The military services have submitted their fiscal year 2016 Program Objective Memoranda (POMs) to the Office of the Secretary of Defense to begin the process of adding and subtracting to develop a balanced total force, Pentagon acquisition chief Frank Kendall said at ComDef 2014 on Wednesday.
The services submitted budgets at the spending level projected in the FY ‘15 president’s budget, a higher level than would be allowable if Congress does not stop sequestration from returning in FY ’16, Kendall said.
Kendall, the under secretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, said he and his staff got the first look at the POMs on Tuesday and had already begun identifying concerns in their purview. Other comparable offices in OSD would examine other parts of the budget using the same process. The OSD staffs will raise issues with the service budgets, meet with Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work to discuss resolving most issues and save the highest strategic decisions for meetings with Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel.
Kendall said his staff already had a thick stack of issue papers identifying “all the things that my staff in AT&L, to say nothing of all the other staffs in the secretary of defense’s office, thinks should be in the budget but aren’t there. So that’s a big stack of paper, every one of them is an add–there has to be a subtraction if there’s going to be an add because this is a zero-sum game–and I sent out a note to my staff this morning saying your job just got a little harder because I’m not accepting any issues for adds without the subtractions that allow us to pay for it,” he said at the conference.
At the same time, others at the Pentagon will conduct strategic portfolio reviews to cover topics like the strategic deterrent force, space, power projection and other cross-service mission areas. Each review group will develop a list of adds but is not required to submit corresponding subtractions.
Given all the services’ needs in a tough budget environment, Kendall said it would be a challenge to create a final product that incorporated the services’ needs, addressed the OSD issues raised and aligned with the current defense strategy–even at the president’s budget level, let alone at sequester levels.
Further complicating the effort at the Pentagon is the likely reaction it will get from Congress.
“There’s the problem, of course, with Congress agreeing to anything that we want to do which will save money,” Kendall said. Last year the defense budget request aimed to reduce the growth rate of compensation, conduct another round of Base Realignment and Closure, retire aircraft fleets, restructure Army aviation platforms and more, but “the answer to all of these so far seems to be basically no from the Congress.”
“When you pile all this up, Secretary Work and Secretary Hagel have a very tough job getting it all into something that’s consistent with our strategy this fall, again at the president’s budget level,” Kendall said.