Surviving the Budget Cuts
By G. Philip Hughes & Mark Davis
Texas Insider Report: WASHINGTON D.C. Quick: What do millions of turkeys & the U.S. defense community have in common? Answer: Come the day before Thanksgiving the ax will fall on both. By Nov. 23 the 12 members of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction - the Super Committee -
must announce $1.5 trillion in federal budget cuts for the next decade measures which both houses of Congress must approve or reject in straight up or down votes.
If Congress approves the committees recommendations the Department of Defense will likely lose 100s of billions of dollars from its 10-year budget projections on top of several recent rounds of deep cuts.
If Congress doesnt pass the measure automatic cuts go into effect - and about half of those cuts must come from defense.
Either way defense faces a mauling.
Having a defense secretary as politically astute as Leon Panetta may blunt the impact. But Panetta is going to be hard-pressed to prevent damage to readiness and modernization while simultaneously recapitalizing a military worn out by two wars.
Vital Role
In the complex challenges that U.S. defense faces the contractor community will have an important - and unaccustomed - role in ensuring a positive outcome for future U.S. military dominance.
To understand why consider the three broad forces that can divert defense spending from wise military priorities.
- The ambitions of the military services. While generals and admirals care deeply about an effective defense the appetite of service bureaucracies for major new program starts whether its a replacement armored fighting vehicle for the Army or a new class of
littoral combat ships for the Navy is ill-timed for todays budget climate. This appetite in turn reinforces the tendency to preserve and replicate force structure along historic lines.
- Constituency influence in Congress. Here most commonly the impulse is to continue procurement of established weapon programs often beyond the point at which the secretary of defense or the services themselves deem necessary. This impulse is understandably strong in a high-unemployment sluggish economy. But it can be especially wasteful in an environment of constrained budgets.
- The defense contractor community. Firms in the field perhaps especially the major systems integrators favor past major contract wins which they hope will continue producing revenue and new technological opportunities which can alert the military services to more potent combat capabilities and become new program starts.
In this era of severe constraints contractors can help the military services and their civilian bosses achieve the right mix of legacy and new capabilities that is both affordable and responsive to emerging threats.
What Kind of Threats Await?
But thats the proverbial $64000 question: Just what are those threats? Will the next few decades portend more of the same: brief intense military operations to defeat smaller and less capable forces in developing countries followed by long years of occupation counterinsurgency training and institution-building?
Or might we confront very different challenges? Perhaps the need to surgically disarm a much smaller but suddenly dangerous nuclear power?
Or to come to the aid of an ally unexpectedly threatened by the conventional forces of a much larger power creating a set-piece confrontation of conventional armies air forces and navies?
Or to halt a genocide in progress in a Third World locale in which we had never previously imagined operating?
Or to deal with a nation in the process of mounting a determined attack on our space assets or cyber networks vital to national security and increasingly to our economy?
In the welter of parochial interests that influence the U.S. defense program and budget - particularly in tough economic times - the contractor community can play an invaluable role in helping Panetta and the military services find effective answers to their looming conundrum.
Contractors can help the services get real about what is possible in the current fiscal environment such as life-extension programs and enhancements to existing systems in lieu of major new program starts or the judicious combining of existing systems with game-changing but affordable new technologies.
Contractor advocacy which will be more important than ever will have to go beyond merely extolling the virtues of current prime contract performance or demonstrating team spirit by helping customers with their program advocacy.
More productive contractor advocacy will help defense to focus and to focus Congress on truly critical even missing capabilities and on smarter and more efficient even unorthodox ways of delivering them.
Ambassador G. Philip Hughes a former executive secretary of the National Security Council and Mark Davis a former White House speechwriter and author of the book Digital Assassination. Both are senior directors of the White House Writers Group.
