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By Roxana Tiron - 06/24/10 07:18 PM
Pentagon leaders, the military services and defense contractors must
work together to cut bureaucratic bloat and unnecessary programs,
the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said Thursday.
Adm. Mike Mullen also renewed his warning that the nation’s
debt is the biggest threat to U.S. national security.
“I was shown the figures the other day by the comptroller of the
Pentagon that said that the interest on our debt is $571 billion in
2012,” Mullen said at a breakfast hosted by The Hill. “That is,
noticeably, about the size of the defense budget. It is not
sustainable.”
Defense Secretary Robert Gates has initiated an effort to free up
$100 billion over the next five years to maintain current fighting
forces and to modernize weapons systems.
The goal is to find more savings within the defense budget without
cutting the top-line number. The savings would be used on other
Pentagon needs. Pentagon leaders are eyeing 2 to 3 percent real
growth in the Pentagon’s budget for the areas that need it most:
force structure and modernization.
Mullen acknowledged Pentagon leaders face the challenge of giving
incentives to the military services and other Pentagon agencies to
start slashing their budgets.
“One of the most difficult things to do in budget world here in town
is incentivize, because too often it is ‘just give it away,’ ”
Mullen said. “It can be done. It does not happen overnight, but over
a period of about 18 months you can start to see the resources come
back and then put them where you need them.
“It is a message to all of us,” Mullen added. “It’s a very important
message to understand that the best way to get there is together, as
opposed to everybody fighting each other. We all have to contribute
here to make sure we are whole and well-prepared for the future.”
Under the Defense Department’s plan, two-thirds of the $100 billion
cost savings spread out over the next five years will come from
trimming overhead on a department-wide basis. That money will be
directly transferred into the force structure and modernization
accounts.
The rest of the cost savings would come from “developing
efficiencies within those force structure and modernization
accounts,” Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn said earlier this
month.
Lynn warned that in order to find $100 billion in savings, Pentagon
leaders, working with the military services, will have to identify
“lower-priority programs” that are not going to be part of future
budgets.
The departments of the Army, Air Force and Navy, which also includes
the Marine Corps, as well as the combatant commands are expected to
report their savings proposals by July 31 as the Pentagon prepares
its budget request for Congress.
The Pentagon’s initiative has met with support from several key
figures in Congress. The chairman of the House Armed Services
Committee, Rep. Ike Skelton (D-Mo.), indicated that he backs Gates’s
spending reforms and is looking for ways his committee can find
savings in the Pentagon’s budget to complement Gates’s effort.
Some in the Democratic Caucus, however, have said the Pentagon might
need to cut its budget in order to take part in reducing the
country’s debt.
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) put the once-sacrosanct
defense budget on the chopping block this week, stating that
Pentagon spending cannot be excluded from deficit-reduction talks.
The defense budget makes up more than half of the country’s
discretionary spending.
Rep. Norm Dicks (D-Wash.), a centrist who is the House’s top defense
appropriator, believes his panel can reduce the Pentagon’s budget
top line somewhat without affecting military readiness, according to
Dicks’s chief of staff, George Behan.
* * * * *
You need to be real careful with that defense
budget, admiral. If you visualize budgets on a graph, in the case of
most budgets, declining investment causes an approximately equal
downward curve in your "return on investment" or the "output" of the
"unit" that your budget is putting money into.
But the defense budget gets kind of weird.
If the amount of money put into it drops below a certain level, the
unit doesn't function as intended, the downward curve plummets in a
straight line to zero, and we all end up speaking chinese or russian
and being ruled by a communist tyrant.
Maybe it's too late already. The last part
of that is already true, and we have to press '1' for english.
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