Gee, this sounds familiar. This is not the first time that DOD has had to plan for a short-term funding shortage. In the summer of 1994, with refugee operations ramping up in Goma and an intervention in Haiti in the planning stages, DOD was running out of funds.
In anticipation, we had to do all the things mentioned above, especially in the operations accounts: slow down training, consider furloughs, defer maintenance, slow the speed at which equipment went through the repair depots.
We even had recourse to the famous Feed and Forage Act from Civil War days, allowing the military to spend funds without an appropriation. Then, in the middle of the next budget year, we refilled the pots with appropriated funds, in the middle of an overall defense drawdown.
So it is not a crisis, it is sound contingency planning. And it is an excellent first step toward bringing budget and management discipline to the Pentagon. We are in a drawdown today. Fiscal and planning prudence is a necessary and good thing.
The services might even discover in the process of preparing these plans that there are temporary civilian employees they don't really need, activities that can slow down for good as we come out of Afghanistan, maintenance that can be deferred because it is not needed for a smaller force, and civil service and military positions that are unnecessary (over a third of the active duty military never deploys).
It is a good idea to start with sweeping out the cluttered back office. But the memo barely scratches the surface on the other challenges in a drawdown. It barely mentions contracts. It only says protect procurement if it is directly related to combat operations (sensible) or tied to the Pacific pivot strategy (dangerous, as it tempts the services to call every program part of the pivot).
And for those contracts supposedly endangered by a sequester, it only asks the services to minimize disruption and added costs, which suggests that procurement contracts are not seriously threatened by sequester. That's consistent; sequester would not affect funding already tied to existing contracts. But drawdown planning will have to put hardware choices on the table, a next step that will be confronted in the forthcoming Quadrennial Defense Review.
And the memo does not deal with military personnel issues at all. Active duty forces and their benefits (as well as those for retirees) are untouched by sequester. But this third rail will have to be dealt with in a drawdown, including shrinking the force further (including jobs in the back office), and revisiting the healthcare and retirement systems.
Sequester is not doomsday, as the Carter memo makes clear. There is a lot of room at DOD for this kind of fiscal discipline. With luck and planning, the next secretary can make a silk purse out of the sequester sow's ear.
SUBJECTS:
