Kendall on Sequestration

During a briefing today on the Defense Department's newest acquisition reform plan, called Better Buying Power 2.0, the Pentagon's top acquisition official addressed the gloomy prospects of an additional $500 billion in cuts via the sequestration trigger.

Frank Kendall, the under secretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, said the department has been trying to make the acquisition workforce more cost conscious and yet sequestration would impose a very inefficient way to take money out of the defense budget.

He added:

I mean, time is money, particularly in development, and I think we're taking -- I mentioned earlier -- too long to get things through development nowadays. A variety of reasons for that, but one of the things that does that is, people tend to want to hang on to all their programs when cuts come in, so basically you reduce the level of everything and you stretch it out. That can be a very inefficient thing. You sometimes need to make harder choices and decide what not to do.

We've canceled quite a few programs from the last few years, and frankly I don't see a lot of potential for additional steps to do that to take money out of the budget. So it's going to be -- it's -- you know, we will work our way through whatever number we get. We did a very in-depth exercise to both build a strategy and then build a budget last year, which we think is all very sound. If we have additional cuts which are too significant, then we're going to have to go back and reconsider all that and fundamentally, reconsider the capabilities we can provide to the nation.

There's a level at which you just -- you know, you've stretched things out to the point where you just can't deliver what's needed. You know, there is a requirement to equip our forces with a certain number of items when the forces are a certain size and replace those items over a certain period of time. You know, that's kind of -- and the right way to formulate a budget is to have a balance between the force structure and the other things that contribute to sustaining and equipping that force structure.

And if we get too out of balance, we'll end up with a hollow force. It could be hollow the way it was during the Cold War. I experienced this in Germany as an Army officer. We had no parts. We had no readiness. We were hollow from the point of view of readiness. You can be hollow from a point of view of training. You can be hollow from the point of view of modernization, if your equipment's obsolete relative to potential opponents. So we want to avoid all of those things, and it requires us staying in balance.