Do you blame everything that is bad on the left?
Well, in the case of military readiness and training, it's The Left where the blame directly lies. The Budget Control Act of 2011, sometimes simply referred to as Sequestration, because it set in motion one-size-fits-all across the board spending cuts (sequestration), and also singled out specific deeper cuts. It mandates that unless Congress can cut $1.2 trillion is spending cuts, then they would raise the debt ceiling by the same $1.2 trillion, but would also trigger $1.2 billion is sequestration spending cuts.The Budget Control Act of 2011 was pushed through Congress by Democrats, led by Obama, and then signed into law by the same Obama, to great fanfare. Yay.
The biggest cuts went to the Department of Defense, with the nature of the budget cuts explicitly and necessarily having the most significant impact on Operations and Maintenance (O&M) accounts (because the government knows, like every expediter knows, that when you're short on cash the first thing you scrimp on is maintenance, so a failed alternator can put you out of business). The O&M cuts hit directly, and deepest, in the areas of training and readiness of combat units during their "at home" cycle between overseas deployments.
This is how you get a military with fully 70% of it's aircraft unable to fly (which, in my personal opinion, is outrageous and embarrassing as an American), because of a lack of trained maintenance personnel and no money for replacement parts even if they had the maintenance personnel to fix them. It's how, when Harvey hit Texas, NAS Kingsville were able to fly 28 of it's T-45 jets to safety, but the remaining 71 jets couldn't take off and had to be left behind. At first blush someone might go, "Well, those are just training jets, they don't matter," but it goes directly to the heart of the areas of training and readiness of combat units during their home cycle between deployments. It's hard to train jet pilots to fly jets when you have no jets for them to fly.
Not-training jets include the 81 out of the 276 FA-18 Hornet strike fighters in the US Marines that are able to fly. Likewise, only 42 of 147 heavy-lift CH-53E Super Stallion helicopters are able to fly. Am I the only one who thinks this is outrageous, and unacceptable?
And it's how you get entire Navy ships deployed at sea full of sailors who haven't been trained in how to do their jobs while deployed at sea. On-the-job-training works when training someone the complicated and difficult task of assembling a Big Mac at McDonald's, but it comes up short when training a team of sailors in how to prevent the boat from being sunk at sea.
