The Air Force is developing a new 20-year “master plan” that will adhere to estimated future spending limits as part of a new three-part strategy document, the service’s top officer said Wednesday.
Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh said the service is embarking on a long-term journey to change the way it performs strategic planning. The “master plan” is one of three documents, along with a 10-year balanced budget that includes the five-year Future Years Defense Plan (FYDP), and what Welsh described as a “call to the future,” which outlines science and technology (S&T) and research and development (R&D) priorities. The “call to the future” will also outline new concept development and training and education for warfighters around the concept of what Welsh called “strategic agility.”
“By strategic agility, I’m referring to the agility of everything from thought, to training, to education, to decision processes, to acquisition and to operational activity,” Welsh told a National Press Club audience in downtown Washington. “We have to change the way, a little bit, (how) we do everything in order to get to this point.”
The Air Force’s “master plan” of adhering to estimated spending limits may be a sign the Defense Department will not submit future budget requests beyond limits imposed by congressionally-mandated sequestration spending caps. DoD in its fiscal year 2015 budget request estimated requesting $2.68 trillion from FY ’16-’19. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated the sequestration cap over the same period at $2.17 trillion, or $510 billion less than what DoD anticipates requesting in today’s dollars.
Air Force spokesman Lt. Col. Allen Herritage said Thursday the new strategy document would be completed in June, but not be publically available. Welsh said the “master plan” will be a consolidation of 12 different Air Force plans, which cause challenges because they compete in many ways both overtly and covertly, he said. Welsh said the consolidation is important because the Air Force needs a single plan before it can make prioritization decisions as an institution. Welsh said, for his part, he did not see signs from Congress that sequestration would be lifted for 2016.
Welsh also said the “master plan” caps would be hard, meaning anything added that causes the plan to exceed spending caps would result in another program being removed. This new spending plan, Welsh said, is part of the Air Force’s new plan to tackle fiscal challenges head-on.
“We have to stop pushing costs into the future and assuming money will fall…because that’s not going to happen for the foreseeable future,” Welsh said. “We have to start balancing our books like you do at home.”