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A trusted defense source emails me a report from the subscription-only Inside The Pentagon newsletter that seems to herald the first defense-budget chicanery of the Obama administration. The piece, by Christopher J. Castelli, is about how the services are starting to think that the forthcoming Fiscal Year 2010 defense budget, Obama’s first, is going to contain bigger spending cuts than originally envisaged — but there’s a caveat. First, here’s some service worry, courtesy of the big big big budget Navy:
Citing recent meetings, the Navy bulletin warns officials that all bets are off and the service’s FY-10 budget plans — known as the program objective memorandum, or POM-10 for short — could soon see big adjustments.
"As you know, our original planning assumption was that the POM-10 we submitted would undergo only minor changes," the message states. "That may no longer be accurate."
Well, maybe. At deputy defense secretary-designate Bill Lynn’s confirmation hearing last week, Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.), a former Navy Secretary, upbraided the service for redundant shipbuilding plans, program cost overruns and a lack of overall strategic planning about what sort of fleet the U.S. requires. Lynn, along with comptroller-designate Robert Hale, pledged a thorough review. And all of that falls into line with, as Castelli points out, Secretary Bob Gates’ recent call to better balance the defense community’s irregular warfare needs with its traditional, conventional, big-ticket-item needs. Counterinsurgency advocates and counterinsurgency skeptics alike are waiting to see how that actually cashes out in terms of Pentagon budgeting.
And there lies the prospect for budgeting chicanery. Castelli ends his piece by summarizing that Navy bulletin’s guidance:
Those who work on high-tech information operations, networks, intelligence and space capabilities must advocate for their high-tech programs by tying them to warfighting and using language that warfighters who are not information technology specialists can understand, the bulletin advises.
That sounds a whole lot like the Navy will attempt to redefine its Rumsfeld-era and pre-Rumsfeld era high-tech stuff as irregular-warfare support. In the Rumsfeld Pentagon, defense officials knew to write their budget requests in a way that sounded pleasing to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s amorphous, tech-heavy vision of "transformation." Now it appears that the services may attempt to justify the same old programs by gussying them up in counterinsurgency-friendly language. ("… the DDG-1000 destroyer contributes to full-spectrum operations, facilitating a whole-of-government approach…" — oh, and look who has a huge piece of the DDG-1000 contract: Raytheon, the company that’s given us Deputy Defense Secretary Bill Lynn. Will the program survive, do you think?)
This is a classic defense budgeting trick, and one I’ll be paying very close attention to when the next budget gets released.
Crossposted to The Streak.
8 Comments
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if we get out of Iraq we save trillions, that’s quite a bit of spending cut right there
I worked on various DoD programs as a contractor (and worked in Accounting and Finance while in the USAF).
I think to a large extent, there are all sorts of big-ticket weapons systems in the pipleline that can be cut without compromising our security in the slightest. Especially in a time of “asymetrical” warfare.
We already have the most advanced Carriers, submarines, Fighters, bombers (the B-52 is still going strong yet the B2 I believe it is has reached the end of its operational life?), and so on.
There has been a great deal of NG equipment relegated to the scrap heap thanks to the fiasco that is Iraq. Some of this will need to be replaced at some point.
Thanks Spencer digg
True but that’s not big ticket, big profit items like new developments. Maintenance and replacement parts and equipment, though a lot are needed, have fixed costs for the most part as well as fixed profits.
DoD Contractors LOVE Cost-Plus development contracts instead cause there’s a lot of room to maneuver and milk the government.
This is standard Pentagon bullshit. They lard a budget with everything including the kitchen sink, and then try to line up a bunch of yahoo Southern Senators to bloviate about how if the Navy doesn’t get its toys the Republic will fall.
From my scandals list here are the top weapons procurement programs (item 338):
If you look through these, they all gold-plated relics of the Cold War. None of them have much use in irregular warfare. But you see that’s the beauty of the Military Industrial Complex, in addition to telling us we need all these dinosaurs or we will die, they also sell it as a jobs and corporate welfare program. This btw is why we never have the military that we need just the one the MIC is willing to sell us.
Here’s the Pentagon budget problem, which my old college roommate who managed the process under Reagan and Bush explained to me. The budget is for a particular fiscal year. The items, however, have expenditure streams that spread over several years. In any given year, the budget discussions overlap, so that in the mornng you are discussing 2009, and in the afternoon 2010, and the next day 2012 or God knows which year. To the point where the participants — who are the same people — sometimes get confused which year they are in. The process makes it easy to bring back projects from the dead, and every party to the negotiations has his or her pet project. That’s why it’s so hard to kill the bad stuff.
For the MIC it’s important not to be limited to supplying individual soldiers. There’s only so much armament, communications gear and firepower one individual can carry. So, they produce big big things that cost a lot.
I suspect Obama will try to repair the damage done to our existing military and cut some of the more wasteful big projects.
I don’t think he will cut as much as we would have liked a couple years ago. The need to keep people employed is too great.
But, even with those constraints the overall percent he can safely cut should be satisfying to Lefties.