By Marina Malenic
A top Pentagon official this week again pressed Congress to pass a budget for the fiscal year that began four months ago.
“We do not have an appropriations bill for fiscal year ’11,” said Ashton Carter, the Defense Department’s chief arms buyer. “What that means is that each and every program manager in the department is having to upset carefully calibrated plans, stop or slow activities, only to restart them later.
“The result is not only delay, it’s inefficient and uneconomical to proceed in this herky-jerky fashion,” he added. “It adds a dollop of cost overhead to everything we do.”
Carter spoke at a Feb. 23 event in Washington sponsored by the Center for a New American Security.
The federal government has been operating under continuing resolutions maintaining FY ’10 budget levels since FY ’11 began Oct. 1. If no funding plan can be approved after March 4, when the current continuing resolution expires, the federal government would partially shut down.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said earlier this week that he wants to extend by another month the FY ’11 budget close to FY ’10 levels. Republican leaders in the House countered that they also will pursue such a short-term fix, but only with spending cuts further below FY ’10 amounts (Defense Daily, Feb. 23).
Carter also emphasized the need for the department to buy products and services more efficiently, given fiscal constraints.
“Our first effort has to be at affordability, and that has to be for new programs we’re beginning and ones we’ve already begun,” he said.
For example, the next-generation ballistic missile submarine that will replace the Ohio-class nuclear submarine in the 2020s will have to cost approximately $4.9 billion apiece instead of the initially projected $7 billion.
“If the Navy spent that much, ($7 billion per submarine), in the period 2020 to 2030 on the SSBN(X), it wouldn’t be able to buy any other ships,” Carter said.
The Navy has been reexamining the “drivers of the design” closely, according to Carter, and “began to shape the design with affordability as a requirement.”
The cost now is down to about $6 billion per submarine, with a target of $4.9 billion, he added.
He said this system is being applied to all new weapons program and that existing programs are also being scrutinized closely to make sure that “the taxpayer is getting a good deal.”