Pentagon Plans Steps to Reduce Budget and Jobs

NYT:

The potential savings Mr. Gates outlined are likely to be relatively modest in the context of a total Pentagon budget, including war fighting costs, projected to top $700 billion next year. The most significant step — in symbol and in substance — was his plan to close the military’s Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Va.

The command includes about 2,800 military and civilian positions supported by 3,000 contractors at an annual cost of $240 million. Its responsibilities, which include managing the allocation of global forces and running programs to press the armed services to work together on the battlefield, will be reassigned, mostly to personnel working under the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon.

Mr. Gates also called for a 10 percent annual reduction in spending on contractors who provide support services to the military, including money for intelligence-related contracts, and he placed a freeze on the number of workers in the office of the secretary of defense, other Pentagon supervisory agencies and the headquarters of the military’s combat commands.

And he went after one of the military’s most sacrosanct personnel structures, placing a cap on the number of generals, admirals and senior civilian positions.

Beyond that immediate freeze, the Defense Department will move to cut at least 50 general and admiral posts and 150 senior civilian positions over the next two years. There are now just under 1,000 general and flag officers, a growth of more than 100 since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

For months, Mr. Gates has been arguing that if Congress and the public allow the Pentagon budget to grow by 1 percent a year, he can find 2 percent or 3 percent in savings within the department’s bureaucracy to reinvest in the military — and that will be sufficient to meet long-term national security needs.

“Our country is still fighting two wars, confronts ongoing terrorist threats around the globe, and faces other major powers investing heavily in their military,” Mr. Gates said Monday. “It is important that we not repeat the mistakes of the past, where tough economic times or the winding down of a military campaign leads to steep and unwise reductions in defense.”

But members of Congress tend to fight to protect jobs and spending in their districts, and some of the proposed cuts — in particular eliminating the Joint Forces Command — are certain to earn strong opposition.

Just minutes after Mr. Gates announced his initiatives at a Pentagon news conference, Senator Jim Webb, a Virginia Democrat who is on the Armed Services Committee, released a statement vowing to “carefully examine the justifications for this decision as well as its implications for the greater Norfolk community.”

Representative Ike Skelton, the Missouri Democrat who is chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said the proposals “appear to efficiently find savings within the defense budget without taking away resources from our war fighters.”

But the ranking Republican on the committee, Representative Howard P. McKeon of California, said, he was unconvinced “that these savings will be reinvested into America’s defense requirements and not harvested by Congressional Democrats for new domestic spending and entitlement programs.”

Assessing his prospects for convincing Congress not to use its power over budgets to block these efforts, Mr. Gates said, “Hard is not impossible.”

Two other Defense Department agencies will also be closed, with their functions eliminated or reassigned. They are the office of the assistant secretary of defense for networks and information integration, with 200 employees, and the Business Transformation Agency, with 350 people.

Pentagon spending has averaged a growth rate of 7 percent a year over the last decade, adjusted for inflation (or nearly 12 percent a year without adjusting), including the costs of the wars. Mr. Obama has asked Congress for an increase in total spending next year of 2.2 percent, to $708 billion — 6.1 percent higher than the peak in the Bush administration.

Mr. Gates bemoaned that “this department is awash in taskings for reports and studies,” and he ordered a freeze on the number of such internal assessments. For those that remain and others ordered by Congress, the Pentagon will publish the cost of preparation in each document.

Mr. Gates has already canceled or trimmed several dozen weapons programs, with long-term savings, based on projections of what the programs would have cost, predicted at $330 billion.

Mr. Gates has ordered the armed services and the Pentagon’s agencies to find $100 billion in spending cuts and efficiencies over the next five years: $7 billion for 2012, growing to $37 billion annually by 2016.

Mr. Gates was asked at the end of his briefing what would happen to Gen. Ray Odierno, who is ending a command tour in Iraq to take over the Joint Forces Command, now slated to be closed.

“I’ve told Ray that his assignment at JFCOM is essentially the same as his assignment in Iraq, and that is to work himself out of a job,” Mr. Gates said. “And then I’ll find a new and better one for him.”

Posted via email from Jim Nichols