Rep. Martha McSally (R-Raytheon) was in Southern Arizona last week for a district work week. She held a town hall at her former employer, Raytheon missile systems in Tucson.
This report from the Arizona Daily Star reads as if it was prepared from a McSally press backgrounder. McSally vows to be strong voice for defense, Raytheon:
Before moving to a podium to speak to employees of Raytheon Missile Systems on Wednesday, Arizona Rep. Martha McSally moved stage right to the display of an inert Maverick missile.
“I think I’m the first congresswoman or person from your district that has actually shot your missile,” the freshman Republican lawmaker told a crowd of Raytheon missile-makers at the company’s facility at the University of Arizona Tech Park.
McSally, a retired Air Force colonel who fired Mavericks as the first female fighter pilot in combat, said her experience piloting A-10 Thunderbolt II ground-attack jets gives her a unique perspective she plans to use to push for a stronger defense budget, save the A-10 from a planned retirement and boost Raytheon’s role in national security.
She vowed to work for a strong defense budget and to keep defense jobs in Southern Arizona.
McSally said she welcomed her assignments to the House Armed Services and House Homeland Security committees.
“My wheelhouse on the national level, my expertise, is in national security and military readiness, so it was a great fit,” said McSally, who served 26 years in the military and has two master’s degrees — one from Harvard and one from the U.S. Air War College — focused on national security.
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McSally said she will fight to reverse the federal budget sequestration process, which requires broad cuts to defense and domestic programs if budgets exceed certain deficit-reduction levels. The automatic cuts will return in fiscal 2016 unless Congress acts.
Sequestration is “a long word for ‘failure of leadership,’ from my perspective,” McSally said.
Those of you with a memory longer than a 24 hour news cycle will remember that the GOP budget sequestration, which cuts government spending across the board on a formula basis, was roundly condemned as a stupid idea that no one in their right mind would ever agree to — but that’s what the Tea-Publican Congress wanted as part of the debt deal. Weeper of the House John Boehner, who endorsed McSally and raised money for her campaign, said at the time I got ’98 percent’ of what I wanted in debt deal.
I think we can all agree that the TanMan, John Boehner, is a “failure of leadership” and the “Worst. Speaker. Ever.” So is McSally indirectly calling out Boehner’s “failure of leadership”?
McSally says she will fight to reverse the federal budget sequestration process, but that’s pretty bold talk for a freshman backbencher, one of 435 members of the House. She apparently does not possess much influence over the GOP Caucus which supports the budget sequestration. The Military Times recently reported Lawmakers: Sequestration is here to stay:
Several influential Republicans and Democrats have bluntly told top Pentagon officials that the budget caps known as sequestration are unlikely to change anytime soon, suggesting that the painful across-the-board budget cuts may hit the military again this fall.
“Even though I believe in miracles, it is becoming very clear to me that … the Budget Control Act funding levels will be the law of the land,” Rep. Betty McCollum, D-Minn., said.
McCollum was referring to the formal name of the 2011 law that established sequestration, a concept that military planners detest because it automatically lops a certain arbitrary percentage of funding from every defense budget account, with no flexibility allowed, in an effort to reduce government spending.
Rep. Ken Calvert, R-Calif., delivered a similar message. “The [Budget Control Act] is the law of the land. Until that’s changed, we must abide by it. So we have a serious funding gap between the strategy and the law,” he said.
The gruff message came March 4 as Defense Secretary Ash Carter and other top defense officials appeared for their annual testimony before the House Appropriations Committee’s defense panel, a powerful group of lawmakers who hold unique sway over the Defense Department budget.
Carter echoed the now-familiar calls for the Congress to repeal the law.
“We would have to change the shape and not just the size of our military, significantly affecting parts of our defense strategy. We cannot meet sequester with further half-measures,” Carter said. “If we’re stuck with sequestration’s budget cuts over the long term, our entire nation will have to live with the answers.”
But Carter was repeatedly told by lawmakers that the Pentagon should plan for the budget cuts sooner rather than later.
That standoff stems from President Obama’s budget request for fiscal 2016, which begins Oct. 1. That budget request is $38 billion over the sequestration cap.
Rep. Kay Granger, R-Texas, told Carter: “I would beg you to be the person that says, ‘Tear up that president’s budget because it assumes that there’s no sequestration.’ “
The negative sentiment from the Republican-controlled House Appropriations Committee highlights the fierce battle taking place within the GOP, where tea party loyalists and other budget hawks seeking to rein in military budgets are locking horns with more moderate Republicans who support robust spending on national security.
Those GOP defense hawks are supporting the Pentagon’s budget request and have urged their party to vote to suspend the sequestration caps and grant the Defense Department the budget flexibility it seeks.
Rep. Mac Thornberry of Texas, the Republican chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, which also plays a key role in the Pentagon’s budget, firmly supports lifting the spending caps for the military.
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Many lawmakers said they support lifting the budget caps, but are resigned to the possibility that it may be politically impossible.
