Pentagon still playing "budgetary shell game" after sequestration

Pentagon to request 20 percent less for war funding, officials say
Bloomberg News
By Tony Capaccio
Published: January 8, 2015

"It's a budgetary shell game for getting around" the caps imposed by the automatic spending cuts known as sequestration, Harrison said in an email.

Soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division salute as soldiers killed in an improved explosive device strike are flown from Combat Outpost Nalgham to Kandahar Air Field in Afghanistan on August 11, 2011.
LAURA RAUCH/STARS AND STRIPES

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon will request about $51 billion in war funding for the fiscal year starting Oct. 1, a 20-percent reduction from the $64 billion Congress approved this year and the least since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, officials and congressional aides said.

The Overseas Contingency Operations funding, as it is known, will be sent to Congress in addition to basic defense spending of about $534 billion when President Barack Obama offers his proposed fiscal 2016 federal budget Feb. 2, according to the officials and aides, who asked not to be identified before the details are made public.

While the decline in war funding largely reflects the continued withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan — from the 10,600 now there to half that planned by year-end — it remains enough to draw questions about why the Defense Department shouldn't pay to fight wars as part of its basic mission.

"The continuing drawdown in Afghanistan is not having a proportionate effect on" the war budget because it's "being used for a lot of things other than Afghanistan," said Todd Harrison, a defense budget analyst with the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington.

"It's a budgetary shell game for getting around" the caps imposed by the automatic spending cuts known as sequestration, Harrison said in an email.
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