With more rounds of defense spending cuts looming, the Pentagon must choose which roles and missions are top priority and which ones aren’t important as it drafts future budgets; a move that could no doubt entail risk and the usual round of ‘painful choices,’ a pair of think tankers advised lawmakers and their staff today on Capitol Hill.
Todd Harrison, Senior Fellow of Defense Budget Studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments stresssed the need for investment in high-end weapons such as stealthy drones that can defeat anti-access weapons designed to defeat the current crop of U.S. aircraft/.../
Said Harrison: “We’re under-invested in long-range systems, in systems that are designed to operate in non-permissive environments where people are actually trying to shoot us down or keep us out. So, I think we’ve got to shift our focus on investments into longer-range systems at the higher-end, that can operate at denied environments. You can still do that in a down-budget environment but it forces some hard decisions in other parts of your budget in terms of what size of ground force are you going to maintain? Do we need to be sized for two major ground operations occurring near-simultaneously? If not, can we bring down some of that force structure and use the savings to not only help bring down the deficit but to help pay for investments in some of these new areas; I think, these are the choices that we face right now.”