Can Washington get us back on track?

• Author: Farrell, Lawrence P., Jr.
• Position: President's Perspective

* A tsunami of bad news lately leaves one gasping for breath and feeling more than a bit disoriented. It's the kind of breathlessness one feels after walking up several flights of stairs.

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It didn't have to be that way, and that seems to be the theme running through many of the nation's problems today.

The origins of the current fiscal and political crisis that is affecting the defense community can be traced back to the months following the 9/11 terrorist attacks when the United States began to gear up for two major wars.

The proverbial fuze was lit with the invention of the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) budgets to fund the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.

It seemed like a good idea at the time--to separate and clearly identify spending for the military's "base" budget and for wartime operations. But everyone soon got a bit sloppy. The accounts over time began to lose dear distinction between what was needed for the base budget and what was needed for war. After the wars, it was anticipated that OCO funding would end. But it was also dearly recognized that OCO appropriations would still be needed after the wars ended to repair military equipment and reset forces back in the United States.

Without OCO dollars, the base would be insufficient for peacetime operations, training and readiness. The contingency operations budgets, further funded the acquisition of new equipment that the services need as they transition to peacetime. A quick termination of OCO money would trap and cut off critical needs regardless of whether they were required for war or peacetime use. So the separation became a distinction without a difference. Additionally, the confusion between OCO and base budgets never anticipated the automatic sequester cuts that are now in effect. This further muddied the issue and complicated the management of the Defense Department's accounts.

None of this had to happen this way.

That brings us to sequester, the across-the-board cuts mandated by the Budget Control Act of 2011. Congress in 2013 gave us a "modified" continuing resolution (CR) with sequestration--the worst of all possible outcomes. This would only have worked if the appropriated budget for 2012 had the balance in all accounts perfectly matched to the demands of 2013. But the approved funding was clearly inadequate for 2013. The largest discrepancy appeared in the operations and maintenance accounts of all military services. The Army was the hardest...