The impact of the White House’s $400 billion cost reduction plan for the Pentagon is being felt in every aspect of the department operations and decision-making processes, including plans to begin withdrawing American troops from Afghanistan next month, the top U.S. military officer said yesterday.
“There is not a decision in government where cost is not front and center, including Afghanistan,” according to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Michael Mullen “So all of the discussions we are having, cost is right in the middle of the mix, and I think it is going to be that way in every major decision that we have.” Mullen’s comments came during a Defense Writer’s Group breakfast in Washington yesterday.
As part of the President Obama’s 2009 decision to surge roughly 30,000 American troops into Afghanistan, the White House included a tentative timeline to begin moving U.S. forces from the country by this July.
Since then, cost savings estimates tied to potential troop withdrawals in Afghanistan have been part of the department’s overall calculus regarding the anticipated drawdown strategy for some time, according to Mullen. And as DoD continues to hammer out the details of that force reduction plan, cost savings will continue to be a factor in that planning process, he added.
On the plan itself, the Pentagon is still awaiting the recommendations from Army Gen. David Petraeus, commander of U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan, according to Mullen. “It is really in his hands still…and his recommendation will kick off the [planning] process,” he added.
That said, Mullen said he was fairly confident that a plan would be in place to meet the president’s July 2011 deadline. “I think the process will move along here pretty rapidly, certainly in the next few weeks,” he said. “We recognize the calendar and the commitment.”
However, the chairman warned that a post-Afghanistan threat environment will be vastly different, and much more dangerous, than the one U.S. forces faced coming out of Southeast Asia decades earlier.
“This isn’t like coming out of the war in Vietnam…the level of national security challenges is, from my perspective, is at a near all-time high, if not at an all time high,” Mullen said. “That, from my perspective, argues for how we move ahead.”
As DoD looks to moves forward with its plan for Afghanistan, it is also continuing to work on a wide-spanning roles and missions review to guide how the Pentagon will cut $400 billion over the next decade.
“What can we do..over the next two to three years, and then what can we do in the far term, out beyond [FY] ’14,” Mullen said regarding that ongoing work. “We have to put initiatives in place over, let’s say, the mid-term that will start to generate cash in the out years.”
Those initiatives will likely focus primarily on health care and benefits, since those areas make up the largest chunk of DoD annual expenditures, according to Mullen. “So when I say all things are on the table, all things are on the table,” he added.
This lengthy review process, according to Mullen and other senior DoD officials, is necessary to generate the required savings while preserving warfighting capability.
“We need to avoid just making the relatively easy decision [to] cash in force structure…we have to go through everything else before we get to that point, because that is why we are here,” Mullen said. “We are not here to have staff. We are not here to have infrastructure…”I am not satisfied with the idea of ‘let’s just be the best counterinsurgency force we can be in the future, and that is it. We still have high-end warfighting requirements that we have to resource.”