Picking budget winners first
Gunzinger and Harrison said the most important lessons learned from the budget study groups are that DoD needs to think about the military the nation will need a decade from now when it builds a budget, and it has to pick budget winners before it decides where to cut. To do that, it also needs to take a holistic view of military capabilities rather than letting each service set its own wish list in stone.
“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.’”