The Marine Corps shielded weapons accounts from cuts during a recent budget review intended to help the Pentagon find savings Congress mandated over the summer, the service’s Nov. 2 military leader said yesterday.
Assistant Commandant Gen. Joseph Dunford said that when his service underwent the multi-month spending analysis, intended to find $450 billion in Pentagon-wide reductions over a decade, Marine Corps officials maintained their modernization budget was too small and out of balance with its entire expenditures.
“When we drew down…to get to the level necessary to meet the bill that we were given in the $450 billion (bill), we very consciously did not touch procurement,” he said at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “On the contrary what we did was we took the money that we had available, we drew down in capacity…in order to maintain balance.”
The Marine Corps plans to lower its tally of trops from 202,000 to 186,800.
He said Marine Corps officials “very much protected modernization because we have historically been underfunded.”
Dunford told the Washington think tank audience about how the service examined its entire inventory of equipment and “mapped it back to capabilities” needed over 10-plus years.
“We identified the period when that equipment would have to be modernized in order to maintain a high state of readiness, and we went ahead and kind of made some investment decisions based on that,” he said.
Marine Corps officials–coming out of the strategic review intended to identify the $450 billion in overall defense savings–“believe we’re in a position to address…not necessarily those things we want, but we’re in a position to make sure that we’re in a position to address the requirements of all those things that we need,” he said.
Dunford said the service’s three top modernization priorities are tactical aviation, strategic and operational lift from the sea, and the ground-tactical vehicle fleet. Those categories include three high-profile development programs, which he cited: the service’s F-35B variant of the Joint Strike Fighter, the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV), and the Amphibious Combat Vehicle (ACV).
Lockheed Martin [LMT] makes the F-35, several industry teams have built competing JLTV prototypes, and the Marine Corps is conducting an analysis of alternatives (AoA) on options for the ACV, a replacement to General Dynamics’ [GD] canceled Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle.
The F-35B, which is currently in a probationary period because of technical glitches, is “a critical priority,” Dunford said.
Commandant Gen. James Amos met yesterday with the “leadership of the F-35 team” and continues to receive daily updates on the B variant’s progress, Dunford said.
The assistant commandant also made a pitch for Marine tactical aviation more broadly, noting the service has not “bought airplanes in a decade.”
“We absolutely believe in the A (standing for “air) in the Marine Air Ground Task Force,” he said.
For ground vehicles, Dunford maintained, the JLTV and ACV are both major priorities for the Marine Corps.
Service leaders are closely monitoring the JLTV effort in a manner akin to their oversight of the F-35B, Dunford said.
Marine Corps and Army officials agreed to revised JLTV requirements earlier this year that are intended to yield a more-affordable vehicle. They have succeeded in dropping the future vehicle’s projected price, once said to be as high as $800,000, down to roughly $240,000, Dunford said. He maintained all unnecessary requirements were removed and pledged to closely monitor “what’s driving the costs in that vehicle.”
The ACV’s AoA, meanwhile, is proceeding and should wrap up in the “spring,” he told reporters after his speech.
“We’ve prioritized that (program), we’ve made choices that are honest to get that,” he said. “So, one, we believe that’s necessary and, two, we believe we have a plan to get it.”
Dunford declined to speculate about how the Marine Corps would be impacted by so-called sequestration cuts that could reduce the Pentagon’s planned spending by nearly $1 trillion over the next decade.
Under the Budget Control Act of 2011, which Congress and the White House approved in August, the Pentagon’s spending plans will be reduced by roughly $450 billion over the next decade. The law says if the now-defunct Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction did not craft a plan for cutting more government-wide spending before Thanksgiving, a sequestration process would cut the Pentagon’s budget over the next decade by another $500 billion to $600 billion, starting in 2013. The committee failed, but it is unclear in Washington if those sequestration cuts will materialize or if lawmakers and the White House will agree on an alternate budget-cutting plan.
Dunford said yesterday that if the Marine Corps faced no more cuts beyond the initial $450 billion in the law, and the service maintained 186,000-plus Marines, service officials are confident “that we can maintain a proper modernization profile to stay ready over the next 12 or 15 years.”