The U.S. Department of Defense must take a long-term view when deciding what programs to adjust or prune as a result of the federal sequester and other budget cuts or risk its defense contractors losing critical capabilities and expertise, a defense think tank argued Tuesday.
According to the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments senior fellow Barry Watts — former head of the DOD’s Office of Program Analysis and Evaluation — the DOD must determine its essential systems and capabilities and build its budget plans around maintaining its contractors’ capability to continue to meet these essential needs, not around a focus on what to eliminate in the current budget cycle.
“The alternative is to risk losing [contractors] to recurring bouts of short-term, across-the-board budget cutting,” Watts said in a briefing Tuesday, ahead of the scheduled release of a CSBA report Wednesday titled "Sustaining the U.S. Defense Industrial Base as a Strategic Asset."
The DOD has never had a coherent long-term strategy for maintaining its “core competencies” — key capabilities where it has a hard to match advantage over rivals — with the support of its defense industrial base, or DIB, having essentially taken for granted contractors’ ability to step up to the plate when needed, Watts argues.
But this base is much smaller today than at its peak during the Cold War, and with the DOD dealing with shrinking budgets — a problem exacerbated by the federal sequester — while new military challenges grow around the globe, it must swiftly put in place a plan to maintain the capacity of its contractors to meet its critical design and manufacturing needs in future, according to the briefing.
Otherwise, the agency risks losing this expertise, which is considerably expensive to regain, Watts said. He cited the example of the U.K.’s recent rollout of its Astute-class nuclear submarine program, which was nearly four years late and more than a billion pounds over budget, with the British Navy forced to draw on the outside expertise — the American company General Dynamics Corp.’s Electric Boat division — to get the project back on track, an option likely unavailable to the DOD should it let its DIB wither/.../