By Emelie Rutherford
Defense analysts said yesterday they do not expect the Pentagon to propose major weapon-system cuts in the fiscal year 2011 budget request and Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) report next Monday.
Jim Thomas, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments’ (CSBA) vice president for strategic studies, told reporters he does not foresee the Defense Department trying to cancel a wide array of weapons programs as it did last April for the FY ’10 budget.
“What we are probably not going to see next week are any significant, major cancellations or shifts in our force structure beyond those that were already announced last spring,” Thomas said during a pre-budget briefing at the think tank’s Washington offices.
Instead, he said he expects the FY ’11 budget blueprint and the long-awaited QDR report, which the White House will send Congress next Monday, to “be about continuity and refinement.”
Pentagon spending is not expected to be part of the domestic-spending freeze President Barack Obama is slated to announce tonight during his first State of the Union address.
Still, Stanley Collender, the managing director of Qorvis Communications, at the briefing said there is “no way that the defense budget will be immune to deficit reduction.”
While Thomas said he expects a “reprieve” in FY ’11 from the types of defense budget cuts seen in FY ’10, he said contraction of weapon-system spending could be coming in future years.
“The pressures that are out there…in terms of pressure on the topline in the future, that’s still there, that’s still looming, and it’s probably intensified,” he said. At the same time the Defense Department has multiple “bottom-up pressures” such as rising personnel costs, he said.
Todd Harrison, a CSBA senior fellow for budget studies, noted that the Obama administration is expected to propose some weapon-program cuts, including trying again to end Boeing‘s [BA] C-17 cargo aircraft production line and General Electric [GE]-Rolls-Royce‘s alternate engine for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Congress has reversed the Pentagon’s past attempts to halt those programs.
An internal Pentagon budget document cites these and five other efforts that the administration wants to cancel.
“In terms of other big cuts coming, we don’t see a lot that’s left that they might want to cut,” Harrison told reporters.
Looking several years into the future, Harrison predicted the factor that will change defense procurement spending more than anything else is whether the Pentagon starts new weapons program.
“The existing programs will continue and they’ll run their course, but reductions in procurement would come from just not starting many new programs in the future,” he said.
Thomas said that the Defense Department tends to husband resources for existing programs and then “commit infanticide so the money simply isn’t there for new starts related to the new challenges that it faces.”
“This is I think an area where it’s possible to see a disconnect between the strategic direction the (Defense) Department goes and the budget, where you see an emphasis on new- priority mission areas but you don’t necessarily see a robust migration of funding to those areas,” he said.
Harrison said he will pay particular attention to the Pentagon’s proposal for the Lockheed Martin [LMT] F-35, because some of the money that would have been dedicated to procuring the aircraft may be shifted to additional development work to iron out problems. If such a shift is proposed, he said, the per-aircraft cost could rise because of reduced economies of scale.
“We expect to see a lot of movement here with the Joint Strike Fighter program,” he said.
He also cited anticipation about the administration’s proposals regarding: overall Navy shipbuilding funding, buying missile interceptors, and starting new programs such as a next-generation bomber.