If the inability to predict a system’s future use weren’t a tough enough challenge for the acquisition community, there have been serious problems of unpredictable funding over the past several years, which have derailed the ability of the Army and DOD to plan for readiness, or even mea- sure current readiness, in a rational way.
However, Junor said, “budgets didn’t create our readiness crisis. But they made a hard problem, for a finite period of time, impossible to solve. And now I’ll back up and say difficult to solve. … Tese readiness pipelines don’t pop out. It’s not a gumball machine where you stick in 25 cents and boom, you’ve got a readiness capability. It takes a minute to grow our forces, especially since … we grow our own.”
THE READINESS CRISIS For years, DOD leaders have warned of a readiness crisis born of a perfect storm of partisan politics, 16 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and rising peer and near-peer potential adversaries. “Our first priority is continuing to improve war- fighter readiness begun in 2017, filling in the holes from trade-offs made during 16 years of war, nine years of continuing resolutions and Budget Control Act caps,” Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis told the Senate Appropriations Committee’s defense subcommittee in June.
Continuing resolutions, forced by Con- gress’ failure to pass appropriation bills on time and required to keep the gov- ernment running, hold spending to prior-year enacted levels and stop any new programs that were not previously funded. Te Budget Control Act of 2011 imposed a projected $1.2 trillion in spending cuts over 10 years, divided evenly between defense and discretionary domestic spending.
“The need is what it is. The materiel developer doesn’t get a vote when it comes to the need. Where we do get a vote is how the need is developed. We’ve got to go all the way back to the beginning of the process.”
“Te services are essentially operating in three fiscal quarters per year now,” Adm. John M. Richardson, chief of naval oper- ations, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in September 2016. “Nobody schedules anything important in the first quarter.”
“Failure to pass the budget, in my view as an American citizen and the chief of staff of the United States Army, constitutes professional malpractice,” Milley told the House Armed Services Committee in April.
While the U.S. has been battling nonstate foes such as al-Qaida, the Taliban and the Islamic State group, China, Russia, North Korea and Iran have been closing the technology gap that U.S. forces dem- onstrated to such great effect during the Persian Gulf War in 1991. “While we’ve been primarily focused on the threat of violent extremism, our adversaries and our potential adversaries have developed advanced capabilities and operational approaches specifically designed to limit our ability to project power,” Marine Corps Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., chair- man of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate Appropriations defense subcom- mittee in June.
Asked at the September 2016 Senate Armed Services Committee hearing whether they “would have the resources and ability to defend this nation against present and future threats if we continue down this path of sequestration,” the four joint chiefs—Milley, Richardson, Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Rob- ert B. Neller and Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David L. Goldfein—answered emphatically: No.
“Te only thing more expensive than deterrence is actually fighting a war,” Milley told the committee, “and the only thing more expensive than fighting a war is fighting one and losing one.”
“Over the same eight-year period in which we reduced the Army by 100,000 Soldiers, continuing resolutions and constrained funding under the Budget Control Act of 2011 forced us to pay short-term bills at the expense of long-term investments,” Milley and then-acting Secretary of the Army Robert M. Speer said in a written statement to the Senate Armed Services Committee in May. “A consequence of underfunding modernization for over a decade is an Army potentially outgunned, outranged, and outdated on a future bat- tlefield with near-peer competitors.”
ASC.ARMY.MIL 17
ARMY AL&T
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