WASHINGTON — The Pentagon took the first major step toward shrinking after a decade of war as it announced on Thursday that it wanted to limit pay raises for troops, increase health insurance fees for military retirees and close bases in the United States.
Although the pay-raise limits are modest, and would not start until 2015, the proposed cuts are certain to ignite a political fight in Congress, which since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has consistently raised military salaries beyond what the Pentagon has recommended.
Increasing health insurance fees for former service members and closing bases are also fraught with political risk, particularly in an election year when the Republican presidential candidates are charging that President Obama is decimating the military.
Next year’s Pentagon budget is to be $525 billion, down from $531 billion in this fiscal year. As the Pentagon is called on to find $259 billion in cuts over the next five years — and $487 billion over the decade — the department’s base budget (not counting the costs of Afghanistan or other wars) will nonetheless rise to $567 billion by 2017. For comparison, the current Defense Department base budget is $531 billion.
Although troops left Iraq and the Obama administration has announced plans to drawn down in Afghanistan, the new budget proposal will include a request for $88.4 billion to pay for overseas combat operations next year. The current combat contingency account is $115 billion.
The modest changes to military pay and benefits were an acknowledgement of the political risk of loading budget cuts on the backs of active-duty and retired personnel. Other savings are to come, as expected, from reducing the size of the military and canceling or stretching out weapons purchases.
Presenting an equal political challenge was an announcement by Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta that President Obama will ask for another round of base closings and realignments — never popular with a Congress that tries to preserve military spending, and jobs, in local districts.
Pentagon officials said savings from any future base closings were not factored into the five-year budget that Mr. Panetta was sending to the White House, but one official described the closings as “the right thing to do.”
There were already objections on Thursday morning, hours before Mr. Panetta made his public presentation. Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told reporters that until the United States shut down some American military bases in Europe, “I’m not going to be able to support” closing down bases in the United States.
Mr. Panetta has disclosed that two heavy Army brigades will come home from Europe over the next decade, leaving an airborne brigade and a Stryker cavalry brigade on the continent.
Most of the broad outlines, and even many of the finer details, of the budget cuts described Thursday by Mr. Panetta and Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were previously disclosed.
But even as the administration vows to focus on the Asia-Pacific region while not decreasing American influence and deterrence in the Persian Gulf, a number of warship and jet-fighter programs useful in long-range missions are being trimmed.
Purchases of the Marines’ F-35 Joint Strike Fighter will be stretched out over more years, in order to accrue immediate savings. Six of the 60 Air Force tactical jet-fighter squadrons will be eliminated.
To find savings, the Navy will retire seven cruisers, and slow work on amphibious ships and an attack submarine. Two littoral combat ships will be eliminated.
But all 11 aircraft carriers, the Navy’s crown jewels, will be preserved.
As previously disclosed, the Army will drop to 490,000 personnel, from 570,000, and the Marine Corps to 182,000, from a post-Sept. 11, 2001, peak of 202,000.
The military’s cargo fleet also will take a hit, with the retirement of 27 giant C-5A’s and 65 of the smaller C-130’s.
Although the administration has pledged to reduce nuclear weapons further, there was nothing in Thursday’s announcement to reach that goal. All three legs of the nuclear triad — bombers, submarine-launched missiles and land-based missiles — will be preserved. One replacement in the fleet of the Ohio-class nuclear-missile submarine will be delayed by two years.
Mr. Panetta has repeatedly stated that he will preserve funding for Special Operations forces, cyberwarfare and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance systems, and the budget makes good on that promise.
Mr. Panetta did not say how much military pay raises would be limited, although any slowdown in compensation after a decade of war — and while 90,000 American forces are still in Afghanistan — is certain to trigger a political battle on Capitol Hill.
However, the limit in pay raises will not start until 2015, when all American troops are scheduled to be home from the war — unless an agreement is reached with the government in Afghanistan for a sustained presence.
But Pentagon officials have made clear that military personnel costs are on a disastrous course — Mr. Panetta has called them “unsustainable” — and that it is imperative that they be brought under control. As it stands now, the Pentagon spends $181 billion a year, nearly a third of its base budget, on military personnel costs: $107 billion for salaries and allowances, $50 billion for health care and $24 billion in retirement pay.
Military salaries have risen steadily since the Sept. 11 attacks, often because Congress gave the troops raises beyond those requested by the Pentagon. Officers have in many cases fared better than enlisted personnel: A private first class with a family and three years’ experience deployed to a war zone took home $26,700 tax free in 2001, compared with $36,000 today — an 11 percent raise over inflation. A lieutenant colonel with a family and 20 years’ experience in the same war zone took home $84,000 tax free in 2001, compared with $120,000 today — a 16 percent increase.
Similarly, health care costs for the Pentagon, the nation’s single-largest employer, have exploded in the last 10 years. In an attempt to rein them in, Mr. Panetta is calling for increased annual fees for the Pentagon’s generous health insurance — right now a family pays only $520 a year, far below the cost of a private carrier — and a fee for military retirees over the age of 65 who enroll in Tricare for Life, a supplement to Medicare.
Mr. Panetta did not say what the new Tricare for Life fee would be. Right now a retiree pays nothing for a benefit that makes up for whatever Medicare does not cover, although similar private supplemental health insurance costs an average of about $2,000 a year. One proposal from the White House would have retirees pay a $200 annual fee for Tricare for Life, which the Office of Management and Budget has calculated would save the Pentagon $6.7 billion over 10 years.
One new capability, to be bought in the new budget, is what the Pentagon is calling a “float-staging base,” basically a movable island to support military operations where the United States does not have a presence.
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