The Defense Department is expected to prioritize the technical superiority of its future force over the size of its current force, and evidence of that should appear in the research and development portion of the Pentagon’s fiscal year 2015 budget request, according to experts speaking at a National Defense Industrial Association and Bloomberg Government webinar.
“We were hoping to see that this would be a first step in a shift towards a smaller, more technologically oriented force, and that we would see very radical shifts,” Kevin Brancato, a senior defense analyst for Bloomberg Government, said during the Wednesday afternoon event. “But we don’t see them, we don’t see a huge number of programs that are canceled. What we see are line reductions across every different types of programs.”
Brancato said that rather than the House and Senate using their month of negotiation time to make strategic decisions, the FY ’14 spending bill they passed last week mostly maintains the status quo until FY ’15, when a more normal budgeting process might occur–starting with the president submitting to Congress a budget request that sticks to a pre-determined topline, avoiding the need for massive cuts later on.
Brancato described the FY ’14 budget as having “lots of losers, but not complete losers.” The Air Force, for example, didn’t commit to eliminating any platform from its inventory even though there have been talks of doing so; instead, the service cut modifications but did not eliminate whole modification efforts, and it reduced the acquisition plan by a few aircraft here and there but did not stop production of any given aircraft.
“If you look at F-35, they lost lots of money, but there are no cuts to the number of jets in fiscal ’14,” he said. “They did cut advance procurement for funding for next year, so there are going to be fewer jets next year perhaps.”
Rob Levinson, also a senior defense analyst for Bloomberg Government, added that “Congress didn’t take any opportunity–and it’s probably understandable given the short timeframe and everything else–but they didn’t start making really strategic shifts.”
Given the internal DoD debate between “the force of today versus the force of tomorrow” and media reports that Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has instructed the services to add 15 percent or more to their research and development budgets in FY ’15 compared to ’14, Levinson said he believes that shifting towards a technologically advanced future force is “the direction DoD is going, and we will see evidence of that–or that they’re not going in that direction–in the ‘15 budget.”
The FY ’14 budget, which Congress passed last week, gave DoD a baseline budget of $520 billion, down from the president’s request of $552 billion but more than the $498 billion it would have received under full sequestration. Unlike with sequestration, where all accounts are cut by an equal percentage, the plan Congress passed cuts unevenly. Military personnel accounts faced only a 2.4 percent reduction, while research and development was trimmed by 6.7 percent and military construction was cut by 10.9 percent, Loren Duggan, Bloomberg Government’s director of legislative analysis, said during the event.