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Time for Pentagon to do more with less

If there remains any doubt that the Defense Department and services need to overhaul the way they develop and buy weapons systems, look no further than the Navy’s 15-year effort to build a 65-foot minisub for its SEAL commando teams.

Years of requirements creep and development problems caused costs to soar on the Advanced SEAL Delivery System, which finally entered service in 2006. Two years later, a fire so badly damaged the Northrop Grumman-built craft that the Navy decided it wasn’t worth repairing.

Ultimately, $1 billion was squandered to build the ASDS, and that doesn’t include the cost of modifying attack and guided-missile submarines to carry the vehicle.

The Pentagon must do better, especially with defense spending poised to shrink.

Yes, that’s shrink, not flatten. Optimists who hoped for merely flat budgets got a hard dose of reality recently when a key defense official, David Ochmanek, admitted that current military hardware commitments exceed the administration’s spending plans by $50 billion to $60 billion over the next five years.

Ochmanek, deputy assistant secretary of defense for force transformation and resources, said cuts would be made judiciously. He also said the Pentagon might consider asking the White House for more money.

There’s no doubt the Pentagon will have to ask. The question is where the money will be found, given hard financial realities and the administration’s policies.

The stratospheric budget deficits of the Bush years now border on the exoatmospheric and are poised to grow with the expected adoption of health care reform in the fall. Meanwhile, the Army is about to add another 22,000 soldiers, with all the attendant personnel costs.

To make matters worse, pulling out of Iraq and increasing troop levels in Afghanistan will cost tens of billions of dollars over the coming years.

At the moment, these coming costs are unaccounted for in the budget.

It’s not just domestic forces that will shape the U.S. defense agenda. International pressure is coming from the very country that some in the Pentagon fear may be a future adversary.

At a financial summit in late July, the administration reassured a worried China that Washington will rein in its debt to preserve the value of Beijing’s current and future purchases of American debt.

With supplemental funding on the decline, the gunsight of savings will be trained on discretionary spending, the largest chunk of which contains military research and development, and procurement. The military services already have been asked to offer up sacrificial lambs.

All of this means that recent cuts and cancellations to programs like the F-22 fighter, presidential helicopter and DDG 1000 destroyer could seem minor in comparison with what’s to come.

The Pentagon will have to craft a strategy that matches America’s defense ambitions to its budget. Doubtless, the ongoing Quadrennial Defense Review will lay the underpinning for cuts to come.

The bottom line: The days of lavish defense budgets are over. If America is to adequately equip its forces, it must figure out how to get more for less.