RIDING OUT THE STORM


with modernization and readiness. “You have to ensure that you have a balance … or you are at risk of creating hollowness in one of those areas or across the entire Army,” he said.


Sequestration has a number of signifi- cant specific impacts, Barclay said. “All along, we’ve said that when we finish in Afghanistan, we would probably have somewhere between two and three years of reset to get our Army back to where it needed to be,” Barclay said. With sequestration, “we won’t be able to reset in two to three years after we bring the last forces home.”


In the area of modernization, “We’re going to extend the timelines of our


modernization programs,” he said—for example,


the CH-47 Chinook, AH-64


Apache and UH-60 Black Hawk helicop- ters. “We’re just pushing the final year of when we would complete them out into the future.”


Over the longer term, each program


affected by cuts is likely to see delays, higher costs and greater program risks, Shyu said. “Current-year activities and procurement buys will be late or reduced to meet sequestration targets, with no assurance that funding will be restored in the future years. Tese changes will extend program schedules, increase our unit costs and add to our programs’ overall risk next year and beyond,” she said.


For the workforce, sequestration threatens to reduce professional military education classes “to only those that are promotion- tied requirements,” Barclay said. And, of course, the civilian workforce is now subject to a furlough, with about 250,000 Army civilians required to take as many as 14 days without pay before the end of FY13.


Te furloughs come at a time when the AL&T workload is expected to increase, Shyu said, particularly in the area of con- tracting, because sequestration triggers widespread efforts to terminate or mod- ify a large number of existing or pending Army contracts. “Te burden of the con- tracting workforce, charged with helping the Army achieve the best value execut- ing contracts in a timely manner, will be significant,” Shyu said.


Overall, “Te potential loss of critical expertise through indiscriminate budget cuts jeopardizes unique skills sets that are critical to our Army’s future,” she said.


MG Tomas W. Spoehr, director of pro- gram analysis and evaluation in the Office of the DCS, G-8, noted in a presentation Feb. 20 at the AUSA Winter Symposium that the Army’s total obligation authority over time is not growing at a rate com- mensurate with inflation, which was 2 percent as of February. “Tat alone is going to put pressure within the Army. And so Army buying power goes down precipitously with sequestration, but even without sequestration, the Army is losing buying power,” Spoehr said.


VIRTUAL TRAINING The Army is looking at ways to conduct training at lower cost by maximizing the use of live, vir- tual, constructive approaches. Here, Soldiers with the 167th Theater Sustainment Command (TSC), Alabama Army National Guard practice rifle marksmanship March 2 at a simulated firing range on Fort McClellan, AL, using the Fire Arms Training System. (U.S. Army photo by PFC Jeremiah Raines, 167th TSC)


In sum, the challenges of improving buying power in the Army and DOD could hardly be greater, given the cur- rent fiscal conditions.


BBP ACCOMPLISHMENTS While the fiscal picture is not pretty, the


14 Army AL&T Magazine April–June 2013


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