personnel and readiness and could make it hard to execute a global security strategy, defense analysts predicted on Wednesday.

Teams of analysts from four think tanks, who unveiled the results of a defense budget-cutting exercise at a Capitol Hill briefing, all found themselves slashing large numbers of civilian and uniformed personnel, along with ships and fighter jets, to help meet tough budget targets facing the Pentagon.

“It is very, very hard to reach the required level of budget savings in the first … (five-year planning period) if you don’t touch personnel, readiness or both, frankly, because that’s where the money is,” said Nora Bensahel, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security.

“You can’t do it by just picking out a few systems here and there,” she said.

The analysts unveiled their thinking on the 2015 defense budget and U.S. military strategy just a month before the Pentagon releases its own budget for the upcoming fiscal year as well as the Quadrennial Defense Review, a document produced every four years aligning U.S. strategy and resources.

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Panetta To Propose Military Pay Cut After Obama Raised Federal Officials Pay

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Photo Credit: US Army AfricaOutgoing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta reportedly believes the military should receive a pay cut in order to respond to the budget cuts facing the Pentagon — a position that might strengthen the Republican push to reverse President Obama’s executive order raising the salary of Vice President Joe Biden and other federal officials.

“Panetta will recommend to Congress that military salaries be limited to a one percent increase in 2014,” CNN reports, explaining that Panetta is “effectively decreasing troop salaries next year . . . The decision comes as the secretary is stepping up the rhetoric about dire cuts at the Pentagon if sequestration goes into effect.”

The debate about sequestration did not stop Obama from ending a pay freeze for some government officials, effectively authorizing a pay raise that costs $11 billion.

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Panetta: Troop Pay May Be On Table in Future Budget Cuts

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At a packed National Press Club lunch event Tuesday afternoon, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta gave a talk full, as always, of ire at the unresolved specter of sequestration, but also spent time talking about how to implement further cuts to the Defense Department.

Under the 2011 Budget Control Act, Panetta and the military service chiefs carved out $487 billion from planned spending over the next fiscal decade. But if members of Congress can’t reach a budget deal that finds equivalent savings, the sequestration mechanism will kick in and lop an additional half-trillion dollars off the Defense Department’s bottom line.

“Because of political gridlock, this department still faces the possibility of another round of across-the-board cuts,” Panetta said. “Wherever I visit our troops, they make clear their concerns about those cuts. What does it mean for them and what does it mean for their families. We’re down to the wire now.”

But even while Panetta urged Congress Tuesday to put a halt to sequestration, he joined the new trend of defense hard-liners talking in earnest about additional Pentagon cuts.

“We obviously continue to look at areas where we can achieve efficiencies at the DoD. There’s no question there is duplication, there is overhead in a bureaucracy of three million people,” he said.

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