First posted March 28, 2017, 3:18 p.m. on CQ.com.

If Washington fails to send the Pentagon a new spending bill for the rest of this fiscal year, the U.S. military will take a major hit, according to new Defense Department reports to Congress obtained by CQ Roll Call.

The consequences for the U.S. military of subsisting on a continuing resolution range from the mammoth to the mundane, and the net effect is near- and long-term damage to everything from recruitment to weapons contracts, according to the Navy, Army and Air Force information papers sent to Capitol Hill within the last week.

If the CR were to be extended through Sept. 30, the end of fiscal 2017, then the military services would have to ground large portions of their aircraft squadrons, halt most training exercises, stop paying bonuses, freeze hiring of new military personnel and hold off on modernizing numerous new weapons, according to the documents.

The armed forces would also have to stop fixing tornado damage to a Marine Corps facility in Albany, New York. They would have to cancel Blue Angels flyovers. And they would force thousands of military families to wait to move to their next post until after the start of fiscal 2018 on Oct. 1 (at the earliest) — meaning children in those families would have to change schools after the new school year has already begun.