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Pentagon likely to seek ’08 supplemental

The Pentagon likely will seek an emergency supplemental for the 2008 budget to finance operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, despite congressional pressure to begin requesting combat-related dollars in annual budget plans, said Lisa Marie Cheney, acting U.S. defense undersecretary for legislative affairs.

“We are trying to address more war costs in the baseline budgets, but it is a war,” Cheney said Feb. 1. “There is only so much that we can predict.”

Lawmakers for several years, and with increased vigor in recent months, have called for the Department of Defense to begin rolling expected war costs into its annual baseline budget blueprint.

The Bush administration next week will send Congress its 2008 budget proposal and a 2007 war supplemental funding request. The latter, expected to seek around $100 billion, would drive defense spending for 2007 to around $563 billion.

The new Democratic leadership on Capitol Hill has vowed to scrutinize both requests with a finer-toothed comb than their Republican cohorts did in the first six years of the administration.

Pentagon and administration officials are resisting the calls to abandon emergency war supplementals because “we don’t plan to lose five humvees or three helicopters when we send them into the AOR,” Cheney said after her prepared remarks. “That’s what supplementals are for.”

What they are not for, many in Congress say, is next-generation weapons and things not directly related to the war; an initial version of the 2007 supplemental showed the administration packed in a call for billions of dollars for non-war items, including: Air Force and Navy Joint Strike Fighters (JSFs), Army and Marine Corps communications gear, and the Army’s modularity effort.

Some congressional aides and defense analysts have said lawmakers are more likely to simply remove items deemed not related to the war and insert them into the 2008 Pentagon budget. But an aide to one senior lawmaker said that tide may be changing.

Whether big noncombat items like JSFs will simply be shifted into the 2008 baseline budget “will depend on how big the line is” for those things, the aide said. “If it’s too big, there probably just won’t be room in ’08 bill.

“There are going to be whacks at programs in the supplemental,” the aide said.