No More 'Off the Cuff' Budgets
By
Bob Brewin
Households and businesses run on rigorous budgets, but the Defense Department doesn't. During the past six years, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the department follows what he described on Monday as an "off the cuff" budget approach, to fund essential stuff such as intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance systems, mine-resistant vehicles and medical care for wounded soldiers.
Households and businesses run on rigorous budgets, but the Defense Department doesn't. During the past six years, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the department follows what he described on Monday as an "off the cuff" budget approach to fund essential stuff such as intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance systems, mine-resistant vehicles and medical care for wounded soldiers.
Defense paid for all of the above, as well as systems and equipment to counter roadside bombs, through war supplementals, which Gates views as a rather upside-down way to run a megabillion dollar enterprise.
Talking with students and faculty at the Marine War College in Quantico, Va., Gates commented, "Everything that I found that needed to be done for the warfighter had to be done outside the base budget and outside the regular bureaucracy of the Pentagon. It seemed to me strange that the Department of Defense engaged in two wars, had to do all this stuff, in essence, off the cuff and not as part of a regular program."
Gates was polite enough not to mention that this budget approach was pioneered by his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld.
Gates also criticized the services for fostering a culture focused on the campaigns of yesterday instead of focusing on the wars of the future. "The Army can't keep thinking about how it's going to fight the Fulda Gap or Desert Storm all over again. The Marines have not had a major amphibious landing since 1950. The Navy wants to fight Midway again. And the Air Force just loves to fly with pilots in the cockpit."
Instead, Gates said the services and top Defense managers need to focus on not only demands of combat today in Iraq and Afghanistan, but future conflicts that will not require exotic and costly systems such as F-22 fighters and high-tech Navy cruisers - the latter of which got delayed in Gates' proposed $533.7 billion fiscal 2010 budget.
I wonder if Congress can resist its own form of off-the-cuff budgeting when it starts to tinker with the Defense budget.