There’s no end in sight to the apocalyptic tenor of Beltway defense news and, if anything, it could keep getting worse. Todd Harrison, a defense budget analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments briefed reporters Monday on his new report on the fiscal 12 defense budget, including DoD’s future prospects, and the outlook for the military-industrial complex is bleak/…/The Pentagon’s long-term problems aren’t insoluble: Harrison outlined what he believes Washington needs to do to weather the buffeting of Austerity America, and included some interesting and innovative concepts along with the now-familiar prescriptions — control requirements, manage well, and follow a strategy. The problems for DoD and America lie in executing what many people agree must be done, but which requires today’s dysfunctional system to work perfectly.
First, the problem: At Monday’s brief, Harrison brought up numbers from the fiscal 2001 defense budget to compare against the fiscal 2012 plan now under consideration up on the Hill. Although the United States has spent about $1.3 trillion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001, those costs will theoretically diminish along with the smaller American presence in both countries. But the costs of DoD’s normal operations have grown enormously over the past decade, and they won’t stop growing or decrease without major strategic and structural changes.