Military Officer - March 2007 - (Page 34)

washingtonscene Chat Online With an MOAA Lobbyist ■ Join MOAA each month as our lobbyists chat online with members about your top issues. From TRICARE to concurrent receipt, we’ll cover it all. Visit MOAA’s Web Base to scan previous chat sessions and check upcoming schedules, www .moaa.org/januarylegis chat and www.moaa.org /februarylegischat. leaders as much as it did their Republican predecessors, the president now might be more likely to veto legislation initiated by a Democrat-controlled Congress. Most important, the new congressional leaders also pledged to be “more ﬁscally responsible” than their predecessors, which means they intend to set relative priorities and ensure any new programs are paid for. That’s where the rubber hits the road — because it means any new programs will have to be funded either through additional taxes, cuts in pork projects, or cuts in other programs. Each of those choices has plenty of builtin, bipartisan political opposition. So while MOAA thinks the new congressional leadership is sincere in its support for many of the issues we care about most, this is no pie-in-the-sky Congress. Major improvements cost money, and we’ll have to continue to prove the merits of our case. As MOAA works with House and Senate sponsors to reintroduce bills on key issues in the new Congress, we’ll need to temper our optimism with realistic priorities and remember that when we’ve won substantial progress in the past, it almost always has come in budget-limited increments. Army to Grow — Finally Budget to add thousands more soldiers and Marines. O 34 MILITARY OFFICER MARCH 2007 n Jan. 11, Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced the FY 2008 budget would call for increasing Army and Marine Corps strength by a total of 92,000 servicemembers over the next ﬁve years. The Army’s share of the proposed increase is 65,000 soldiers, while the Marine Corps would see a 27,000-person boost. Both increases will make permanent the temporary increases — 30,000 for the Army and 5,000 for the Marine Corps — that were previously authorized only for FY 2006 and FY 2007. In addition, the Army will get an extra 7,000 and the Marine Corps an extra 5,000 increase each year for the next ﬁve years. The Army’s eventual end strength will stabilize at 547,000, and the Marine Corps will grow to 202,000. Differences between temporary and permanent force level authorizations can make it hard to understand how substantial an increase this actually represents. The bottom line is that, over the next ﬁve years, the Army will add about 35,000 more soldiers than it has today, and the Marine Corps will add about 22,000 more Marines. The increases can’t come too soon as far as MOAA is concerned. We’ve insisted for years that signiﬁcantly larger force levels are needed to avoid long-term retention and readiness problems. MOAA is glad to see the administration ﬁnally is endorsing these needed increases and putting the necessary funding in the budget to support them. Now, it will be vital for Congress to fully fund these increases in the regular defense budget — rather than adding temporary funding through annual supplemental funding requests, as has been done in the past. Achieving those increases won’t be easy or cheap. The services and Congress are going to have to commit extra resources and facilities for recruiting, training, and retaining those additional thousands of men and women. But this is a vital national defense issue. We simply must make it a top national priority to ensure our forces grow large enough to meet the truly extraordinary demands being imposed upon them. In an unfortunate counterpoint, budget-driven force reductions continue for http://www.moaa.org/januarylegischat http://www.moaa.org/januarylegischat http://www.moaa.org/januarylegischat http://www.moaa.org/februarylegischat http://www.moaa.org/februarylegischat

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Military Officer - March 2007

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