Pentagon officials said the “Cold War” weapon systems they will seek to cut in the forthcoming budget are those that have narrow military applications.
Few details about the weapons programs President Barack Obama wants to cut have leaked before today’s budget briefing at the Pentagon with officials including Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey.
Yet Pentagon spokesman offered some insight into the “outdated Cold War-era systems” Obama said his administration will “continue to get rid of” when he unveiled the Pentagon’s new strategic guidance on Jan. 5 (Defense Daily, Jan. 6). Those systems will be forfeited in favor of “capabilities we need for the future,” including intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, he said.
Navy Capt. John Kirby, a Pentagon spokesman, said in a radio interview aired yesterday that under the new strategy Pentagon officials “want our systems and capabilities, we want our people to be capable of handling military operations across the spectrum of conflict.”
“The whole force has got to stay ready for a broad range of capabilities,” to an extent greater than in the past, he said. “And I think that’s really the gist of what the president was talking about, that systems and capabilities that are simply focused on only one thing and can only do one thing, can only contribute to one part of the strategy, are probably (things) that we need to take a look at.”
He noted, for example, that Navy sailors now “are doing everything from counter-piracy to nuclear deterrence and everything in-between.”
Fellow Pentagon spokesman George Little, who was interviewed along with Kirby for a Federal New Radio program that aired yesterday, declined to name “Cold War” weapons that administration officials want to eliminate.
“As we develop the strategy, and make budget decisions, the focus isn’t necessarily on specific weapons programs,” Little said. “It’s on capabilities and skillsets that we need in the future.”
Pentagon officials, he said, are “viewing this from the prism of strategy” and “not necessarily” looking at a dated weapon system and asking if it has “outlived its usefulness,” he said.
Panetta and Dempsey plan to brief reporters at 2 p.m. today “on major budget decisions stemming from the defense strategic guidance,” according to the Pentagon. Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. James Winnefeld also will share some details of the fiscal year 2013 budget, which the White House plans to send to Congress on Feb. 13.
Weapons programs expected to be trimmed include the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and Global Hawk unmanned aircraft.
The Pentagon underwent the roles-and-missions strategic review to identify a $487 billion cut to planned spending over the next decade, as required by the Budget Control Act of 2011. The five-year defense-spending plan to be unveiled Feb. 13 is slated to reflect $263 billion of those cuts.
During his State of the Union address to the nation on Tuesday night, Obama called for investing in a “strong military.”
He said the new defense strategy “ensures we maintain the finest military in the world, while saving nearly half a trillion dollars in our budget.”
The Pentagon faces additional longterm spending cuts, of up to $600 billion more, under the Budget Control Act.
A “super committee” of lawmakers failed to craft a plan to cut $1.2 trillion in federal spending last year, thus triggering a sequestration mechanism created by the law that calls for $1.2 trillion in cuts starting in January 2013, with half coming from the Pentagon.
A group of Republican lawmakers plan to unveil legislation in the near future to prevent those sequestration cuts, Senate Armed Services Committee Ranking Member John McCain (R-Ariz.) told reporters Tuesday (Defense Daily, Jan. 25). House Armed Services Committee Chairman Howard “Buck” McKeon (R-Calif.) also has crafted the Down Payment to Protect National Security Act, which would reduce the federal workforce to fund a one-year reprieve from the sequestration cuts.
The White House and Pentagon have not budgeted sequestration cuts into their FY ’13 budget proposals, multiple officials have said.
Pundits who discussed the defense budget at the left-leaning Center for American Progress (CAP) think tank in Washington yesterday predicted that lawmakers will find a way to prevent the sequestration cuts, but not do so until after the November presidential elections. Those speakers were Michael Breen, vice president of the Truman National Security Project; Jim Arkedis, director of the National Security Project at the Progressive Policy Institute, and Lawrence Korb, a senior fellow at CAP.