Posted by
Bull 67 on Wednesday, July 29, 2009 10:14:28
I predicted that the current administration's real defense budget would manifest this coming fiscal cycle. This story from Reuters states...
U.S. military services have been told to find savings of between $50 billion and $60 billion over five years in their current programs to fund new initiatives, a senior Pentagon official said on Tuesday.
David Ochmanek, deputy assistant secretary of defense for force transformation and resources, said the Pentagon had identified gaps in its capabilities and had told the services to fill them, while assuming no overall budget growth.
"It's now up to the components to figure out how best to make real those new capabilities and capacities and to find offsets within an assumption of zero real growth," Ochmanek told a group of defense reporters...
The Obama administration has asked Congress for $663.8 billion for the Pentagon for the 2010 fiscal year that begins Oct. 1, including $130 billion in war funding, mainly for the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Ochmanek said analysts working on the QDR had been told to assume zero growth in the defense budget but this did not necessarily mean there would be no increases.
Translation: The military must meet current obligations as well as new $50-60 billion in new requirements (about 1/2 the current Air Force budget) with no additional funding. Lets take the $130 billion for current wars out of the overall $663 billion. That leave $533 billion for force sustainment, modernization, fuel, manpower, etc. This is where the $60 billion will come from. That's a shift of 11% of the budget over a one-to-five year period. Since current missions won't suffer, it will most likely come out of modernization or personnel.
First, this is a massive alteration of our defense establishment. Second, what are these "new initiatives"?