By Carlo Munoz
The Pentagon will look to base its plan to cut roughly $400 billion in spending over the next 12 years around a key department review of the miltary’s roles and missions, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said yesterday.
Defense Department officials will use the various conflict scenarios from its Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) as a starting point for what promises to be a painful budget exercise to bring the Pentagon in line with the White House’s plan to reduce the national debt.
Last week, President Barack Obama laid out a plan to cut $400 billion in defense spending by 2023 as part of a larger roadmap to shave a total of $4 trillion in federal spending over that same time frame (Defense Daily, April 14). “Over the last two years, (Defense) Secretary Bob Gates has courageously taken on wasteful spending, saving $400 billion in current and future spending,” Obama said at the time. “I believe we can do that again.”
Gates told reporters yesterday that the worst-case scenario for the department would be if those cuts were issued indiscriminately across the board. That approach to defense spending reductions, Gates said, led to the hollowing out of national security priorities under the Clinton administration.
Across the board reductions have “no evident consequences” when carried out, according to Gates, who added that option would be “the easy thing” to do to get to the president’s $400 billion goal, but leave the department at a disadvanatge.
The only way the administration’s proposed cuts to national defense can be met, without a return to the mid-1990s, is to ensure that cost and capability consequences are weighed against recommended reductions, according to Gates.
“I want to frame this so it is not a math exercise,” he said, adding that any cut or reduction must be “driven by the analysis.” That analysis will begin by taking the various combat and threat scenarios outlined in the latest QDR, according to Gates.
Using those scenarios as a base, DoD planners will then hash out what kinds of missions will be critical to those scenarios, and, more importantly, how many platforms and personnel will be needed to support those missions.
Despite using the QDR as a baseline for DoD deliberations on its deficit reduction plans, Gates was adamant that the exercise would not devolve “into a mini-QDR.” Instead, it would result in difficult decisions “that [will] need to be teed up for the president.”