A decade of war has seriously eroded the military’s preparedness to fight new wars, according to top officers in all four services. And it’s making the brass publicly bridle against the Obama administration’s planned defense cuts.

During a grim hearing in the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Readiness Tuesday afternoon, the vice chiefs of the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps glumly said the military faces deep problems getting its equipment and troops ready to meet unexpected threats beyond Iraq and Afghanistan. And they’ve got to fix the problem while the Pentagon shaves $400 billion over 12 years from the military budget. They’re not exactly happy about it.

Army Gen. Peter Chiarelli fretted that the Army’s frantic deployment pace means building “trained and ready units closer and closer to the deployment date.” Adm. Jonathan Greenert — nominated to be the Navy’s next top officer — warned that the Navy’s budget constraints required “we limit demand for Navy forces to a level that is sustainable,” as a full 50 percent of the Navy has been “underway daily” for the past year. “I can’t see how we can sustain this pace of operations,” Greenert said, “and meet our readiness standards.”

Gen. Joseph Dunford said that Marines and their gear at their home stations were in a “degraded readiness state,” thanks to their decade of war, meaning they’d be late to “respond to unexpected crises.” Regional commanders outside the Middle East also don’t have as many Marines as they want. His Air Force colleague, Gen. Philip Breedlove, confessed to a “slow but steady decline in reported unit readiness indicators,” with units devoted to recovering personnel and providing airborne intelligence “right at the ragged edge.”

None of the four-stars explicitly rebuked the Pentagon budget plan. But they made it clear they’re not fans of lowered budgets. “We would have some challenges taking those cuts,” Dunford said. Chiarelli confessed the Army brass “don’t totally understand” how they’re going to make do with less money. Breedlove bemoaned the decades-old tankers and bombers the Air Force flies and contrasted them with the rapid pace of Chinese military modernization: “They put the money to whatever they decide to do, and that scares me.”

Rep. Randy Forbes, the chairman of the subcommittee, warned that the readiness difficulties, coupled with the impending budget cuts, raise the risk of “the slow dismantlement of the greatest military on earth.”

But the nominee to be the nation’s next top military officer flatly downplayed military readiness concerns. “The services have done a tremendous job maintaining the readiness of our military to respond to contingencies,” Gen. Martin Dempsey, the likely next Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Senate committee on Tuesday morning, “evidenced, in part, by our rapid ability to plan and execute military operations in Libya, respond to the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, and maintain a credible deterrence against potential aggressors across the globe.”

Anxiety over the budget cuts within the military started to bubble up this month. Two weeks ago, top Navy officials conceded to the House panel that over a fifth of its fleet wasn’t ready to fight. Days later, Breedlove, worried aloud that the impeding cuts imperiled a joint Navy-Air Force plan to dominate the Pacific.

The stakes are highest for Greenert, since he’s Obama’s pick to lead the Navy. And Greenert all but begged the Pentagon to reconsider the global demand on the Navy. “Without a comprehensive strategic review, a fundamental look at what asking our forces to do, we won’t be able to meet the global force management plan,” Greenert said.

The readiness woes are political catnip for the Republicans on the Armed Services Committee. Many of the committee’s hawkish members want to exempt defense spending from forthcoming budget cuts. The committee chairman, Rep. Buck McKeon, called preserving military cash a “red line” for him last year, even though Defense Secretary Leon Panetta publicly backs the planned cuts.

In a Monday op-ed, four Republicans on the panel attributed the readiness woes not just to the lengthy wars, but to “a sustained lack of resources.” That’s nonsense: Pentagon spending has risen massively since 9/11, from $432 billion in fiscal 2001 to a $670.9 billion request for cash currently before Congress, when including war costs and adjusting for constant dollars. (.pdf) The defense budget will continue to grow until 2015 — just less rapidly than in the past.

Want to put aside war costs entirely? The proposed 2012 defense budget without the war is still $553 billion, up from the $526 or $527 billion given to defense in the past two fiscal years. Republicans on the panel can argue that cutting defense is unwise or that the budget growth the military has enjoyed is insufficient. But they can’t factually argue that Pentagon budget growth hasn’t happened.

But that’s cold comfort to a military that the current Joint Chiefs Chairman, Adm. Mike Mullen, said “hasn’t had to make the hard choices” about what guns, ships and planes to buy during the fat budgets of the last decade. Dunford warned that just fixing Marine equipment battered in Afghanistan will cost $12 billion. The Pentagon budget cuts may go forward. But don’t expect the military to go along with it quietly.

Photo: expertinfantry/Flickr