By Ann Roosevelt
The Army is committed to rebalancing the force in fiscal year 2011, but faces uncetainties as it executes the FY ’08 budget and prepares the Program Objective Memorandum (POM) future budget build, the deputy chief of staff (G-8) said.
“Our commitment within the Army staff to work these imperatives is absolutely vital to our success,” Lt. Gen. Stephen Speakes, the Army’s chief of the future Army through programming, materiel integration and synchronization of the service’s program at an Institute for Land Warfare breakfast. “If we are able to sustain, prepare, reset and transform we will achieve this transformation of the Army from being out of balance to in balance.”
With Lt. Gen. David Melcher, military deputy for budget to the Assistant Secretary of the Army for programs, financial management and comptroller, Speakes shares the challenge of synchronizing where the Army is now and where it needs to be in the future.
In FY ’08, the base budget is $129 billion, with a total supplemental funding request right now of $118 billion.
“That tells us that right now we’re roughly 50 percent funded in base and 50 percent funded in supplemental funding,” Speakes said. “It tells us our current fiscal strategy is uncertain.”
But it can’t tell the service how much funding is needed or when.
Looking toward the future, some trends are discernable, such as a diminishing demand for troops, and how the total service fiscal strategy will evolve over the next five years, he said..
“The challenge we have in building the POM this spring is to anticipate this very, very foggy future,” he said.
The Army is trying to ensure the “enduring” capabilities of an Army that is larger, with a more realistic assessment of what it takes to do the full soldier preparation cycle in the Force Generation (ARFORGEN).
This points to a strategy where the ARFORGEN is in the base budget and what can’t be in the base is “nested in the appropriate supplemental strategy that has a reasonable chance of success,” Speakes said.
“By reasonable, we talk about amount of money and we also talk about timing of money. And the timing element of money is also equally important because we all recognize the challenges that we see in timely receipt of funding.”
As the strategy work moves forward, everyone wants their program in the base budget.
“Nobody wants a lack of comfort being out in the wild… in the supplemental funded area,” Speakes said.
Internally, the Army must assess programs and develop a shared sense of what must be in the base, he said. Any budget changes, the service calls “corrections.”
For example, paying soldiers and preparing them for war is appropriately found in the supplemental budget, because it is directly liked to the war. That means those activities have migrated out of the base budget. The nation generally agrees to that, and with how the money to pay for it is found, he said.
However, what about the future, when not every soldier training at the brigade level is doing so for immediate deployment. Should that money be back in the base budget?
Perhaps, he said, but consider if training will ever return to the environment at the National Training Center as it was in 2000, ” an environment absolutely devoid of human beings, largely devoid of any kind of cities, and our answer would be of course not.”
The Army’s new FM 3.0 Operations clearly states the service will fight “among” people in future in an environment where complexity must be anticipated.
“It tells us that a new, more sophisticated training environment will have to reside in the enduring base,” he said. But where that initial funding is to be found is a challenge for the Army future and thus subject to active leadership discussion.
Another example: medical care. Wounded soldiers of today will need care tomorrow, he said.
Other elements play into future strategy. Discussions also examine the fact that Army pays more now to recruit and retain soldiers. There’s no promise that increased cost will go away.
“We have to take a look at the base budget to see if there are enduring qualities that we now recognize through the grim prism of combat as things that have to be included in our base,” Speakes said. “And that the need for supplemental funding will diminish and go away as need for soldiers at war go away.”
Countering those who might say the Army’s become rich from supplemental funding should be aware that 70 percent of supplemental funding right now is “a direct pass through,” funding two theaters of war and combat operations, he said. Another 15 percent goes to reset; another 15 percent is used to materially improve the quality of the Army in a time of war, in items such as improved body armor.
This spring, the Army will work to develop a strategy that makes sense for today and the future that is able to survive scrutiny from the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the White House Office of Management and Budget and the Hill.
This strategy must make sense “so that soldiers and their families see concern and commitment for them vested in the base budget…and yet see agreement about what it is we’re putting in supplemental funding that makes sense in supporting an army at war, ” Speakes said.
While building the POM, the service also is defending the FY ’09 president’s budget request.
The next critical element is the Quadrennial Defense Review, and what changes the Army could be required to make.
“We have to be participatory and understand that whatever we build today will undergo repeated scrutiny have to be able to explain every increment of this evolving picture, what it is we’ve done and why,” Speakes said.
Beyond that, there are the issues of the Defense Department share of the total resourcing strategy of government.
The service is working on the Army topline now, and expects the topline guidance “imminently.” It will bring specific issues that will have to be part of trade-off discussions within the Army as the POM is built, he said.