Gen. Grass: Budget Deal Gives Guard, Army Time To Compromise

[unhappycamper]

http://breakingdefense.com/2014/01/gen-grass-budget-deal-gives-guard-army-time-to-compromise/



The chief of the National Guard Bureau, Gen. Frank Grass, testifying to Congress last year on the impact of sequestration.

Gen. Grass: Budget Deal Gives Guard, Army Time To Compromise
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
on January 09, 2014 at 4:36 PM

As budgets tighten, will the National Guard and the regular Army go to war? Not if Gen. Frank Grass, chief of the National Guard Bureau, can help it. Peppered with questions about the conflict today at the National Press Club, Grass carefully redirected almost every one. In fact, he said, December’s last-ditch budget deal to delay sequestration gives the two components time to resolve the potential conflict with a painful but rationally agreed-on compromise.

“We’ve got some relief here for a few years, so what we don’t want to do is rush into failure,” Grass said. “We’ve got some relief with the $22 billion added (to the defense budget for fiscal year 2014) and the $9 billion added (for 2015), and that gives us a few years to look at this.”

If it does come to an all-out funding fight, said Grass, “we could win the battle and lose the opportunity to train our folks, because the training infrastructure comes from the Army and the Air Force.” So does the vast bulk of the funding that keeps procurement programs alive for the Guard to piggyback on at a low marginal cost. “As the active component loses money,” he said, “we won’t be able to modernize, we won’t be able to send pilots to the schools(,) we won’t be able to get people into basic training and advanced schools.”

So the Guard has an enlightened self-interest in not savaging the active-duty budget. But, asked Press Club president Angela Greiling Keane, isn’t the budget ultimately a zero-sum game? Hasn’t the Army Chief of Staff, Gen. Ray Odierno, explicitly said the active duty force has borne the brunt of the cuts so far and the next round will have to fall heavily on the Guard?