Can the Pentagon break its addiction to supplementals?

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.
• Position: DEFENSE WATCH

* The day of reckoning has arrived at the Pentagon. This Gotterdammerung--also known as the end of supplemental budgets--is being met with a mix of anxiety and resignation. Everyone knew they would not last forever but were somehow still hoping for a miracle.

The 2011 defense budget will end the practice of funding the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan by supplemental appropriations requests, which are separate from the department's annual "base" budget. Between 2001 and 2010, the Pentagon will have received more than a trillion dollars outside the normal budget process. The funds pay not just for war operations but also personnel costs and procurement of new equipment.

Technically, it is not free money, but it sort of feels like it.

Even before the Obama administration decided to stop funding war costs outside the normal budget process, critics on Capitol Hill had vociferously opposed it. Armed Services Committee Chairman Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., spoke about the "corrosive" impact of the over-reliance on supplemental appropriations through the years. "Deliberate calculations and planning in anticipation of supplemental appropriations undermines budget and fiscal discipline," Levin said recently. "Congress has called for many years for this practice to end."

In theory, there is no reason why war expenses for Iraq and Afghanistan cannot be estimated and budgeted like everything else at the Defense Department. Supplementals were designed for emergencies such as hurricane relief or military operations that were never anticipated. The ongoing wars, now heading into their eighth year, no longer qualify as such.

But even those who agree that the wars have gone on long enough to be part of the Pentagon's regular budget worry about the zero-sum game. If war expenses are plugged into the base budget, will that require equivalent cuts elsewhere, in non-war related programs?

"We've all been concerned," said a senior military official who spoke at a private defense industry gathering. "The biggest challenge in 2011 is moving OCO [overseas contingency operations] expenses into the base budget," he said.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates told Congress that the Army and the Marine Corps have already shifted war-related personnel costs to the base budget. But the Navy still keeps 2,400 sailors in the OCO budget. The Air Force has billions of dollars in equipment and depot maintenance, flying hours, contractor logistics support, training and readiness...