Signs of acquisition desperation inside the Pentagon
Wednesday, January 3, 2007 at 3:14PM ARTICLE: "War Costs, Loosely Defined: Pentagon Measure Stretches Concept of Emergency Spending," by Jonathan Karp, Wall Street Journal 3 January 2007, p. A5.
When big defense contractors start stuffing in small buys and extra funding for ongoing development programs (like ballistic missile defense) in supplementals, some smell a feeding frenzy, and certainly, there are elements of that. Oversight on these bills is limited, because the main subject is ongoing operations, not all the extras stuffed in, so inappropriate stuff (like those ballistic missiles we're using in Iraq?) slips by.
But I smell something more long term and profund. Everyone inside the Pentagon knows that budgetary spending will level off--by necessity--with whoever follows Bush (Mr. I-care-not-about-budget-deficits), and as we move out of Iraq, so will the opportunity for emergency spending. That combination, along with an inevitable and much needed shift in long-term spending from air assets to ground assets, or from smart weapons to smart soldiers, means the current squeezing of the "out years" (beyond the current stated plans, typically presented in five-year increments) is likely to grow worse with time. The losers in this struggle wil naturally call it a "procurement holiday," but the beneficiaries will call is matching assets to the environment.
Either way you want to describe it, I see this as another sign that the big programs are in greater danger, so contractors are grabbing what they can from the supplementals in the meantime to get as much produced as possible before cuts come, or to push programs along far enough as to make them harder to kill when the time logically comes.
This is a game being played in many dimensions.
Reader Comments (2)
The pilots who lead the Air Force need to understand that we can not afford to buy $250 million aircraft while the Army and Marines are taking the brunt of the punishment in Iraq.
So what will the Air Force do? They'll keep their plane purchases and slash the budget for Space (which in many ways, is not focused enough). While space assets need upgrades (e.g. SATCOM), we need to stop buying pie in the sky projects offered up by the military-industrial complex. Something is wrong when aircraft cost more than spacecraft, including launch... and no the spacecraft are not getting cheaper!
But I digress...