By Emelie Rutherford
A senior Pentagon advisor yesterday described the Pentagon’s healthcare, retirement, and personnel systems as ticking time bombs that must be overhauled to avoid a budget catastrophe.
Retired Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Arnold Punaro also acknowledged the budgetary problems caused by the Pentagon’s “procurement processes and programs, where the dollars increase while the quantities decrease.” And he spoke favorably, during a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, about Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ so-called efficiencies initiative to save money within the Pentagon’s budget.
Yet Punaro, in a blunt morning speech, called most forcefully for changes to be made in military benefits.
Punaro, a former executive at SAIC [SAI], headed up an independent Defense Business Board task force that recommended cost-saving measures to Gates, some of which ended up as part of the new efficiency effort.
“The military has generated a General Motors-style system of fringe benefits and deferred compensation” that is not sustainable, Punaro said.
He said the nation’s greatest challenge is not the two-part military mission in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“Our greatest challenge is strengthening the U.S. military in a weak economy that rests on the quicksand of deficit spending,” he said.
The No. 1 “ticking time bomb,” he said, is the alarming state of the country’s finances as a whole, considering the $1.3 trillion deficit this fiscal year.
Punaro noted how Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Michael Mullen has been saying in speeches that national debt is a national security threat.
“You cannot have a strong defense in a rotten economy,” Punaro said.
Punaro said how the Pentagon spends money, in its budget that takes up a huge proportion of mandatory federal spending, must be more carefully scrutinized.
He called for looking more at the outputs of Pentagon spending, and making hard decisions about the retirement age, medical bureaucracy, and services such as schools and grocery stores.
“We are not getting the bang for the buck we need in warfighting capability,” he said.
He noted if the Pentagon’s $212 billion in overhead spending were a gross domestic product, it would be larger than Israel’s economy.