Looking 10 years down the road
The think tank doesn’t endorse or decry any of the individual spending decisions any of the seven groups made, but CSBA did reach some conclusions from the project. Organizers gave high marks to two of the groups that decided to think about what capabilities the military as a whole will need for the next 10 years rather than running through the typical Pentagon budget process, which allows individual military services to set their own priorities and then submit them for approval to the defense secretary and later to OMB.
CSBA’s Todd Harrison said throwing those procedural stovepipes out the window turned out to be a huge breakthrough.
“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.
Harrison said once those groups saw what their more strategically-minded counterparts had done within the same fiscal parameters, they had quite a bit of remorse.
“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.’”