Pentagon aims to find $100B in savings

The Pentagon leadership has started a sweeping effort to free up about
$100 billion over the next five years to maintain current fighting
forces and to modernize weapons systems.

Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn on Friday said the
goal is to find more savings within the defense budget without cutting
the top-line number. Pentagon leaders are eying 2 to 3 percent
real growth in the Pentagon’s budget for the areas that need it most:
force structure and modernization, Lynn told reporters at a Pentagon
briefing Friday.

{mosads}Not including war funds for Afghanistan and Iraq, the Obama
administration requested $548.9 billion for fiscal 2011. The White
House has told the Pentagon to expect a growth of about one percent in
the budget over the next several years.

But Lynn said that based on past experience about 2 to 3
percent real growth would be necessary to “give the troops what they
need to do their very best.”

Two-thirds of the $100 billion
cost savings spread out over the next five years will come from
trimming overhead on a department-wide basis. That money will be directly
transferred into the force structure and modernization accounts, Lynn
explained.

The rest of the cost savings would come from “developing
efficiencies within those force structure and modernization accounts,”
he added.

“If we’re able to reduce overhead accounts where we
don’t need those increases, shift it to the force structure and
modernization accounts, we can get that 2 to 3 percent [real growth]
and we can do what we think we need to do in technology refresh,
modernization, protecting quality of life and all those critical
factors.”

Lynn warned that in order to get to the $100 billion in savings the
Pentagon leadership and the military services will have to identify
“lower priority programs” that are not going to be part of future
budgets.

The departments of the Army, Air Force and Navy, which also includes
the Marine Corps, as well as the combatant commands are expected to
report their savings proposals by July 31 as the Pentagon prepares
its budget request for Congress.

For example, the military departments are each expected to find $2
billion non-essential costs for fiscal 2012. In turn, the services would
be able to transfer those savings to their modernization efforts and
their forces.

Lynn on Friday basically fleshed out Defense Secretary Robert
Gates’s major initiative to reduce Pentagon bloat and scrutinize the
defense budget. Gates unveiled his initiative in a major speech last
month at the Eisenhower Library in Abilene, Kan.

“The secretary very much wants to get started early and establish
momentum for this,” Lynn said on Friday. “So I think you will see
decisions over the course of the summer and the fall, at least to start
down the path of overhead reductions and efficiency savings.”

Lynn also said President Barack Obama and the director of the Office
of Management and Budget are strongly backing the cost savings
initiatives.