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Skelton takes Gates 'seriously' on defense spending reforms
Rep. Ike Skelton (D-Mo.) on Tuesday indicated that he backs Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s efforts to free up about $100 billion from the Pentagon’s budget over the next five years.
Pentagon leaders want to cut from within the Pentagon’s $548.9 billion budget to pour more money into maintaining current fighting forces and modernizing weapons systems. The Pentagon does not intend for the overall budget to be cut.
“I take what the secretary said seriously,” Skelton, the chairman of the House
Armed Services Committee, said Tuesday at a breakfast with defense reporters.
“I have been contemplating how to approach it.”
Skelton, a strong supporter of a robust military budget, also drew a couple
lines in the sand. He said he would not accept cuts from the ranks of
active-duty military personnel, nor a smaller Navy.
Skelton said he is preparing to task his committee with finding savings in
the Pentagon’s budget to complement Gates’s effort. The chairman is considering
tasking an existing acquisition reform panel with tackling the issue;
forming a new panel with this specific goal; or asking each subcommittee on his
panel to come up with ways to save.
“I am taking it very seriously. I am going to do one of those very, very soon,”
Skelton said. Overall, Skelton expressed strong support for Gates, a
holdover from the George W. Bush administration, giving him a grade of “A-plus.”
Echoing Pentagon leaders, Skelton said he is not targeting the top line of the
base defense budget.
“It is not just a matter of dollars. It’s how you spend them,” Skelton said.
“There are ways to save money. How much, I don’t know.”
Skelton also made the case for a new reform acquisition bill approved by his
committee that Skelton argues would save $30 billion a year.
The Senate Armed Services Committee did not approve any such
legislation, and Skelton acknowledged that the House panel members have to get
their Senate counterparts to back their efforts.
Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn on Friday said the Pentagon
leadership’s goal is to find more savings within the defense budget without
cutting the top-line number.
Lynn on Friday fleshed out Gates’s major initiative to reduce Pentagon bloat
and scrutinize the defense budget. Gates unveiled his initiative in a major
speech last month at the Eisenhower Library in Abilene, Kan.
Pentagon leaders are eyeing 2 to 3 percent real growth in the Pentagon’s budget
for the areas that need it most: force structure and modernization, Lynn
indicated.
The White House has told the Pentagon to expect growth of about 1 percent in
the budget over the next several years.
But Lynn said that based on past experience, about 2 to 3 percent real growth
would be necessary to “give the troops what they need to do their very best.”
Two-thirds of the $100 billion cost savings spread out over the next five years
will come from trimming overhead on a department-wide basis. That money will be
directly transferred into the force structure and modernization accounts, Lynn
explained.
The rest of the cost savings would come from “developing efficiencies within
those force structure and modernization accounts,” he added.
Lynn also warned that in order to redistribute $100 billion, the Pentagon
leadership and the military services will have to identify “lower-priority
programs” that are not going to be part of future budgets.
The departments of the Army, Air Force and Navy, which also includes the Marine
Corps, as well as the combatant commands are expected to report their proposals
by July 31 as the Pentagon prepares its budget request for Congress.
For example, the military departments are each expected to find $2 billion in
non-essential costs for fiscal 2012. In turn, the services would be able to
transfer those savings to their modernization efforts and their forces.
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