“I completely agree that the [sequestration law] needs to be modified to avoid dramatic consequences and long-term negative impacts on our military capability,” said Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen, R-N.J., chairman of the House Appropriations Committee.
“But unless and until the law is changed, this committee has no choice but to draft our bill to comply with the caps, at least $37 billion below the president’s budget request.
“McSally also vowed to continue her fight against retirement of the A-10 — a mainstay of operations at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base — noting that the Air Force spent $1 billion upgrading the “Warthogs” in recent years and maintaining that there is no effective replacement.”
McSally said the move to allow the Air Force to put up to 36 A-10s in “backup aircraft inventory” under a compromise with Congress last year is akin to retirement, since no resources or personnel will be assigned to maintain them for combat.
“You might as well just put them in the Boneyard, for crying out loud,” she said, referring to the military aircraft storage center at D-M.
McSally said a recent conference the Air Force held to study options for close air support produced suggestions that F-15 and F-16 fighters could be dedicated for the troop-support role, or perhaps light reconnaissance planes could be adapted to the task of low-altitude support.
But McSally said the F-15 and F-16 will never match the A-10’s ability to loiter low and slow over a battle, providing cover fire, forward air control and combat search-and-rescue support.
“There are situations in which only the A-10 can keep you alive,” she said.
McSally’s “wheelhouse” of being an A-10 pilot does not carry much box office mojo with the Air Force. Maybe she burned that bridge when she sued the Air Force over wearing a head scarf. In February, A-10s get no reprieve in ’16 Pentagon budget:
After being thwarted by Congress this year, the Pentagon wants to plow ahead next fiscal year with plans to retire the A-10 Thunderbolt II close air-support jet, a mainstay of Davis-Monthan Air Force Base.
According to budget documents released Monday, the Air Force plans to mothball 164 A-10s in fiscal 2016 and devote future cost savings to procurement of F-35 stealth fighters and force readiness.
Already, the Air Force plans to bench 9 of D-M’s A-10s:
The Air Force said Friday it will put nine A-10 Thunderbolt II jets at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base on backup inventory status, shifting resources including maintenance personnel to the next-generation F-35 stealth fighter at other bases.
D-M officials do not know yet which of the base’s three flying A-10 units will be affected, or how many airmen will be affected, said Lt. Erin Ranaweera, a base spokeswoman.
The Air Force says it will convert a total of 18 combat-ready A-10s fleetwide from active units and place them into “Backup-Aircraft Inventory,” or BAI, status with the possibility to convert another 18 at a later date in fiscal year 2015.
Besides the moves at D-M, the Air Force says it will mothball six A-10s at Moody Air Force Base in Georgia and three at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada.
The Air Force is authorized to place up to 36 A-10 aircraft into BAI status, under provisions of the 2015 National Defense Authorization Act passed last year.
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“While we are authorized by Congress to put 36 aircraft into BAI status, doing that now would require taking down an entire squadron,” Secretary of the Air Force Deborah James said in a news release. “Out of respect for the intent of Congress, we’re placing 18 aircraft in BAI status.”
The Air Force says it “will assess whether this action adequately balances ongoing requirements and the need to modernize.”
So on the two things that McSally pledged to Raytheon, reverse the budget sequestration cuts to the military budget and prevent the retirement of the A-10 fleet at Davis-Monthan AFB, she has demonstrated that she lacks any influence within the GOP caucus, and she has had no successes. Good investment, Raytheon.
McSally also spoke to the Fort Huachuca 50 Dinner in Sierra Vista last week, and rehashed some of the same points she made to Raytheon. McSally: Sequestration harming defense capabilities:
Speaking at the Fort Huachuca 50 dinner, attended by more than 60, the first-term Congresswoman said that if sequestration continues as part of the national budgeting process, America’s defense capabilities will be reduced, opening an avenue for international threats, such as ISIS, McSally said.
“We have sequestration causing us to shrink our defense budget,” she said.
* * *
So we have a budget-based strategy going on right right now, but not a strategy-based budget (for the military).”
The current military budgeting process is backwards, McSally said, adding that sequestration must end because it is not a good process by which to fund government operations. She warned it could lead to an internal fight in the GOP, as some conservative house members could buck the party leadership.
McSally told the Fort Huachuca 50 that intertwined with the sequestration issue is a potential of a “shadow BRAC,” which could impinge on missions on the Army post.
Movement of missions from the fort to other Army installations have to be guarded against, she said.
The Army leadership is “East Coast-focused,” the congresswoman said, and protecting the high-tech capabilities of the Arizona post is “a challenge.”
Many in the top echelon of the Army have no understanding of what the post does and its critical impact for the nation’s defense readiness is lacking, the congresswoman said.
The problem, congresswoman, are your fellow Tea-Publicans in the Congress who support the budget sequestration. This is where you need to do the work. So as Elvis Presley used to sing, “a little less talk and a lot more action.”
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