Fiscal year 2015 might be a rough year for acquisition programs despite the Bipartisan Budget Agreement raising the Defense Department’s spending caps, making the joint Pentagon-Congress acquisition reform effort all the more significant, one defense analyst said.
Arnold Punaro, a retired Marine Corps major general and former staff director of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said Thursday evening that acquisition tends to take a hit during drawdowns, and FY ’15 looks like it will follow that trend. Marine Commandant Gen. James Amos has said repeatedly that he would prioritize current warfighter readiness above all else, including replacing its aging fleet of surface connectors. The Army has resisted drawing down its force size beyond the currently planned 490,000 soldiers, even pushing back against calls to shift more responsibility to the National Guard and Army Reserve to reduce personnel costs.
For Punaro, the willingness to cut so many acquisition programs is worrisome, particularly when some of what he calls “overhead” hasn’t been similarly tapped for spending cuts–“creature comforts” such as commissaries, on-base schools, recreation programs and others not directly in support of the warfighter.
DoD is set to release its FY ’15 budget request on March 4. Punaro said he hoped to see the department “prioritize the warfighting side, and to the extent that they can, the tradeoffs ought to be, put as much in the ‘tooth’ as they can and cut as much in the ‘tail’ as they can. That’s not necessarily what’s really happening in the building, but that’s what the emphasis ought to be.”
Punaro, who also serves as the chairman of the National Defense Industrial Association, said some acquisition seemed safer than others. The Army, in working with Congress to rewrite its FY ’14 budget in December for last-minute passage, severely cut its Ground Combat Vehicle Program. Amos let slip earlier this month that the Marine Corps’ Amphibious Combat Vehicle would not proceed as planned, with the service lacking the money now to pay for the high-speed capability it really wants. But while ground vehicles are suffering in the constrained budget environment, aviation accounts are faring better. The Air Force has so far prioritized its F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, Long-Range Strike Bomber and its tanker replacement programs.
Punaro, noting his bias as a former infantry officer, said, “you need air superiority, you need that, but in every conflict we’ve ever been in, at some point, you have to basically take that territory and hold that territory and clean up that territory. So you need effective ground fighting equipment. It’s troublesome to me to see a lot of the ground programs are in trouble, so hopefully we’ll get that corrected. We have a lot of [tactical air assets], we have a lot of fighter airplanes. We need new generation fighters, but we certainly are more modern on the air side than we are on the ground side.”
Because the services are facing so many tough financial choices, Punaro said the acquisition reform effort–led by Pentagon acquisition chief Frank Kendall and House Armed Services Committee Vice Chairman Mac Thornberry (R-Texas)–would be all the more important for ensuring the military can get more for the money it spends.
“When you have the massive amount of regulation we have, when you have three separate stovepipes of requirements, acquisition and budgets and they’re not linked or they’re not streamlined, you’re not going to dramatically improve the outcome until you improve the process,” he said, adding that industry was eager to shed some of the burdensome and outdated acquisition regulations in favor of a simpler process.
“I’ve been a skeptic on this, but frankly I think because Frank Kendall has strapped this on and is very serious about it, now Mac Thornberry is very serious about it, we in industry are very excited about working with Frank and working with Mac Thornberry and giving them some of our thoughts they can consider,” he said. “Hopefully they’ll like some of them, maybe not, but I think we have a real opportunity here to make a difference under Kendall’s leadership and under Thornberry’s leadership, which I would not have said would have been the case a few years back.”