“With a lot of these efficiency initiatives, these are projected savings, this is what they’re estimating they’re going to save in the future. What quite often happens is that the savings don’t materialize like we expected,” said Todd Harrison, a longtime defense budget watcher at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
And all of this assumes Congress will follow Gates’s budget proposals and pass them. Gates and his top lieutenants have howled at the prospect of month-to-month continuing resolutions or a yearlong CR that forces the Pentagon to stay at its 2010 level.