A group of outside advisers to the Pentagon is urging President-elect Barack Obama to scrap unspecified military programmes due to a growing gap between arms-buying plans and how to pay for them.
"Business as usual is no longer an option," the Defense Business Board said in a series of briefings presented last month to Pentagon leadership. Copies of the panel's briefing slides were made available by the Defense Department on Monday.
"History suggests the department is entering a period of fiscal constraint in a tough economy with deficit and competitive spending pressures," the briefing material said.
"Eliminate programmes and activities not vital to the mission," it recommended to the incoming administration.
Cuts at the margin "won't work this time," the board said. "Nor will pushing things off to the later years."
The board did not "call out specific programmes to cut," said Navy Cmdr Darryn James, a Pentagon spokesman. Its final report is to be released later this month.
The briefing material suggested investing savings into items on the armed services' wish lists, offering them back to Congress as 'goodwill' or a combination of both.
US defence spending has climbed more than 60% during the eight years of the Bush administration, and will total at least $612.5bn in fiscal 2009. This includes $542.5bn for the core defense budget and an initial allowance of $70bn for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A top defence adviser to Obama, former Navy Secretary Richard Danzig, has said he does not see overall defence spending declining in the first years of Obama's administration. Obama has said he would review every major arms programme.
InsideDefense.com, a trade publication, last week quoted a briefing paper for Obama's national security advisory team as saying prime targets for possible cuts included missile defence, notably a laser built aboard a modified 747 jumbo jet by Boeing. The new administration will also mull cuts to the Army's future combat systems, co-managed by Boeing and SAIC, it said.
The Defense Business Board said bold action was required to resolve growing mismatches between projected future budget levels and weapons-buying plans.
The Defense Department cannot replace worn combat hardware, modernise and transform its capabilities simultaneously, the panel said.
"Choices must be made across capabilities and within systems to deliver capability at a known price within a specific period of time," it said in a presentation titled 'Decision making in a fiscally-constrained environment'.
Since 1947, there have been four periods of significant increases in budget authority, each of which has been followed by a period of significant decreases, the panel said.
Defense Business Board members are appointed by the defence secretary. Among current members are Kenneth Krieg, the Pentagon's chief weapons buyer from mid-2005 to mid-2007, and Dov Zakheim, the Pentagon's chief financial officer from 2001 to April 2004.
In another briefing for the transition, the board said the total budget for all major Pentagon acquisition programmes more than doubled in the past seven years, from $783bn to $1.7tn. Of the total increase, $401bn, or 44%, was tied to programme cost growth over the baseline budget, the board said.
Separately, the Defense Science Board, another independent advisory group, said in a study for the incoming administration last week that the Defense Department's business practices – acquisition, logistics and infrastructure – raised costs and slowed modernisation so much that they were having "a long-term debilitating effect on our military forces."
With the wars under way in Iraq and Afghanistan, the new administration must act quickly to meet challenges outlined in the report or face the risk of a "disastrous failure," the science board said.
By Jim Wolf, Reuters.
