Nice knowing you, Navy surface combatant

According to Reuters, the forthcoming Fiscal Year (FY) 2011 defense budget “foresees spending about $4 billion over the next five years to maintain the U.S. bomber industrial base, study plans for a possible new bomber, and upgrade existing B-2 and B-52 bombers.” Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition Ashton Carter said yesterday that when it comes to details about the new bomber, "We will provide an answer on what comes next on that within the next year." Secretary Gates said previously that the new bomber would likely get around $1 billion in FY 2011.

At a HASC subcommittee hearing yesterday, CBO analyst Eric Labs said that building 12 new SSBN(X) ballistic missile submarines to replace the 14 Ohio-class subs could cost around $85 billion, with the lead ship costing $11 billion and subsequent ships costing $7 billion apiece. More modern construction techniques could help hold down costs; however, increased labor and material costs, the enhanced capabilities of all Navy subs, and the current low rate of ship construction (i.e. fixed overhead costs spread over fewer ships) might push costs upward.

At the same hearing, CRS analyst Ronald O’Rourke made the point that if the Navy pays for the new SSBN(X) out of its regular shipbuilding budget, it would have to steal money from other programs. This could reduce the total number of ships the Navy is able to procure by 56 (20 percent) and “make a substantial consolidation of some kind of the surface ship construction industrial base a distinct possibility, if not a likelihood,” according to O’Rourke. To deal with this problem, the Navy has started asking whether or not an individual service like the Navy should be responsible for spending so much of its own budget on “force structure elements that serve a national mission of strategic nuclear deterrence,” as O’Rourke put it. Loren Thompson suggested to HASC the creation of a “separate, strategic funding” category for the SSBN(X) that would keep it separate from other shipbuilding programs, a model similar to how the Department of Energy pays for U.S. nuclear warheads even though they are fielded aboard DOD-financed delivery vehicles.

One last thing covered at the hearing was the issue of ship requirements for the Obama administration's rejiggered plan for U.S. missile defense in Europe (yeah, we might consider Aegis missile defense a "strategic" budget priority now). For more detail, read what both Labs and O'Rourke said.

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Nukes on a Blog, Table Scraps, Iran Watch, Missile Defense, Defense Spending, Posture Review, Acquisition, Navy, Air Force (all tags)

December and January are when the Pentagon, OMB, and the White House put the finishing touches on the defense budget request for the upcoming fiscal year. These months are great because of all the leaks, misinformation, spin, and half-assed speculation that accompany the few nuggets of truly reliable information.

In what appears to be a golden nugget, Defense News last week reported that the Obama administration plans to add $100 billion to the defense budget between 2011 and 2015. This infusion of funds will mean that the defense budget will increase above and beyond the effects of inflation. In contrast, this year’s FY 2010 budget projected future spending increasing only enough to keep up with inflation.

For insight about what this spending increase might mean, Defense News TV yesterday interviewed one of the most informed, least spun, and best connected defense observers in Washington: Gordon Adams, aka “The Don Corleone of Defense Budgets.” Adams was frank about the contradiction between spending increases and acquisition reforms:

As a bottom line, you get no reform when you increase the budget…If the objective here is a real reform in acquisition, or a real reform in management, or a real reform in operations programs, you’re not going to get it when you’re increasing the budget. That’s just an iron law.

Watch it:

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Security Matters, Defense Spending, Acquisition (all tags)

Shhh, be quiet

At FAS, Hans Kristensen’s got the goods...

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Nukes on a Blog, China, Acquisition, Navy (all tags)

The Obama administration promised “a sweeping shift of priorities and resources in the national security arena.” The sixth annual Report of the Task Force on a Unified Security Budget for the United States, FY 2010 finds that the promise of resource shifting has not yet been kept.

From the press release:

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Security Matters, Acquisition, Defense Spending (all tags)

Discussing U.S. defense plans with the House Armed Services Committee yesterday, CBO’s Matthew Goldberg echoed a common refrain: we don’t have enough money to do everything we want to do.

