Players in budget war game plot $500B in Defense cuts

Wednesday - 11/28/2012, 12:17pm EST

Jared Serbu, DoD reporter, Federal News Radio

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Mark Gunzinger, senior fellow, CSBA


"We saw every approach. We saw groups that were truly strategy-driven, listening to the future first, all the way to people who said, 'Well, this is the way the building works so we'll work this way too. We'll cut everything, everyone will share pain and now we have a budget,'" he said during a briefing with reporters Tuesday. "That's not terribly well-driven by strategy. In fact, failure to make real strategic choices is essentially the same thing as sequestration."

Looking 10 years down the road



"They decided not to start the process by saying, 'All right, what are we going to cut?' Because if you do that, you've got your airpower guy saying you can't cut aircraft, you've got your seapower guy saying you can't cut ships and everybody's on the defensive," he said.

"Instead they said, 'All right, what's important in the future? What are we going to add money to?' Everyone decided what they thought the really critical capabilities for the future would be. Everybody got to win. Everyone got to pick the winners. Then they said, 'All right, now we've run up a bill and we're going to have to get rid of some things.' But everybody already got what they wanted, so they were willing to give up more, even in their own pet areas that they might otherwise have been protective of."

Other groups basically followed the Pentagon's standard budgeting formula and began with the idea that cuts had to be made rather than starting with investments in the military's most important joint priorities. They essentially gridlocked while trying to protect all of their own programs and cuts were made more or less evenly across the military's programs in order to meet the half-trillion dollar savings target.


"There was not a lot of consensus around the table. People's arms were crossed. It was like, 'If you're going to do that to me, I'm going to this to you," he said. "It was the service-centric approach you would expect out of DoD. And there was a lot of dissatisfaction at the end, because the other teams had cut more deeply but they used that money to invest in new capabilities. These teams were sitting there saying, 'Man, I wish we had that.'"

Identifying DoD's 'crown jewels'

But as far as what capabilities the military will need in the future, the teams had a fair amount of agreement. CSBA asked the experts to identify the military's "crown jewel" priorities that shouldn't be scaled back under any circumstances.


Todd Harrison, senior fellow, Defense Budget Studies, CSBA

They also concurred that some programs would have to endure reduced funding, including the Pentagon's most expensive weapons program, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

"Their reasoning was that it might give time for the program to mature a little bit more before we proceed with full-scale procurement," Gunzinger said. "One team cancelled the F-35 outright, reasoning that the new kinds of scenarios we have ahead of us in the Pacific with very long ranges and challenges to our forward bases give less support to short-range aircraft."


"All of the teams made significant cuts, ranging from 20 to 40 percent reductions in the civilian workforce. I can't necessarily say that's part of a strategy, but it is something that all the teams went to when they needed more resources," he said.

Gunzinger and Harrison said it's not surprising that the teams found ways to cut DoD's budget. After all, they said, that gradual $519 billion cut would be roughly in line with previous downturns in defense spending following the conclusion of wars. The interesting part, they noted in a report based on the exercise, was that at least a couple of teams found ways to start with a strategy and build a budget around it.


"The point still is that the services develop their [program operating memoranda] independently, and then they're reviewed by the [Office of the Secretary of Defense] at the end of the budget process. So, there's a lot of momentum behind those budget submissions already by the time they start to have the strategic choices discussion," he said. "If you have that discussion up front, before the POMs are developed, it might actually drive some different investments."

Picking budget winners first


"If you want to begin with the end in mind, if you want to think ahead to the future and then work backwards into what you need to be doing today, that's got to be a joint thing. You can't have services doing it independently, it won't work," Harrison said. "If you want to pick the winners first, again, this has got to be a joint exercise from the beginning."

"This isn't just our opinion, this came out of the teams," said Gunzinger. "We discussed the process and the way things were, and the teams acknowledged, 'Gosh, that's kind of not the way we do it today.'"


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