Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work sent an unambiguous message to Congress on its first day back after the midterm elections – “Stop this madness!”
Speaking at the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ annual Global Security Forum, Work said the Pentagon is doing everything it can to craft good defense budgets, strategies and policies to guide its spending, but “constructing a coherent defense budget in this type of budget uncertainty is beyond the capability of the most capable of men and women. The chaos is becoming more difficult for the department to adjust to.”
“We have repeatedly asked Congress to provide us with more time and flexibility and budget stability to implement the reductions that they have asked us to do and make deliberate and useful force structure adjustments according to our strategy,” he said. “So I’ve got to tell you, unless we return to some sort of regular budget order soon, and Congress provides us some budgetary stability and room to make the hard choices we must, we run an increasing risk of building a program that will become increasingly misaligned with strategic environment.”
Work noted that as the Pentagon is piecing together its fiscal year 2016 request, Congress still hasn’t passed an FY ’15 budget. It is unclear if and when that budget will come, and it looks likely that Congress will reject as much as $70 billion in cost savings that the Defense Department has proposed.
For example, lawmakers in all four defense committees want to keep the A-10 fleet in the Air Force’s inventory even though the service has made clear it cannot afford to keep the aging platform. Keeping those planes “will cause serious maintenance challenges because we have to assume – we have to hedge our bets and assume that sequestration must occur … and under sequestration levels you don’t have enough maintainers to do both the F-35 and the A-10. It’s pretty simple,” Work said.
On top of the $31 billion a year DoD could save by shedding several platforms from its inventory – which Congress is not interested in allowing – the department could also save about $12 billion a year through another round of Base Realignment and Closure, Work said, which Congress is also uninterested in. Work said DoD spends about $55 billion a year on sustaining its bases, about 24 percent of which is excess infrastructure.
“Congressional opposition to a BRAC makes a mockery out of the term strategic planning,” Work said. “It is a big problem for us because it is wasteful spending, period. It is the worst type of bloat.”
The deputy secretary said the Pentagon is doing what it can on its own to operate more efficiently. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel is about to unveil a defense-wide innovation initiative, Work said, which will include a long-range research and development plan. The Pentagon is pursuing acquisition reform and is finalizing the newest increment of Better Buying Power.
Work said he has even started an analysis of overhead spending, which will be led by the deputy chief management officer and the Defense Business Board, to help identify cost savings. In the past, Work said, each headquarters office was told to cut 20 percent of its spending, for example. This effort will be more holistic and look for opportunities for vertical integration that no single office would have been able to identify previously.
However, Work made clear that “these initiatives will not be sufficient. We have to be able to, at this time, with everything going on in the world, we have to be able to better rely on our strategy and resources. And the margins for us to do so are simply not there. We need funding passed at the president’s budget level. We need continued Overseas Contingency Operations money continuing at least for the foreseeable future. We need flexibility in the way we manage our program – we need to work with Congress to get through some of these issues they don’t agree with us on. We need a BRAC. And we need budget stability – and that means, above all, getting rid of sequestration.”