NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. – Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter will advocate that President Obama veto the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act if it contains provisions included by the congressional defense committees to “raid war funding” and reorganize the Pentagon’s weapon-buying bureaucracy.
Topping Carter’s list of concerns with the NDAA as written is a proposal by the House Armed Services Committee that would redirect $18 billion from the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) fund to pay for items not covered in the Defense Department’s fiscal year 2017 budget proposal.
“If a final version of the NDAA reaches the president this year that includes a raid on war funding that risks stability…jeopardizes readiness and rejects key judgements of the department, I will be compelled to recommend that he veto the bill,” Carter said. “I am hopeful, however, that we can work with Congress to achieve a better solution.”
The so-called “OCO fix” has drawn criticism from current and former Pentagon officials. Carter on Tuesday called it a “raid on war funding” that would undercut the U.S. military’s already precarious readiness to fight a high-end conflict.
Carter called the plan “gimmickry” that pays for force structure not funded in future budgets and for acquisition that the Pentagon did not request and does not want.
“First and foremost, it’s gambling with warfighting money at a time of war–proposing to cut off funding for ongoing operations in the middle of the fiscal year,” he said. “Moreover, it would spend money taken from the war account on things that are not DoD’s highest priorities across the joint force.”
Though the military service budget requests in fiscal 2017 focus on readiness over modernization, Carter said throwing money at force structure is counterproductive. He and uniformed service leaders have cautioned against adding force structure or arresting end-strength drawdowns without attendant funding.
“Buying force structure in this fiscal year without the resources to sustain it in future years is not a path to increased readiness,” Carter said. “It’s a path to a hollow force. It exacerbates the readiness challenges we currently have.”
The Senate Armed Services Committee in its version of the NDAA prescribes the dissolution of the under secretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics (AT&L), a position currently held by Pentagon chief weapons buyer Frank Kendall (Defense Daily, May 17). Instead of designating one individual to be responsible for the whole of acquisition, the committee would divide duties among officials including a new under secretary of defense for research and engineering USD(R&E)—who would focus on technological innovation—and the renamed undersecretary of management and support, a key figure overseeing the business operations of the department.
Carter, who once served as the AT&L executive, defended the existing hierarchy. He argued that separating the office’s research function from the duty to oversee production and sustainment could spell trouble for both phases of a program.
“I share the view of SASC that over time, the acquisition executive’s position has become so preoccupied with program management, including a lot of unnecessary bureaucracy associated with it, that it perhaps takes some management attention from the research and engineering function,” Carter said.
“Separating research and engineering from manufacturing could introduce problems in the transition from the former to the latter, which is a frequent stumbling block for programs.”
Buying platforms and planning for their maintenance over their service lives is intimately linked to their design and development, Carter said. The latter phases of an acquisition effort also represent 90 percent of the cost of procuring new systems, costs that are determined during development.
“Separating these functions makes no sense,” Carter said. “This proposal could also derail the success we’ve had lowering our contract cost growth on the most high-risk contracts to a 35-year low.”
The NDAA bills themselves have become behemoth documents that are “extraordinarily prescriptive” that block needed Defense Department reforms like Base Realignment and Closures (BRAC), Carter said. He respectfully requested that Congress defer to the “informed expert judgement” of uniformed and civilian DoD leadership and grant the annual budgets they craft greater support and submit them to less micromanagement.