Excluding costs for Afghanistan and Iraq, the average annual budget required to carry out current U.S. defense plans will be $567 billion between 2011 and 2028, according to CBO. That funding level is six percent ($33 billion) greater than the Obama administration’s FY 2010 request of $534 billion...

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Security Matters, Acquisition, Defense Spending (all tags)

The Pentagon is evaluating why protests over weapons contracts increased by 24 percent in 2008. The brouhaha over the Air Force refueling tanker last year was an obvious factor, but there are larger forces at work, too...

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Security Matters, Acquisition, Defense Spending (all tags)

CACNP Fellow Christopher Hellman, who was in town to brief his new primer on military spending, made an interesting observation yesterday about war funding in the Obama administration.

For years, budget analysts railed on the Bush administration for submitting its war funding requests outside of the normal budget process (i.e. as supplementals). Supplementals undermined budget planning and eroded congressional oversight by omitting detailed documentation, obscuring the basis of requests and viable funding alternatives, and failing to portray accurately the long-term costs associated with military operations. When the Obama administration routed its war requests through the regular order, we applauded the move.

As Chris pointed out yesterday, however, bundling war requests with the “base” Pentagon budget presents President Obama with a political problem. Right now, the administration wants to keep certain congressional add-ons out of the appropriations bill. So it is threatening a veto. Yet carrying out this threat would require Obama to veto not only the objectionable add-ons in the “base” budget, but also the entire tranche of war funding that is part and parcel of the bill. In other words, executing the veto threat to keep pork out of the bill would require Obama to delay funding for troops in the field, which is a political death sentence.

There’s not really a work-around for this problem, unless you want to rehash fights over the line item veto. All the White House can do is work the Hill to try and keep pork out of the bill in the first place. But that’s probably a lost cause this late in the FY 2010 cycle.

(Title from this one by the Mighty Mos, which I’ve been looping for 2 days)

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Security Matters, Iraq & Afghanistan, Congress, Defense Spending, Acquisition (all tags)

Isn’t it inappropriate for the Boston Globe to publish an op-ed advocating the construction of new aircraft carriers when the author works at a consulting firm that represents Northrop Grumman, the company responsible for carrier construction?

The Globe committed this exact sin today by running Christopher Lehman’s op-ed, “Keeping the Aircraft Carrier Fleet Afloat.” The Globe did not even bother to disclose the author’s financial stake in the position he was arguing, which at least would have helped readers evaluate Lehman’s credibility (or lack thereof) as a dispassionate analyst. I might have failed to notice Lehman’s conflict of interest, such an occurrence being so common today, except that his argument was utterly unpersuasive.

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Security Matters, Navy, Acquisition, Defense Spending (all tags)

Defense Secretary Robert Gates wants to institutionalize the procurement of irregular warfare capabilities so they can be quickly fielded when needed. In a new case study of the mine resistant ambush protected (MRAP) vehicle, Christopher Lamb, Matthew Schmidt, and Berit Fitzsimmons convey the urgency of Gates’s mission.

From their new article in JFQ (the longer paper is here):

Once senior leadership validated the requirement and provided resources, the acquisition system fielded large numbers of MRAPs within 18 months—an accomplishment often described as an industrial feat not seen since World War II [however] the long delay [before] fielding MRAPs is attributable first to the Pentagon’s force development or requirements system, second to Service cultures that generally undervalue irregular warfare capabilities, and finally to the Pentagon’s decisionmaking structure and processes, which typically favor specialization over integration of diverse areas of expertise to solve complex problems.

The consequences of bureaucratic inertia were tragic. Look:

(Brown line on top is actual fatalities; gray line underneath is fatalities with deployed MRAPs achieving a 65 percent “save rate”)

Not that mass MRAP acquisition was without problems. Major questions must be asked about the total quantity procured, the cost, the timing, the effectiveness in COIN operations, and the vehicle’s utility in operations outside Iraq. Nonetheless, if the requirement for MRAPs had been identified and acted upon when IEDs first became an escalating menace in 2004, we would have saved lives.

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Security Matters, Iraq & Afghanistan, Acquisition (all tags)