Budget Cutting

Former Pentagon policy chief Michèle Flournoy today defended the department's decision to omit from the 2012 Defense Strategic Guidance any discussion of greater risks it might accept in various potential budget-cutting scenarios.

Officials decided against including options for scaling back the strategy because Congress could have seized the opportunity to pocket savings, she said during a panel discussion at the Brookings Institution.

"I think there was a sense that the task at hand was to take the 10-year budget guidance that was in the Budget Control Act of 2011 and rethink our strategy in that context," Flournoy said.

"I think that there was an assumption that this was going to be an iterative process – that if the goal posts keep moving in terms of the resource constraints, we're going to have to keep learning and refining on that strategic guidance," she added. "So I think it was seen as a first bite at the apple." Given the iterative nature of the process, it was natural for Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey to immediately launch his "visioning exercise to think about the force of 2020" after the guidance was released, Flournoy said.

"But we don't want to have to accept risk or manage risk in areas that we really would rather not until we have clarity on the resource picture," she said. "And we still don't have clarity on the resource picture because here we are facing sequestration in the complete absence of any kind of consensus about the parameters of a budget deal."

But Kori Schake of the Hoover Institution and former Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead, who co-authored a paper on national defense issued today, criticized DOD's approach during the panel discussion.

Schake said she and Roughead strongly believe it would have been better to include excursions in the Defense Strategic Guidance showing where greater risk might be taken in the event of more budget cuts. DOD's decision not to do that has dramatically complicated the current challenge of balancing risk in the force, she said.

Flournoy countered that the strategy was aligned with the Budget Control Act's resource picture. The problem with including excursions, she said, was that it would have enabled Congress to "pocket" savings where the department was presumably willing to take risk without pledging to provide DOD resources.

Roughead said rather than being "pick-pocketed," DOD is about to lose the "whole enchilada" through sequestration. The American people have not had the benefit of a discussion about the risks and tradeoffs involved, he said.