Are defense cuts jeopardizing military readiness?

After 15 years of combat, many of the U.S. military’s aging war machines are nearing the breaking point, with replacements either non-existent or taking a long time to come on line. A drain in skilled personnel and shrinking defense budgets are making it more difficult to maintain existing weapon systems. This, along with shifting strategic priorities in the face of rising threats to U.S. vital interests may be putting America’s military readiness in jeopardy.

“We are supposed to be doing the type of maintenance like you would take your car to Jiffy Lube for replacing fluids, doing minor inspections, changing tires, things of that nature, not building airplanes from the ground up,” Lt. Col. Harry Thomas, commanding officer of VMFA-312, a Marine Corps F/A-18 squadron based at Beaufort, S. C., told Fox News.

Only 30 percent of the Marine Corps’ 276 F/A-18 Hornet strike fighters are in flying condition, according to the Fox News report. That shortage is contributing to reduced flight hours for Marine pilots, who now fly only four hours per month on average, compared to between 25 and 30 hours per month 10 years ago.

Cutbacks are hitting the U.S. Army hard as well. Cuts in the number of troops along with budget reductions have forced the Army to keep weapons designed for the Cold War in service decades longer than expected.

“Senior Army leaders recently told Congress the Abrams tank and Bradley infantry fighting vehicle—Reagan-era systems—will likely remain in the force for another 50-70 years,” wrote defense analyst Loren Thompson in a recent Forbes article. “Meanwhile, the Army is predicting that its workhorse Chinook helicopters will probably be in service for a full century.”

Thompson added that the service is doing its best to upgrade and protect these signature systems from increasingly capable adversaries, but it can’t afford to replace them.

The budget cuts are not just affecting the Army and Marine Corps, two service branches that have borne the brunt of the ground combat in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“Everybody is being affected equally painfully,” said Dakota Wood, senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation and editor of the Heritage 2016 Index of U.S. Military Strength. “It just manifests itself in different ways. Some of them are much more visible than others.”

The Index rates U.S. military power as a combination of capacity, capability, and readiness on a 5-point scale, ranging from very strong to very weak. The conclusion of the document, published in October using 2015 data, was that overall U.S. military posture is “marginal,” trending toward “weak.”

“The shift in two services—the Army and Air Force—to a lower category in the course of a single year is surprising and should be seen as evidence of the rapidly accumulating effects of inadequate funding during a time of higher operational demand and policies that have traded long-term health for near-term readiness,” the report’s authors concluded.

But because military power alone is irrelevant unless a vital U.S. interest is being challenged by a nation state or non-state actor, the Index of U.S. Military Strength also rates key threats to those interests on a 5-point scale ranging from low to severe, with elevated being the midpoint. Russia and China were both rated as high and North Korea as severe.

But President Barack Obama claims climate change and the national debt are higher strategic priorities than China or Russia.

“You have an administration that says China’s not a problem,” Wood told me. “And because it’s not a problem, I don’t want to have to apply any resources against it. We’ll deal with it economically and diplomatically.”

Wood added that a president’s worldview informs his policies and priorities, which have material, real world consequences and can sometimes hinder the effective allocation of scarce military resources.

“To say that global warming is a more significant threat than the nuclear stockpiles of China or Russia or a rising nuclear aspirational power like Iran … causes the military establishment to really question, well what should we be planning against?” Wood said.