High-Op Funding

Guard faces complex wartime budget dance in Congress, Pentagon

With troops deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq and performing homeland defense missions across the country, the National Guard is busier now than it has been in half a century. And budgeting for the Guard today is more like dodging bullets than counting beans.

The $17.7 billion Guard spending plan in the president's fiscal year 2005 budget request allocates $10.6 billion to the Army Guard and $7.1 billion to the Air Guard. It's 4.4 percent of the $401.7 billion defense budget Congress received in early February.

And none of the money is allocated to cover the costs of war.

Army Guard spending increases about 9 percent under the proposed budget. The Air Guard's increase is half that rate, 4.5 percent. Those compare to an overall defense spending increase of 7 percent in the 2005 budget.

Behind those basic spending statistics, a complex budgetary choreography is underway.

As Guardsmen move from inactive status to active duty and then deploy, responsibility to pay their training, salaries and sustainment shuts from the Guard to the active-duty services.

That creates surpluses in some Guard accounts, deficits in active-duty accounts and sets in motion a chain of fund transfers and reprogramming that ripples through the Guard budget.

Guard budget officials call the first half of the process "cost avoidance" because the shift of Guardsmen to active-duty status means that some of the money the Air Guard and Army Guard expected to spend won't be used.

But that doesn't mean the Guard gets to pocket a windfall, said Col. James Baxter, Army Guard comptroller.

Money not spent on troops, training and the like will be transferred to other accounts where it will be used to pay unbudgeted expenses, such as repairs to equipment used overseas.

"Basically, we have to absorb our bills from the global war on terrorism using the savings from having 25 percent of our soldiers mobilized," Baxter said. So far, the Army Guard has transferred $606 million from personnel accounts to pay wartime bills.

The accelerated pace of operations has produced some other budgetary aberrations. The most extraordinary is that the Air National Guard has been unable to spend all of its money, said Col. Bill Windsor, Air Guard deputy comptroller.

So many Air Guardsmen have been put on active duty-where their costs are paid by the Air Force, not the Air Guard-that "for the last two years we have not been able to spend all of our money in certain areas. Primarily it's in flying hours," Windsor said.

Training money has gone unspent because pilots are flying wartime missions instead of training missions. But budget drafters are beginning to adjust to those wartime circumstances.

"Doing real-world missions appears to be becoming the norm," Windsor said. "So we recognize that there will be underexecution in certain areas and are reprogramming ahead of time."

That helps explain the miniscule growth proposed in the Air Guard's fiscal 2005 personnel.

At $2.55 billion, personnel accounts, which include money for pay and training, are just 1 percent higher than this year's spending, Windsor said.

The $2.55 billion includes money for a 3.5 percent pay raise for troops and a 1.5 percent raise for civilian employees. The Army Guard has budgeted for the same pay raise, as have the active-duty services.

In addition, Baxter said the Army Guard has requested money to be used for signing bonuses of up to $2,500 for troops who enlist or re-enlist in jobs where the Guard has critical shortages.

Compared to the 1 percent increase in the Air Guard's personnel budget, the Army Guard's planned spending on personnel appears to skyrocket. It climbs 11 percent, from $5.3 billion this year to $5.9 billion for 2005, Baxter said.

But the extra money won't end up in soldiers' pockets-at least not directly. More than two thirds ol the increase-$428 million-goes straight into an account that lunds health care lor reservists. "It's pass through money," Baxter said.

When the health care funds are deleted, the actual increase in the Army Guard personnel budget is about a hall percent, he said.

How far will that stretch? That's uncertain. For now, Army Guard personnel costs are expected to decline because about a quarter of the Army Guard's troops have been mobilized and will be paid by the active-duty Army.

But if fewer Army Guardsmen are mobilized or remain on active duty less than expected, the Army Guard could fall far short on funds for annual training, inactive-duty training and to pay lull-time Active Guard Reserve personnel.

"We've got some risk areas," Baxter said.

There is similar uncertainty in Operations and Maintenance (O&M) budgets.

The Army Guard's O&M budget request is $4.48 billion, up lrom $4.3 billion this year. The Air Guard's is $4.47 billion, up from $4.42 billion.

Those are nominal increases that leave key eost questions unresolved.

"We've got some shortcomings in O&M," Baxter said ol the Army National Guard's proposed 2005 budget. The situation is the same for the Air Guard, where the O&M budget falls 14 percent short of the total required for depot maintenance on aircraft, Windsor said.

And it's not clear yet whether the Guard budget maintenance shortages will be made up in the active-duty budget.

Money for operations in Afghanistan and Iraq is not included in the 2005 defense budget but will be sought in a separate emergency supplemental budget request Defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has said he will send Congress early next year.

Money from the current emergency supplemental is scheduled to run out at the end of September. That means the military will have to borrow from a variety of accounts to pay war costs until another supplemental is passed next February or March at the earliest.

Rumsfeld has told lawmakers the funding delay is necessary because he cannot predict how much the war will cost a year in advance. Others suggest that the delay is the product of election year politics by an administration anxious not to add to the federal deficit.

The result, however, is more budgetary uncertainty for the services.

With its meager depot maintenance budget, the Air Guard is counting on the Air Force to provide for some of the maintenance needed on Air Guard planes.

Keeping up with wear and tear on aircraft is certain to be a challenge in 2005, Windsor said. Planes operating in Iraq "are used more and used under more stressful conditions." And when planes are deployed, scheduled depot maintenance is often postponed.

"We're trying to keep up with it," but it's difficult with depot maintenance accounts funded at just 86 percent of the maintenance requirement, Windsor said. In better times, budgeted spending lor depot maintenance has been as high as 93 percent of requirement.

"The Air Force has assured us they will make up the difference," Windsor said. But the Air Force won't know whether it has money to do so until Rumsfeld requests, and Congress passes, a supplemental appropriation.

The Army Guard depot maintenance budget for 2005, by contrast, jumps 19 percent-from $194 million to $23f million.

It includes money to repair battle-damaged helicopters, maintenance money for combat vehicles including MlAl tanks and infantry fighting vehicles, and it funds sustainment maintenance for 3,749 pieces of warfighting equipment.

Both the Army and Air Guard are counting on Congress to add to their 2005 budgets to pay for priorities that the Defense Department has not included in its annual budget request. It's an annual ritual, and Congress usually comes through for the Guard.

The Air Guard's wish list begins with $114 million for targeting pods for F-los and A-IOs. second is hope for $79.3 million to be spent on large aircraft countermeasures to protect C-130s against shoulder-fired missiles. Also included is $50 million for new engines for Air Guard Joint STARS radar surveillance planes.

The Army Guard's wish list includes $149 million more for base operations, where funding is "woefully short" in the 2005 budget, Baxter said. The Army Guard also wants an additional $15 million for recruiting. The recruiting budget is cut by $18 million, from $99 million this year to $81 million in the 2005 budget.

The cut comes at a bad time, he said. Recent mobilizations, the high operations tempo and the imposition of "stop loss" rules that temporarily blocked troops from leaving the service are expected to lead to some personnel losses. Some Army Guard personnel officials say an "extremely aggressive recruiting campaign" may be necessary to attract new recruits in 2005.

William Matthews is a Springfield, Va., freelance writer who specializes in military matters.

Copyright National Guard Association of the United States Apr 2004
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved