The strategic guidance issued to much fanfare by President Barack Obama and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta last January is getting a "relook" because the senior leadership has "found some problems" with it, according to the Defense Department's head of acquisition, Frank Kendall.
What are the holes? As one might expect, Kendall didn't outline them, so we went to one of the Pentagon's top strategy resources, Andrew Krepinevich, head of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and graduate of Andy Marshall's Office of Net Assessment. (For those who don't know, Marshall is a Pentagon legend whose office helps determine our strategy.)
Kendall mentioned during his talk at the ComDef Conference last Wednesday that the strategy effort was a bit "rushed," though he did not say what were the effects.
When Krepinevich started our conversation his first point was that we were talking about strategic guidance: "What we have is strategic guidance; we don't have a strategy." And the guidance doesn't clearly outline what are commanders' priorities. For example, he said it's unclear whether we focus more on China or on North Korea. How much do we rely on allies and where? Add to that considerable budget turmoil, like those sequestration cuts that look increasingly likely to bite.
"You are basically running a strategy review when you are trying to put together a budget," Krepinevich. Since one's budget is, to a large degree, one's strategy that may not bode well.
On top of that, the Pentagon has projected almost $230 billion in what are wonderfully called efficiencies, with Panetta having proposed $60 billion of those over the next five years.. To people outside the building they are more like fair dust, something you sprinkle through the budget and really really hope they appear. As Krepinevich notes, "the long history of these is you get a fraction of the efficiencies you hope to get." We don't know yet how well the Pentagon is doing scraping together these savings, but during the last drawdown in the 1990s they rarely materialized on anything close to the scale that budgeteers hoped.