After a lengthy hiatus in modernization spending, a ‘starving’ Pentagon is ill suited to absorb a cash windfall under the Trump Administration, according to defense analysts.
Funding for new defense technologies is expected to increase in the new administration’s fiscal 2018 budget, but an infusion of cash may not bring the Pentagon back from a decade-or-so long vacation from modernization spending, analysts say.
Andrew Hunter, director of the defense-industrial initiatives group and senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), said deferring modernization funds to pay for recapitalization of current systems has resulted in a “trough in the modernization pipeline.”
“There is a substantial decline and a relative paucity of systems that are in development for the next generation of technologies that are going to be used by the military in 10 to 15 years from today,” Hunter said. “It is a six-year trough, so there’s been a dip of six years’ duration inflicted by sequestration.”
“You’ve got a lack of systems in the pipeline,” he added.
The Defense Department lacks the capacity to simply absorb a massive funding windfall, Thomas Mahnken, president and chief executive of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Jan 24.
“The Pentagon today is a lot like a person who has been slowly starving for years,” he said. “There are limits to how effectively it can spend a large infusion of cash,” Mahnken said. “One byproduct of our neglect of modernization over the past decade and a half is there are few programs that are ready right now to accept new funds. Rebuilding the American military will take time.”
President Donald Trump has promised to build a 350-ship Navy. The Navy says it actually needs 355 ships to accomplish it mission. CSBA undershoots them both and has estimated the service needs about 348 ships. In any case, achieving a Navy of that relative size cannot happen overnight, Mahnken said.
“Our analysis, using the Navy’s own models, show that it is affordable, but making it a reality will require a sustained commitment on the part of the Executive and Legislative branches,” he said.
The trough began under former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who found substantial cost savings in eliminating programs that overshot established budget and schedule projections. An infamous example was the Army’s Future Combat Systems that was unceremoniously terminated after sucking up billions in research and development dollars without producing a single platform.
“They may have had deserved deaths, but that meant there was an absence, there was a lack of a modernization program in that timeframe,” Hunter said. The trend was “particularly acute for the Army because the Future Combat Systems was not solidly replaced by anything in particular as a modernization agenda for the Army.”
The other services have large modernization programs on the horizon that will result in the so-called “bow wave” of programs that will soon require massive infusions of funding. After a relative relaxation of demand for modernization dollars, the service’s thirst for funding is about to become severe, Hunter said.
CSIS budget guru Todd Harrison says the bow-wave phenomenon, though a naval term, is almost entirely an Air Force problem. In his analysis, the Navy has been buying aircraft over the last eight years or so and are now moving away from buying aircraft and towards purchasing ships. It has a huge bill coming due for nuclear submarine modernization but has largely balanced that foreseen expense with appetite suppression elsewhere.
“There are a lot of caveats to that, especially if you want to keep building submarines at a high rate, but in general the Navy’s program is fairly balanced,” Hunter said. “The Air Force, though, in order to afford the new bomber, in order to afford large numbers of F-35s, in order to afford buying the tanker, in order to afford the next-generation ICBM, in order to afford buying the next-generation cruise missile, in order to afford buying the next trainer and on and on and on, there is a bow wave.”
Mahnken took a broader view of the modernization vacation and said that peer nations like China and Russia have been catching up technologically over the past 15 years as the U.S. military focused on near-term readiness for counterinsurgency wars at the expense of preparing for a possible high-end conflict.
That is especially true of the Army, which is scrambling to fill capability gaps it sees in a near-peer war that have widened while it operated in largely permissible environments in Iraq and Afghanistan. There is very little in the Army’s plans for modernization, Hunter said.
President Trump has promised to end the budget caps placed on defense spending by the Budget Control Act but has not specified how he plans to do that. He also has not laid out a plan to pay for a larger military or how large that force might be.
A position statement on the revamped White House website simply states “Our military needs every asset at its disposal to defend America. We cannot allow other nations to surpass our military capability. The Trump Administration will pursue the highest level of military readiness.”
The statement specifically mentions only missile defense and cyber warfare as areas of investment.