WASHINGTON — Nearly a year ago, Army officials and their allies warned that a "disaster is looming" because of congressional delays in passing a war spending bill. Within weeks, funding for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan would be "completely exhausted," they argued.
Thanks to political wrangling, the funding didn't come in time. But the consequences were far less dire than predicted. The Army pushed hard on the brakes of several spending accounts, canceling nonessential travel and sending cargo overland rather than by plane, for instance. But the war effort was largely unaffected.
Now, with the president and Congress on a collision course over this year's war funding bill, questions have again arisen over when money for the war effort truly runs out. But this time, it has far more political baggage attached.
Congressional Democrats have passed the nearly $100-billion emergency spending bill, but the money is conditioned on troop withdrawals by next year. President Bush has vowed to veto any legislation with such strings attached.
"The clock is ticking for our troops in the field," Bush said last week, demanding that Congress provide "vital funds for our troops."
The administration argues the Pentagon already has been forced to raid key weapons programs to find money for armored vehicles needed by troops in battle zones. And Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates warned that by mid-April, training for units deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan could be hampered.
But even as the administration warns of dire consequences, White House and Pentagon officials already have begun to add caveats to such claims. White House spokeswoman Dana Perino noted last week that the military has been able to find money for essential operations from elsewhere in its budget.
And a senior Pentagon official, who like others spoke on condition of anonymity when discussing internal debates, said Gates was warned by his staff to be cautious with "doomsday" predictions, since the military always seems to find money for war operations even while insisting that it can't tighten its belt any more.
"My experience is there are always two more holes left in that belt," the official said.
Wars aside, the Pentagon is given nearly $500 billion a year by Congress. But that money is committed to the daily operation of the nation's armed services as well as the department's large weapons programs, and its use is tightly restricted under federal laws.
Even the Pentagon's toughest critics acknowledge that without timely war funding, the department must tie itself into knots to find available, nonessential accounts to tap, a complicated process that has ripple effects throughout the military.
"They raid accounts where they have some flexibility, and 'cash flow' that to Iraq operations," said Winslow Wheeler, a former congressional budget aide and critic of Pentagon spending practices. "Sometimes that's quite harmful, because they've canceled training or something. That's not a good solution, but they can do it."
At times, withdrawing funding from seemingly nonessential accounts can come back to haunt the Pentagon. One account frequently raided, for example, is building maintenance, a seemingly benign source for funds. But after the scandal surrounding Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where wounded soldiers were found housed in substandard buildings, officials fear delays in refurbishing military infrastructure could lead to similar problems elsewhere.
More troubling to many in the military is that by starving forces not directly tied to the war, operations responsible for potential trouble spots outside the Middle East may find themselves short-handed.
"The really dangerous thing is: Can you continue to support the global war on terrorism?" said the former Pentagon budget official. "And the answer is: yeah, probably -- marginally.
"But what happens if you have another major combat operation? It would just scare the bejesus out of me."
How and when the cutbacks will affect troops in the field remains a matter of debate. The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service issued a report last week saying that legally, the Pentagon could scrape together $7.5 billion from other programs to continue funding the war. But some of that money sits in accounts that the Pentagon insists it can't touch without causing long-term damage.
Wheeler, the former Capitol Hill budget aide, said the department's accounting process is so impenetrable that it is nearly impossible to judge from the outside just how close to the bone the armed services are cutting to fund the war.
"What they really do is so opaque that when you match it up against their rhetoric, I just don't get real confident that when they push their panic button that they're not doing it for mostly political reasons."
