Washington, D.C. ­– U.S. Senators John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Jack Reed (D-R.I.), Chairman and Ranking Member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, sent a views and estimates letter to the Senate Budget Committee last week as a regular part of the annual budget process. The letter requests that defense spending be restored to Budget Control Act (BCA) levels prior to sequestration: $577 billion for national defense discretionary budget authority, in addition to the necessary funds for Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO).

The full text of the letter is available here.

Excerpts of the letter appear below:

“It is our constitutional responsibility, as an independent branch of government, to formulate our own views and estimates and provide for our national defense, regardless of current law or policy. Indeed, if we determine that existing laws and policies no longer serve our national security, it is our responsibility to propose new laws and policies…

“[With] global crises and threats increasing, we believe that the limitations of the post-sequestration BCA—which require nearly $1 trillion of defense spending cuts over ten years—have become a national security crisis of the first order. Some insist that our nation cannot afford to spend more on defense at this time. We believe we cannot afford not to…

“[All] four of the military service chiefs testified that American lives are being put at risk by the caps on defense spending mandated in the BCA. At a time when real worldwide threats are growing, we are compounding those dangers with a national security crisis of our own making. We think retired General James Mattis summed up our current problem best when he told our Committee on January 27: ‘No foe in the field can wreak such havoc on our security that mindless sequestration is achieving.’ Continuing on our current path for defense spending would be reckless and dangerous. It is imperative that we change course…

“It is worth recalling that sequestration was never supposed to happen. It was designed to be so destructive and unacceptable to our national security interests that it would force members of Congress and the President to make more prudent cuts to federal spending. The failure of this effort, and the resulting trigger of sequestration, was a collective failure. However, continuing to live with the unacceptable effects of sequestration is a choice. Sequestration is the law of the land, but Congress makes the laws. We can choose to end the debilitating effects of sequestration, and we must, because at the post-sequestration BCA levels, we believe that is impossible to meet our constitutional responsibility to provide for our national defense…

“With a FY 2016 defense budget at sequestration levels, we as a nation must decide what we do not want the U.S. military to do for us. Are we comfortable, for example, with fewer Navy ships to ensure freedom of commerce in the Pacific amid China’s military modernization? Or with less U.S. military presence in Europe amid renewed Russian aggression? Or with an Army and Marine Corps comprised of fewer troops with older equipment as more of the Middle East falls into the hands of ISIL, al-Qaeda affiliates, and Iranian-backed militants? We cannot pretend that we can avoid these choices. As growing global threats increase the demands on our military, we must either increase our resources to meet our strategic requirements, or we must reduce our strategic requirements to match our limited resources. We cannot have it both ways.” 

-end-