The Defense Department in its last two budget requests identified $238 billion in “efficiencies” that could help it spend less through 2017, but it is a mistake to call them savings, analysts from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments said.
Leaders will have to come up with a mix of different ideas and make much tougher decisions than they have been willing to thus far in order to close the gap between dwindling resources and increasing threats to national security, CSBA analysts told reporters June 21 at their Washington D.C. office.
“The wolf is now at the door,” CSBA President Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr. said. “You’re going to have to think a lot more creatively if you’re going to get through this period without really increasing the risk to security.”
Krepinevich compared the oft-invoked efficiencies to fool’s gold. Historically, the Defense Department rarely realizes the savings it says it can achieve, he said.
When Donald Rumsfeld became defense secretary in 2001, he spoke about cutting the defense budget by 5 percent through efficiencies, but expenditures only increased, noted Todd Harrison, a senior fellow for defense budget studies at CSBA.