Jul 28, 2009 -- Defense Secretary Robert Gates is poised to direct the services to squeeze as much as $60 billion from their five-year investment plans to finance new capabilities he believes are higher priorities, a top Pentagon official said today.
David Ochmanek, deputy assistant secretary of defense for force development, said Gates is poised to issue revised guidance for the development of the force as soon as this week, a step that marks the first recommendations of the ongoing Quadrennial Defense Review. The classified document outlines programs and forces the Office of the Secretary of Defense believes the services must fund in their investment blueprints for fiscal years 2011 to 2015.
“The order of magnitude of the enhancement that the Quadrennial Defense Review has called for across the [future years defense plan] is on the order of $50 [billion] to $60 billion,” Ochmanek told defense reporters in Washington this morning.
The guidance effectively signals Gates’ opening move to begin recalibrating the Pentagon's FY-11 spending plan even as his proposals for changes to the FY-10 budget are still being considered in Congress.
In early June, Ochmanek recommended to Gates three proposals for new capability packages to reshape the U.S. military -- low-, medium- and high-cost options that carried approximate price tags over the five-year spending plan of $25 billion, $50 billion and $75 billion (DefenseAlert, June 17).
While the specifics behind the capabilities Gates wants the services to fund in their FY-11 to FY-15 investment plan remain under wraps, Ochmanek said that, in general, irregular warfare capabilities are manpower-intensive, while capabilities for dealing with anti-access challenges are capital-intensive.
“The Army is being asked to do a number of things, mostly to enhance the availably of key enablers to special operations and general-purpose forces doing counter-insurgency and counter-terrorist operations,” he said.
“The Air Force and Navy are being asked to do some of that but at the same time to enhance their capabilities to confront and defeat high-end anti-access threats,” Ochmanek added.
The services must update their five-year investment plans to ensure their spending proposals reflect Gates' guidance, which will mean shifting roughly $4 billion annually in each service’s budget plan -- a sum that will require some changes but not dramatic upheaval, he said.
“This mark on the wall of $50 billion to $60 billion in and of itself isn't a forcing function for massive change,” he said.
In August, the services will submit their spending proposals to the Office of the Secretary of Defense for review. In the fall, OSD will render judgment on the service budget proposals.
“The secretary made a deliberate choice in the QDR that the components” -- the services and the defense agencies -- “would have the first right of refusal, the first opportunity to make those trade-offs,” Ochmanek said.
“All the components have to make adjustments; the flavor of those adjustments varies by service and domain,” he added.
While he said QDR officials have assumed the defense budget will not grow, he expressed hope that the White House will find more money for defense.
“Frankly, we hope that the administration will be able to provide some positive growth to the DOD budget so that we don't have a lot of these painful choices because there isn't any 'low-hanging fruit' in the defense program anymore,” he said. “There's nothing that you can go to to find money that's not going to reduce some important capability.” -- Jason Sherman
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