Gates: Shrinking budget means fewer troops

WASHINGTON, Jan. 6 (UPI) -- A $78 billion, five-year reduction to the Pentagon budget means fewer active troops in the Army and Marine Corps, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said.

The Pentagon should be able to absorb the reduction without significantly impacting its warfighting capability, although it will have to reduce the size of the Army and Marine Corps starting in fiscal 2015, Gates said Thursday in a release.

Gates said the Defense Department is expected to reinvest $150 billion from implementing plans that improve efficiencies, such as reducing overhead costs, improving business practices and culling excess or troubled programs. Most of the savings would be used by the Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force to invest in high-priority programs that strengthen warfighting capabilities, Gates said.

"Meeting real-world requirements. Doing right by our people. Reducing excess. Being more efficient. Squeezing costs. Setting priorities and sticking to them. Making tough choices," Gates said during a news conference. "These are all things that we should do as a department and as a military regardless of the time and circumstance. ... (It) is imperative for this department to eliminate wasteful, excessive and unneeded spending. Indeed, to do everything we can to make every defense dollar count."

Gates said he was confident the department could effectively meet threats it is likely to face during the next few years but cautioned the United States could experience a "complex and unpredictable array" of security challenges globally.

He also warned against unchecked defense spending.

"This department simply cannot risk continuing down the same path," Gates said, "where our investment priorities, bureaucratic habits, and lax attitudes towards costs are increasingly divorced from the real threats of today, the growing perils of tomorrow and the nation's grim financial outlook."

Gates said the Defense Department will reduce its senior ranks and freeze civilian staffing levels, but he said savings from senior personnel reductions "will be relatively modest, and mostly consist of the extra staff and amenities that, by tradition, follow high rank."

Gates said he will name a task force to evaluate which cuts can be made among general and flag officers and Senior Executive Service employees, and expects the department will eliminate more than 100 general officer and flag officer positions from the 900 it currently authorizes, the American Forces Press Service reported.