By Emelie Rutherford
Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) would not immediately cut defense spending if elected president, but would scrutinize the affordability of acquisition efforts including the Army’s Future Combat Systems (FCS) program and national missile defense, a senior campaign adviser said yesterday.
Richard Danzig, a former Navy secretary under President Clinton, also cited concerns with Navy shipbuilding costs and quantities during a breakfast with the Defense Writers Group in Washington.
While Danzig said he does not “see defense spending declining in the first years of an Obama administration,” he said the military services’ desire for acquisition programs that may not be affordable is “evidently a big problem.”
“It’s a problem both in the affordability generally and it’s a problem in the acquisition system when you look at it,” he said, decrying the increase in over-budget defense programs under the Bush administration.
“You need to come to grips above all with the affordability issues and the requirements process,” he said. “The requirements need to be more appropriately fashioned, not only to the desire to buy the most modern equipment, but also to the realities of cost. And you then need to drive programs, I think, to conform to that cost decision.”
Danzig predicted there will be “gut-check issues to [address] with regard to particular weapon systems,” and said an Obama administration would “have to come to grips” with them.
The Army’s FCS program, he said, “needs to be looked at closely.” He noted the massive modernization effort–steered by Boeing [BA] and SAIC [SAI]–has “been criticized in Congress and cut periodically.”
The FCS and national missile defense efforts “are two examples of worthy programs that nonetheless [need] a serious scrub,” he said.
Danzig said he and Obama’s cohorts “have a strong view that national missile defense is a rewarding area and should be invested in.” However, he faulted former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for separating the Missile Defense Agency from the typical Pentagon acquisition processes.
Thus, missile defense is “an area that demands scrutiny,” Danzig said. “It should be used to the extent that it works, but it needs the normal checks and balances.”
On the planned missile defense sites in Poland and the Czech Republic, Danzig said the United States’ agreements with the two nations are “in the United States’ interest.” He said a “serious” conversation needs to be held with Russia to convince it the sites are not anti-Russian.
Danzig, who was Navy secretary from 1998 to 2001, said change is needed in other acquisition arenas including Navy shipbuilding.
“It’s just obvious that we’re not building enough [ships], and it’s apparent that our cost overruns are dramatic,” he said. Noting he’s been careful to “withdraw from the scene” since his departure nearly eight years ago, he added, “To the extent I’ve reengaged and looked at it, I see [it’s] clear that shipbuilding program doesn’t work. It doesn’t add up.”
Danzig’s comments come as an increasing number of officials on Capitol Hill and in the Pentagon are predicting the current credit crisis–and pricy bailout package lawmakers have weighed to address it–will put a crimp on defense spending. He was specifically asked yesterday if defense spending, which rose significantly in the Bush administration, would have to come down to accommodate spending on the so-called soft power and diplomacy Obama supports.
“I don’t see defense spending declining in the first years of an Obama administration,” Danzig said. “There are a set of demands there that are very severe, very important to our national wellbeing.”
He pointed to an “extraordinary imbalance between our the investments in hard power and our investments in soft power,” bu said the “kinds of dramatic increments in our investments in soft power that we’re talking about are…so small relative to the defense budget, that they really don’t figure into the fundamental math of the defense budget.”
For example, he said while the nation’s $10 billion annual investment in national missile defense is “warranted to some extent,” he noted the current spending on reducing the risk from loose nuclear weapons and policing nonproliferation regimes is less than $1 billion.
“So is that the right proportion for what you want in your defense budget?,” he said. “And look how you could increase the one by 50 percent if you reduce the other by 5 percent.”
On defense spending, Danzig cautioned that “the temptation is to invest in the issue du jour, or the cause du jour, and to overlook a lot of basics.”
He said the tendency in the context of Iraq is “to say, ‘Well, it’s just obvious that what we need is more counterinsurgency capability and more troops on the ground and the like.'”
He said he agrees more counterinsurgency capability is needed in the Army and the service needs more capability “to put boots on the ground in a variety of places.” However, he said, “it’s also the reality that lying behind that is our dominance of the air and our dominance of the sea, so that we can reinforce without difficulty, so that we can protect our troops on the ground and the like.”
“If we don’t invest in it, we’re not going to have it,” he added.
Danzig also pointed to the need to invest in new technologies including unmanned aerial vehicles and robotics, and to address cyberwarfare.
“Military force is like money in the bank,” he said. “It can be used for any number of different contingencies. It’s good, the more of it you have, the better off you are in terms of your military capability.”
He said the investment needs to be balanced between expanding the size of the military–to which he said Obama remains committed–and making needed investments in technology.
“This, of course, will raise the affordability issues, and I don’t mean to duck them, there’ll be hard questions there,” he said. “But the goal is balance.”
Obama’s Republican opponent for president, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), also has called for scrutinizing defense spending.