By Marina Malenic
The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has given the Pentagon a list of possible cuts to major weapons programs–among them a recommendation to delay the Air Force’s aerial refueling replacement fleet, a top Defense Department official confirmed yesterday.
However, no decision on the tanker program’s fate has been made, said the department’s deputy comptroller, Kevin Scheid.
“We take all of OMB’s recommendations seriously, but it was a recommendation,” he told reporters at a conference sponsored by Aviation Week and McAleese & Associates. “It’s been picked up with more significance than it probably needed to be.”
Congressional Quarterly first reported on Tuesday that the White House had instructed the Pentagon to delay the contract by five years.
OMB denied that the White House had directed a program delay.
“OMB did not direct the Defense Department to delay the new tanker,” Ken Baer, a spokesman for the agency, told Defense Daily yesterday. “Reports that suggest the OMB made such recommendations are simply wrong.”
Meanwhile, Pentagon officials were meeting yesterday to reconcile the department’s programs within the $533.7 billion fiscal year 2010 budget laid out by the Obama administration, according to defense officials with knowledge of the process.
Scheid acknowledged that there is still some trimming to be done on procurement expenditures and that the sum total of cuts “will not be a trivial amount.” However, he added, even more significant cuts are likely to come in future cycles with guidance from the Quadrennial Defense Review.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates and other officials have said they expect to complete that major analysis of weapons programs by the end of next month.
Further, Scheid said Gates has made clear that does not want “salami-slicing” efforts to shave small amounts money from programs across the board. Instead, according to Scheid, the secretary is ready to make the difficult trade-offs on programs based on strategic needs–suggesting that some major programs could be terminated.
“He wants to do this in a strategic and thoughtful way so that we can best prepare for the threats that we’re going to face in the future,” Scheid said.
Gates has repeatedly said he favors “75 percent solutions in greater quantities” over the “exquisite” systems that are the most expensive and time-consuming to procure. Marine Gen. James Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has often referred to programs such as the Air Force’s F-22 Raptor fighter jet and the Army’s massive modernization program, the Future Combat Systems, as “exquisite” systems.
Scheid added that the administration would submit a complete FY ’10 budget package to Congress on April 20 or 21.