By Marina Malenic
Air Force leaders are attempting to protect their existing force structure and crucial modernization programs as they scour their budget for “lower priority” items that can be eliminated to meet a cost-cutting directive from Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a top Air Force official said last week.
“The message is clear. Every dollar that we have in an overhead area that might be perceived as non-productive or in excess of what we need is a dollar that is not going to some higher priority area,” Air Force Secretary Michael Donley said during a June 23 event sponsored by the National Defense University on Capitol Hill.
Pentagon officials said earlier this month that the military services will have to identify $2 billion in overhead and “lower-priority” programs within their five-year spending blueprints in an effort to divert more than $100 billion to current forces and modernization priorities. The armed services, Pentagon agencies and combatant commands are expected to submit cut proposals by July 31 (Defense Daily, June 7).
“The secretary asked us to protect overall force structure, meaning, generally speaking, the size of the Air Force, active-duty end-strength at about 332,000 and the combat capabilities that go with that,” Donley said last week. He noted that Gates has “left the door open” to paying for necessary modernization and end-strength maintenance through canceling underperforming or less needed acquisition programs.
“So there could be some lower-priority programs whose resources are moved to higher priorities inside modernization,” he said.
Donley declined to elaborate on what types of programs might be terminated, but he noted several that are likely to go forward: a follow-on effort to the current subsonic air- launched cruise missile (ALCM); a replace for its Vietnam-era security helicopters that guard the ICBM fleet, known as the Common Vertical Lift Support Platform (CVLSP); and the long-troubled Space-Based Infrared System (SBIRS) satellite program.
He noted that the Air Force is also creating strategic modernization plans and a more detailed roadmap to sustain its Minuteman ICBM fleet to 2030. He said that a study of a potential Minuteman IV follow-on would also be initiated but added that there were no plans for beginning a program any time soon.
“We’ve already taken steps to get Minuteman to 2020, and now we want to extend that out and get it to 2030,” he said. “I do not think we’re ready yet to make a commitment to a Minuteman IV. We’re just not there yet.”
Meanwhile, the Space Posture Review is to be released “within the next couple of weeks,” Donley said. And he noted that the service is also planning to deliver a report to Congress on the solid rocket motor (SRM)industrial base in the coming months. “We’re not well postured to take advantage of the dollars that we’ve invested” in the SRM industrial base, he said. “So we need to change our approach going forward.” He declined to elaborate on how the approach would change.