The Pentagon will face several significant challenges in the coming months as it tries to meet the Trump administration’s goal of strengthening the military without breaking the bank, a panel of defense experts said Feb. 21.
Michael O’Hanlon, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, noted that while President Trump pledged during his campaign to end across-the-board federal budget cuts known as sequestration, temporary measures to give the Department of Defense relief from those cuts will soon end. As a result, sequestration, which was introduced by the Budget Control Act of 2011 (BCA), could soon become an issue again.
“The BCA keeps on ticking, which means the possibility of a return to sequestration remains,” O’Hanlon said during a Brookings event in Washington, D.C.
While the administration has threatened to cut the planned purchase of Lockheed Martin [LMT] F-35s to save money, some of that savings would be lost because buying fewer fighters would reduce economies of scale and increase the per-plane cost, O’Hanlon said.
O’Hanlon also described the nation’s overall budget woes as a potential barrier to a military buildup.
“We still have a huge deficit and, therefore, all government programs are going to have to be watched vigilantly and carefully, even in a Trump administration that wants to make America great again and make the military great again,” O’Hanlon said.
Robert Hale, DoD comptroller during the Obama administration, said that while the Pentagon’s upcoming fiscal year 2017 budget amendment is expected to total tens of billions of dollars, DoD will likely have only a few months to spend the money, which is not enough time to resolve all of the shortfalls in readiness, such as equipment maintenance and pilot training.
“I would think we’ll see some plus-up [for readiness], but they have to be careful in the budget amendment because they’re going to get this amendment approved maybe five months left in the fiscal year and that money … has to be obligated by the end of the fiscal year,” Hale said. “So I think they’ll have to be modest there.”
Even if funding were not an issue, the military’s heavily taxed, complex weapon systems cannot be repaired overnight, according to retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Mike Moeller, vice president of business development and international programs at Pratt & Whitney, a United Technologies Corp. [UTX] company.
“It takes time to get parts into the system,” Moeller said. “It takes time to modify equipment that has essentially been used up over the last 15, 16 years.”