WASHINGTON — US Defense Secretary Ash Carter urged lawmakers Thursday to "come together" on a budget deal, saying the nation's security interests are at risk.
Under fire from Republicans at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, Carter defended the Obama administration's 2017 budget request for its compliance with last year's all-but-unraveled bipartisan budget deal. Carter appeared beside Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford.
"We need Congress to come together around providing normal, stable, responsible budgets because lack of stability represents one of the single biggest strategic risks to our DoD enterprise," Carter said.
"Such instability undercuts stable planning and efficient use of taxpayer dollars — often in ways taxpayers can't even see," Carter said. "It baffles our friends, and emboldens our foes. It's managerially and strategically unsound, and unfairly dispiriting to our troops, their families, and our workforce. And it's inefficient for our defense industry partners, too."
Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and other lawmakers grilled Carter over Senate Democrats' blockage of DoD appropriations to retain leverage to pass non-defense spending bills.
"We submitted a budget supportive of the bipartisan budget agreement just months after it was agreed," Carter said. "That is in my judgement the only way we can get true stability.
"Remember, the reality is that these things have to be supported by both parties in both houses and be signed by the president. I'm just the secretary of defense, I can't make all that happen, but I know that has to happen in order for us to get an appropriation," Carter said.
When Carter began to sidestep a question from Cotton over whether the president should sign into law a defense increase, if supported by both chambers, Cotton lit into him. "You are not the director for the National Endowment for the Arts," Cotton said.
"I do know that some of the national security related portions which are outside the [Defense Department] need funding as well, so it's not a matter of indifference to me whether the whole of government is funded," Carter said.
Without a budget deal in place, Congress on Thursday morning was still inching toward a stopgap measure to keep the government open after the fiscal year ends on Sept. 30. Some House Republicans have called for the measure to extend into 2017, though the Senate is negotiating one that ends in early December, to tee up a new budget compromise.
If the stopgap measure extends past December, it would "undermine plans to quadruple the European Defense Initiative a a time when we need to be standing with our NATO allies and standing up to deter Russian aggression," Carter said.
Committee Ranking Member Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., prompted Carter and Dunford to confirm that the non-defense side of the budget is important to national security and efforts to counter the Islamic State.
"The whole counter-ISIL thing is a whole-of-government approach," Carter said.
Committee Chairman Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a frequent critic of President Barack Obama on national security matters, said the military is being forced to confront myriad global threats with insufficient budgets, equipment and readiness.
"We are simultaneously asking our military to wage a generational fight against Islamist terrorism, while rebuilding a ready and modernized force to deter and, if necessary, defeat great power or rogue state competitors in full-spectrum combat," McCain said.
"I would be the first to admit that the Congress is failing in to match resources to requirements, but the failure of the President is worse. After all, it is the duty of the commander-in-chief to be the strongest advocate for the needs of our military, but President Obama has been more interested in using the defense budget as a hostage to extract political concessions for greater non-defense spending," McCain said.
McCain, Reed, House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, and Ranking Member Adam Smith, D-Wash., are negotiating defense policy bills that reflect the two chambers' differing approaches to the emergency Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) account.
The Senate spending and policy bills support the president's budget, while the House bills redirect $18 billion in the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) account — which is exempt from statutory budget caps — for unrequested troops and equipment.
The gambit, spearheaded by House Republicans, would leave operations in Afghanistan unfunded to force the next president to request Congress pass supplemental defense spending.
The White House has issued veto threats against the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act over this approach to OCO, as well as a number of reforms to DOD's structure and acquisitions apparatus.
On the proposed reforms, Carter reiterated that he has "serious concerns" and "would like to work out all of these."
Specifically, on acquisitions and Goldwater-Nichols reform, the House and Senate bills have significantly different approaches.
The Senate's NDAA blows up and renames the position of AT&L undersecretary to better emphasize innovation within the Pentagon. The House's NDAA, in a move to shake up DoD's risk-averse acquisition system, would disincentivize lengthy, ambitious programs in favor of incremental, rapidly fielded breakthrough technologies.
In his written testimony, Carter skewered defense appropriators who "cut high-priority investments that we should be making in high-end capabilities" in favor of "lower-priority things we did't ask for and already have enough of—including an extra Littoral Combat Ship and "extra force structure that we cannot afford to keep ready in the long term."
Unwanted cuts targeted the submarine-hunting P-8 aircraft, the Next-Generation Jammer and the Surface Electronic Warfare Improvement Program, the maritime-strike version of the Tomahawk cruise missile, an anti-ship mode for the SM-6 missile — as well as innovation initiatives such as the Strategic Capabilities Office, the partnership with In-Q-Tel and Carter's pet tech-startup program, the Defense Innovation Unit-Experimental (DIUx).
"I've seen the constant temptation over the years to starve new and future-oriented defense investments in favor of more established and therefore well-entrenched programs," Carter said. "In a rapidly changing and competitive world, we must resist this temptation."
Email: jgould@defensenews.com
Twitter: @ReporterJoe
Joe Gould was the senior Pentagon reporter for Defense News, covering the intersection of national security policy, politics and the defense industry. He had previously served as Congress reporter.
