By Marina Malenic
The military will have to make difficult spending decisions as the Pentagon’s budget growth begins to slow dramatically, the director of the Joint Staff said yesterday.
“The downward pressure on the defense budget is real,” said Vice Adm. William Gortney during a speech at the Air Force Association’s annual conference outside Washington.
“We’re in a position of having more missions than stuff, so low priority missions are going to suffer,” Gortney added. “We have to figure out the right balance and figure out where to take risks.”
Defense Secretary Robert Gates provided details earlier this week of his spending and productivity efficiency initiative (Defense Daily, Sept. 15). He has said that the ultimate goal of the effort is to redirect savings from overhead to other priorities over the next five years. Over the next five years, new program starts are expected to cost $50 billion, presenting an opportunity for substantial savings to be shifted to other priorities, Gates has said.
While creating “the right mix of people, equipment,” defense officials must ensure that the military can still “do those high-end missions,” Gortney said. The services must be prepared for low-end operations such as counterinsurgency missions, he said, but at the same time they cannot allow their core proficiencies to decay.
Gortney said the greatest challenge in the current budget environment is weighing “recapitalization versus current readiness.” He said the services are studying the recap problem closely.
The admiral said joint forces must learn to balance competing interests.
He added that the Pentagon must be flexible due to the evolving nature of military threats–particularly at a time of rapid technological change.
“If history has taught us anything, it’s that the next war will bear little resemblance to the past,” the admiral said. “There is no doubt that 15 years from now, we’ll talk about how we got it wrong in 2010.”
For example, he said air and sea power could again become prominent after a decade of protracted land wars. He said the Air Force and Navy are therefore focusing on strategic planning for an “air-sea battle concept.”
Close coordination and relationship-building are also is critical to joint forces, said Gortney. “But relationships are not built overnight, and they’re not built through e- mails and tweets,” he said.