Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work said the Pentagon and Congress will eventually need to decide how to pay for an increasing number of overseas operations and his best guess is that the Overseas Contingency Operations account that was expected to go away in the coming years will be here to stay.
Work told the audience at a Center for Foreign Policy event on Tuesday that, in the short term, the Defense Department is able to respond to ISIS by using forces already stationed forward in the U.S. Central Command area of responsibility.
“Another advantage of our global posture: being able to maintain forces forward, and those are largely paid for in a combination of the base budget and Overseas Contingency Operations,” he explained. “Right now the costs for operations in Iraq are coming out of Overseas Contingency Operations and for the foreseeable future we believe that is the case.”
However, OCO was meant to shrink and eventually go away as operations in Afghanistan wound down to a steady state presence of forces to train and equip the Afghan National Security Forces.
Instead, Work said, “the long-term solution on OCO is one of three choices. There’s a lot of money in the OCO that should probably be in base [budget], and it’s not because we didn’t want it to be in the base, it’s just happened over 12 years. So that money either has to come into the base with an increase in our topline, which Congress has indicated no, they’re not ready to do that. Or it’s got to come over where we eat it, which really constrains us. Or we agree that OCO will continue in the future, and we’ll establish the rules to do it.
“I believe the latter one is what we’re going to have to do,” he continued. “The crisis in Ebola, with all these things, the European reassurance initiative – we’re going to have to have Overseas Contingency Operations money for some time.”
In his speech, which focused on the Asia-Pacific rebalance, Work said that regardless of how operations are paid for, overall there is less money to go around than the department got used to spending. To adjust, the Pentagon is seeking innovative ways to create additional overseas presence with the limited resources it has available.
One solution is to forward-station more ships. The Navy put four Aegis-equipped Arleigh Burke-class (DDG-51) destroyers forward in Rota, Spain, rather than devoting 10 destroyers for that mission under a traditional deployment model with ships homeported in the United States.
Work also discussed right-sizing the force – still providing enough force to decisively defeat an enemy, but not sending a billion-dollar destroyer to defeat pirates on a skiff. He said the Army was making good progress in this area, developing regionally aligned forces that can break down to small units and deploy for very specific missions in that specific geography.
“They’re brigades, but the brigades would never go out as brigades – they’d go out as packets of platoons,” he said. “These emphasize skill sets that are particular to the regions of the world,” he said, which creates a lower-cost, smaller-footprint approach rather than deploying one-size-fits-all battalions.
Work also said the Joint Chiefs had been working on a “dynamic presence” concept in which, instead of pushing all ready forces out to the combatant commanders and then struggling to move them across COCOM lines if needed, the Pentagon would allocate “the minimum deterrent force” to each COCOM and have the rest of the troops in a cross-COCOM deployment that could take them to whatever region needs them. If the troops are not allocated to any of the COCOMS specifically, they can be moved around as needed with much less red tape, he said.