McHugh warns of “thinly stretched” Army

John McHugh, the outgoing Secretary of the Army, warned the assemblage at the annual conference of the Association of the United States Army that the Army is “thinly stretched” and “on a ragged edge”. From TribLive;

“BCT readiness levels right now are at 32 percent,” he said. “Our standard? Sixty to 70 percent. We are simply consuming that readiness as it’s produced — with more funding cuts looming before us. If we continue to strip resources from this Army, I have said repeatedly, at some point, someone is going to have to tell us to stop doing something. As I look at the world right now, I don’t know where that would be.”

This is not the first time concerns have been raised about a decreasing budget, but the language suggests an increasing uneasiness.

“And the problem we have been most troubled by is not the challenges we saw. … It’s the ones we didn’t see, we didn’t budget for, we didn’t plan for,” McHugh said.

Yeah, well, who’s fault is that, McHugh? The White House recommended “sequestration” as a way to break a logjam on budget cuts, and they’ve been unwilling to do anything to correct the destructive power of using defense cuts to balance the budget. In fact, when Congress tried to fully fund the Defense Department this year, the White House threatened to veto. In previous years, the White House has even gone so far as to hold up DoD funding because Congress won’t hike healthcare costs for retirees.

The White House says that they want to balance the budget, but they refuse to cut spending across the board. The only cuts that they’ll approve are cuts to Defense spending, you know, while we’re conducting all of these war thingies. Let’s see the White House and the Congress lead the way in this whole thing by cutting their own internal spending.

Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden, Big Army, Congress sucks