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Thursday, May 21, 2009
And why are we conducting a QDR? Gates and his FY10 Budget analysis and recommendationsCongressional
staffers and think tank academics are openly claiming, with many senior officers in the Services quietly cheering
them on, that SECDEF's FY2010 DOD budget recommendations lack analytical rigor. But the Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs, Admiral Mike Mullen, said at the Brookings Institution on Monday that the program reviews conducted by the SECDEF and his small group
of confidants (Gates' people) in February and March and the budget recommendations Gates put forward in April are the
product of "the most in-depth and complete" budget process Mullen has seen since he first came to the
Pentagon as a Flag Officer in 1995.
Reportedly Gates developed his vision for a "reformed" defense budget over the
two years since November 2006 when he replaced the "Transformer", Mr. Rumsfeld. If you read
Gates' speeches from the period starting in late-2007 to mid-2008 and analyze his actions regarding the procurement
of MRAP vehicles and the establishment of the ISR Task Force you can see the increasing level of frustration he reached with
bureaucratic impedimenta as a result of his less than satisfactory interactions on changing the DoD culture with
Service Secretaries, their acquisition officials, and senior officers in Service Headquarters.
Gates' Foreign Affairs article on "A Balanced Strategy" in the January/February 2009 issue of the magazine was his strategic
guidance to the OSD, the Services, and DOD agencies to get them focused on the on-going campaigns
and the most likely near-term conflicts with effective strategies, acceptable material solutions, and well-trained
servicemen. To
reinforce the mandates and to monitor the implementation of his guidance, over the course of February and March Gates
spent at least one hour per day personally working budget issues in the run-up to his April 6th announcement.
Mullen believes he and Gates had the time and substantive support from OSD PA&E, the Joint Staff J-8, and the Services
to form a well thought out path to the future. Those officials who worked with SECDEF believe he did
not merely validate his own positions but welcomed input from the Services and only made his decisions after
working issues in great detail.
Tony
Cordesman has made public the prevailing analysis of the QDR process in a recent speech at the National Defense University - “If God really hates you, you may end up working on a Quadrennial Defense
Review: The most pointless and destructive planning effort imaginable. You will waste two years on a document decoupled from
a real world force plan, from an honest set of decisions about manpower or procurement, with no clear budget or FYDP, and
with no metrics to measure or determine its success."
The question is now, given Gates' decisions, to
what end is DoD conducting the 2009 QDR? Will the work Michele Flournoy and Kathleen Hicks, the Queens of the QDR,
really have any relevance, save providing more analytics for and more public validation of Gates' positions? With
the QDR being conducted on a "compressed timeline" will Michele and Kathleen bring counter-arguments and
analysis contradicting FY2010 budget decisions to their Boss' attention? Is it conceivable that
Gates will tolerate receiving analysis that disproves his thesis for reform? In all probability DoD is in in
the process of conducting another pointless QDR effort.
It now appears that Bob Gates, the old spymaster
and veteran political infighter, sees the QDR in the same terms Cordesman sees it. Gates has proven he
understood all too well the need to quietly observe, orient, decide, and quickly act to implement his vision at the first
feasible opportunity or he would likely watch his initiative for defense reform be slowly and painfully
gummed to death by the DOoD bureaucracy.
With the SECDEF over their shoulders, Service leaders show restraint in program wish listsAs this blog noted on 9 May link , Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently sent a warning to Military Service leadership
that he would not contenance them going over his head to plead their budget/funding woes to the Congress via the Unfunded
Priorities List (UPLs). The result: substantially leaner UPLs made their way to Congress today from both the Air Force
and the Marine Corps. Last year saw the Air Force submit a massive, $18.75 billion list to the Congressional Defense
committees that outlined dozens of shortchanged requirements. This year Air Force Chief of Staff Norton Schwartz identified
but 20 unmet needs totalling $1.9 billion... and even suggested that the Service could find this money from its own funding
reallocations if necessary. The Marine Corps, which last year requested some $3 billion to meet unfunded needs, this
year asked for but $188 million. Here's betting that the Congress plumps the Administration's FY10 request anyway...
only this time without the benefit of Service-vetted wish lists.
link
Monday, May 18, 2009
FCS -- Forgotten... and now goneLet's admit it... sometimes we hear
an obituary announcement for some-long forgotten celebrity and we think "really, was he/she still around?" Now comes
news from Kris Osborn at Defense News that the Army is poised to officially
kill off the Future Combat Systems (FCS) program... by name. In doing so, the Army is acknowledging what
everyone has known for some time, that neither OSD nor the Congress is willing to wait any longer for the "future"
in FCS to arrive. The past few years have seen the Army acknowledge this and increasingly focus the $160
billion FCS program on "spin-outs" that more quickly deliver capability to an army at war and defer the more lofty
"system of systems" objectives. Six weeks ago came word from Secretary of Defense Robert Gates
that the very core of FCS -- its array of futuristic manned and unmanned tactical vehicles -- would be scuttled pending a
broad reevaluation of the requirements. Now FCS is being scrapped in its entirety and is being replaced
by a new moniker -- the Army Brigade Combat Team Modernization (ABCTM). The word "future" is
gone and so is the Boeing/SAIC Lead Systems Integrator (with a hefty termination check still to be inked). It
is envisioned that the $2.9 billion in FY10 funding requested by the Army for FCS elements will remain in roughly the same
allocations, if under different names, at least for the present. We will see what becomes of FCS as the
new budget request rolls through the Congress in the weeks and months ahead... no doubt Members will want to see significant
changes in orientation while protecting constituent interests in the current arrangements. It is clear,
however, that the focus will be on the "now" (spinouts) and that the Lead Systems Integrator concept that underpinned
FCS management has been wounded, perhaps gravely.
link
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