Pentagon officials questioned yesterday if they should be crafting 30-year shipbuilding and aviation plans for Congress, saying projections for shorter time periods may be more appropriate.
A House Armed Services Committee (HASC) subpanel held a hearing yesterday on the two reports that the Pentagon submits to Congress in a process that some lawmakers lament, in part because the documents have been delivered late.
The Pentagon submitted a delayed aviation plan this year on April 12. Congress changed the reporting requirement for the shipbuilding plan, within the fiscal year 2011 defense authorization act, from a annual to a quadrennial report.
HASC Oversight and Investigations subcommittee Chairman Rob Wittman (R-Va.) quizzed a panel of military brass during a hearing yesterday.
“How do you believe the process can be changed, fixed, to make sure the information that comes out of the 30-year shipbuilding plan, the 30-year aviation plans, makes it to the House Armed Services Committee members and the committee staff itself in a timely way to make sure that we get it so that those pieces of information, which I think are very valuable, make their way into the planning process?,” he asked.
Vice Admiral P. Stephen Stanley, principal deputy director of cost assessment and program evaluation in the Office of Secretary of Defense, said for the Pentagon trying “to do something as complicated as this and projecting it as far into the future as the current legislation requires is a very complicated task.”
He said input the Pentagon can give Congress about shipbuilding and aviation needs in the near term is “most significant,” while the “longer-year projections become less important.”
“Were I to try to shape it, I would say that a reasonable balance is to have a plan that’s…maybe less long in duration,” Stanley told the panel. “Maybe I’ll suggest 20 years just to throw an idea out.”
He further said the every-four-year Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) may be “enough.”
Stanley then offered three proposals for changing the 30-year shipbuilding and aviation plan-submittal process.
“I believe the long report tied to…the Quadrennial Defense Review makes sense,” he said. “I think limiting the scope of the report potentially to 20 years, I’ll say. It’s not clear to me that the last 10 years does either you nor I much good. And then the last thing I would suggest is potentially that we look at, ‘How do we time it.’”
On that last point regarding timing, he noted that when presidential administrations change the new ones create their own national-security strategies and define their fiscal constraints. During recent changes of administrations, the defense budget proposals and associated QDRs have been behind schedule.
“To try to then get a 30-year plan to reflect that new direction, new administration’s national security strategy and QDR is very, very difficult,” Stanley said, suggesting any 30-year plans be delayed until the following budget cycles.
At the hearing, Marine Lt. Gen. George Flynn, deputy commandant of combat development integration, said he tends “to agree with Adm. Stanley that 20 years is about right” for a revised duration of the shipbuilding and aviation plans.
“But then what you also have to be able to do is when you build the execution plan to get there in 20 years you’re searching for a consistency and stability and I think that means on a yearly basis then you need to take a look at what assumptions that you have based your plan and whether they’re going to play out,” Flynn added.
HASC Oversight and Investigations subcommittee Ranking Member Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.) was critical of the 30-year shipbuilding and aviation reporting process.
“To ask anyone to come up with a 30-year window on the future is really a recipe for embarrassment, because no one can anticipate the changes on the horizon,” Cooper said. He noted that requirements for armored vehicles changed “remarkably quickly” during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“I’m a little more interested in agility and the ability to respond to future threats than in locking in programs that may or may not be useful 10, 20, 30 years hence,” Cooper added.
Wittman talked positively of the concept of the 30-year plans, saying they are intended to “ensure effective congressional oversight of (Pentagon) plans by giving Congress the information we need to make decisions on issues that are not consistently available in the five-year data of the Future Years Defense Plan.”
“In my view, we tend to spend too much time arguing about tactics when we’re discussing these plans and not enough time focused on long- term strategy,” the panel chairman added. “We’re constantly reacting to events rather than planning for them, resulting in a system that is burdened with waste and inefficiency. We cannot afford to do this any longer….It’s critical for us to make sure we have that long-term perspective to understand where we need to go and the best way to get there.”
He pointed to past decisions he deemed as harmful, including the one to not build submarines in the 1990s that created shortfalls in the attack submarine force structure. Wittman also lamented past moves to cut or kill programs including the F-22 fifth-generation fighter jet, C-17 cargo aircraft, combat-search-and-rescue helicopter, next-generation DDG-1000 destroyer, and MPF large-deck aviation ship.