The National Defense Industrial Association has teamed up with a former Pentagon expert in industrial base issues to develop a plan for maintaining a healthy defense industry in a time of constrained budgets, NDIA Board of Directors Chairman Arnold Punaro said Monday.
Punaro said the association had discussed drafting a proposal for Congress and the Pentagon for a few years now, knowing that budgets would be in decline. But “until you had a better view for what the top line really was going to look like, people weren’t ready to basically move in one direction or another,” he said in a phone interview Monday.
After Congress passed a budget compromise last month that provides some spending predictability for the years to come, Punaro said the time was right to bring on board Brett Lambert, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for Manufacturing and Industrial Base.
“The idea is to better inform the decision-makers as the tight budget environment has settled out” and the spending trajectory is more clearly defined, Punaro said. In the next few weeks Lambert will determine how the NDIA working group will accomplish this and in what timeline, Punaro added, saying that the final product–a report, a presentation or something else–would be determined once the working group knew more.
Punaro added that the timing is opportune because both the Pentagon via the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics and Congress via House Armed Services Committee Vice Chairman Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) are undertaking acquisition reform efforts that could tie in to the recommendations NDIA would want to pitch. Punaro said Thornberry spoke at an NDIA meeting recently about his acquisition reform initiative, and the association wants to be a “big player” in that effort and Kendall’s.
What is known is that the recommended plan NDIA pitches to Congress and the Defense Department will represent the needs of the 1,600 NDIA member companies, which are primarily second-, third- and fourth-tier companies in the supply chain.
“We can’t really say that a plan will work for defense industry unless it accounts for industrial capabilities across product sectors and up and down the supply chain,” Lambert said in a NDIA press release. “The industry upon which our warfighters depend to accomplish their mission is more global, commercial, and financially complex than most recognize…I have seen from both sides of the industry-government partnership how necessary it is for industry to offer its views to policy makers. We need to put forward the facts to get a conversation started.”