Some Pentagon observers question elevated war funding request

By Bryan Bender, Globe Staff

WASHINGTON -- American troops are finally out of Iraq and even trickling home from Afghanistan. So why is the war bill still so high, some Pentagon observers are asking.

When the Pentagon yesterday sketched out plans to ask Congress for $525 billion for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1, it also revealed it is separately seeking $88.4 billion to pay for military operations overseas – what’s officially called the Overseas Contingency Operations fund.

The figure is roughly 23 percent less than the $115 billion last year.

But back then the United States still had more than 50,000 troops in Iraq. Even with 89,000 US troops now in Afghanistan – roughly the same as a year ago and nearly half the size of the US presence at the height of Iraq -- the size of the proposed war kitty for next year came as a bit of a surprise to some Pentagon budget watchers.

They also pointed out that tens of thousands of the troops in Afghanistan are slated to come home this summer -- before the Pentagon would even get the new war funding.

Although the details will not be unveiled until next month, several budget specialists said they suspected that as the Pentagon cut its “base budget,” it may have shoe-horned some items into the war budget, even though they may not be directly linked to the fighting.

One development that particularly caught the specialists’ attention is that it appears the war spending request ballooned by $6 billion since last month. On Dec. 2, The Hill newspaper reported that internal budget communications between the Department of Defense and the White House showed that the Pentagon planned to seek $82.5 billion in war funds.

Criticism that the Pentagon may be misusing the war budget has been made in the past, including last year concerning $10 billion the Army sought to help finance its effort to transform large divisions into smaller combat brigades and outfit them with new equipment.

Indeed, a 2007 study by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office asserted that more than 40 percent of the Army’s war spending that was justified for repairing or replacing war-worn equipment was actually for items that were not damaged or lost in the fighting.

This allegation was raised anew in a review of war spending last March by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.

“Some observers have questioned whether all of DOD’s war-related procurement reflects the stresses of war,” the report said.

It, too, cited as an example the ongoing changes to the Army’s force makeup.

“Army funds were spent to upgrade systems to increase capability, to buy equipment to eliminate longstanding shortfalls in inventory, to convert new units to a modular configuration, and to replace equipment stored overseas for contingencies,” the March CRS report recounted.

Some now question whether the Pentagon is once again taking advantage of a funding stream designed to support the troops in the field -- and which traditionally passes Congress unquestioned, unlike the regular defense budget, which gets at least a modest review by congressional defense committees.

“There is a lot of room for sloshing funds around,” said Charles Knight, co-director of the Project for Defense Alternatives, a progressive think tank in Cambridge.

When asked about the war spending request by the Globe yesterday, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta explained that the need for so many more billions in that funding was due in part to the nature of the war in Afghanistan.

“We still are maintaining a significant force in Afghanistan to conduct the war there and the costs associated with that effort are pretty significant as we try to deal with the supplying of our troops,” Panetta, a former White House budget chief, said. “This is not as easy as Iraq in terms of our ability to provide the supplies and needs that our troops need.”

Waging a war in landlocked Afghanistan, a country with extremely limited infrastructure, requires more supply routes and expensive airlift missions. Also, the most direct land supply routes have been shut down by Pakistan over disagreements with US actions inside its territory. That has required the Pentagon to rely more on longer land routes from Central Asia and air routes.

Nevertheless, the nation’s top military officer also explained yesterday that a significant share of the requested war funds would be used to buy new equipment.

“We have always said it would take years following the end of the conflict to recapitalize the force,” said Army General Martin Dempsey, referring to the term for reconstituting weapons and other equipment that have been in high demand for years. “Some of the [war] costs are caught up in that.”

Congress must scrutinize the war spending request to determine whether it is all justified or whether it belongs in the regular budget, said Winslow Wheeler, a former Republican congressional staffer and director of the Strauss Military Reform Project at the nonpartisan Center for Defense Information.

Even the war spending request itself “is often vague,” he warned.

“We will never know if we wait for the committees to parse it out because they never do.”

CRS estimates that as of last March, the United States had spent more than $1.4 trillion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001.