Pentagon cuts would hit Texas bases hard

Three bases in Texas were targeted for significant staffing cuts Thursday as the Army announced plans to reduce its active force by 40,000 troops over the next two years.

Members of Congress from Texas and other states hit hard by the proposed reductions blasted the announcement from President Barack Obama’s administration. Georgia and Alaska are considered to be among the other hardest-hit states.

“This administration is doubling down on the arbitrary and destructive cuts to our military,” said Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, a presidential candidate.

With all the global unrest, Cruz said, the Pentagon should be maintaining or boosting the military, not cutting it.

Cruz said: “My home state of Texas will unfortunately bear some of this burden: 4,898 soldiers and their families will get caught up in President Obama’s quest for a shortsighted political legacy. … We need to rebuild our military in this time of global insecurity, not hasten its demise.”

Nationwide, six bases — including Fort Hood and Fort Bliss in Texas — are set to absorb the biggest share of the cuts, with each losing 1,200 or more soldiers under the plan.

The cuts would represent staff reductions of 9 percent, or 3,350 personnel, at Fort Hood in Killeen and 5 percent, or 1,219 personnel, at Fort Bliss in El Paso.

Also facing the knife in Texas is Joint Base San Antonio-Fort Sam Houston, which would lose 6 percent of its force, or 329 people. Some of the cuts in San Antonio will be offset by gains in positions tied to military medical and rehabilitation programs in the area.

Some of the loudest critics of the proposed cuts were the very members of Congress who voted four years ago to impose governmentwide budget measures that the Pentagon warned then would compel it to slash the military.

Republican Rep. Earl “Buddy” Carter criticized plans to eliminate 4,350 positions at Fort Benning and Fort Stewart in Georgia. Fellow Republican Rep. Renee Ellmers expressed dismay over the Army’s proposal to cut 842 troops at Fort Bragg in North Carolina.

“With global instability on the rise and increasingly unpredictable threats, this drawdown is shortsighted,” Carter said.

“These cuts take us backwards — and at a time when there are mounting threats abroad, it is all the more imperative the U.S. maintains a robust military,” Ellmers said.

Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Clarendon, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, expressed dismay over the Army’s announced force reductions — from 490,000 to 450,000 active-duty troops. So did Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Yet all four lawmakers voted for the Budget Control Act, which the House passed Aug. 1, 2011, and the Senate approved the next day.

That bill, which passed after weeks of bitter debate, imposed across-the-board cuts under a system called sequestration. The measure divided both parties in the House and the Senate, with significant numbers of lawmakers voting for and against it.

During the legislative debate and since then, the Pentagon repeatedly warned that the forced spending reductions would hamstring its ability to respond to future threats, such as the sudden rise a year ago of the Islamic State, with its sweep across much of Syria and Iraq.

Even before that, then-Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel urged Congress to stop the forced cuts in February 2014 — when he first floated the possibility of significant troop reductions.

“Sequestration requires cuts so deep, so abrupt, so quickly that we cannot shrink the size of our military fast enough,” Hagel said then.

A changing world

The world looked much different four years ago. When Congress passed sequestration, Obama was almost finished fulfilling his 2008 campaign promise to remove U.S. combat troops from Iraq, and security there appeared relatively stable.

The civil war in neighboring Syria, which would give rise to the Islamic State, was in its early months.

The militants’ march across the two countries has forced Obama to send some 3,500 U.S. troops back to Iraq. Their mission is to advise and train Iraqi forces, but several prominent senators have recently said American combat troops might have to return to help defeat the Islamic State.

While Congress has restored some of the military’s lost funding under sequestration — often through last-minute appropriations deals — Pentagon leaders object that the uncertainty each year and the piecemeal budget approach harm their ability to plan.

“We’ve been going one year at a time budgetarily now for several years straight, and it’s extremely disruptive to the operations of the department,” Defense Secretary Ash Carter testified Wednesday at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on countering the Islamic State.

At his confirmation hearing Thursday as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford said sequestration has hurt the morale of troops in the Army and beyond.

“There’s a tremendous amount of angst across the [active-duty] force, and a large part of that is driven by the uncertainty about how big the force will be, what will happen to their particular careers and will we have the equipment necessary to accomplish the mission,” Dunford said.

More cuts coming

Randy George, the Army’s director of force management, warned Thursday that still steeper reductions may be in store if sequestration remains in effect.

“Unless the provisions of the Budget Control Act are changed or reversed, the Army will have to cut an additional 30,000 soldiers by 2019,” George told Pentagon reporters.

Even before Thursday’s proposed cuts, George said, the Army had already reduced its projected strength by 80,000 troops.

“The decision to make these [new] reductions was not easy and will affect almost every Army installation,” he said.

The Army is by far the largest of the Pentagon’s forces, accounting for 38 percent of the country’s 1.3 million active-duty military personnel.

Not all of the congressional criticism Thursday represented a reversal of lawmakers’ stances on sequestration.

Rep. Adam Smith of Washington, senior Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, could not forestall new planned cuts of 1,250 active-duty personnel at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, on the outskirts of Tacoma, making it one of six bases nationwide slated to lose more than 1,000 soldiers.

Smith was among 95 Democratic House members to vote against sequestration in 2011, with the same number of Democrats backing it. A total of 174 Republicans supported the forced cuts, compared with 66 who opposed them.

This story was originally published July 9, 2015 at 6:59 PM with the headline "Pentagon cuts would hit Texas bases hard."