WASHINGTON: This hurts us more than it hurts you. That’s the essence of the regular Army’s message to the National Guard about the Aviation Restructure Initiative (ARI), a controversial cost-cutting plan that — among other things – strips the Guard of all its AH-64 Apache attack helicopters. Pain is on its way for all of us, leader after leader told me, and ARI is the least worst way to allocate it. But can they convince a skeptical Congress?
“I think ARI will happen. I think indeed it must happen,” Army Under Secretary Brad Carson told me in an exclusive interview. (We’ll have more from this wide-ranging interview later). Just the day before, he had joined a delegation led by Defense Under Secretary Robert Work to meet with a committee of the Council of Governors. (Defense Sec. Hagel himself took time from a trip to Fort Rucker, the home of Army aviation, to dial in). “That’s one of the points I made yesterday: All of these cuts are not ones that the Army wanted,” said Carson. “One of the governors asked me where we stood on these issues, and I said, ‘we fight them. We don’t like the cuts, but Congress has visited these things upon the Army and upon the entire Department of Defense.’”
Counting the automatic spending cuts known as sequestration, Carson said, DoD will have to bear a trillion dollars in cuts by 2023, $400 billion of which falls on the Army. “Aviation modernization, aviation operations and sustainment, are extremely expensive,” Carson said, even at the best of times. Today, after 13 years of using existing helicopters hard while canceling or indefinitely delaying replacements like Comanche and the Armed Aerial Scout, “we have long deferred bills from periods of war,” he said, including “massive bills that are coming through in modernization for other aging aircraft that are going to crowd out Future Vertical Lift” — a proposed super-chopper for the 2030s — “not to mention harm readiness” in the nearer term.