Contrary to what one might expect from the budget process, most of the actual horse-trading happens at a higher level inside the Pentagon during a separate but related process to develop the five-year program objective memorandum, well before the Army’s budget request goes to Congress. The program objective memorandum is the primary document on which the services base decisions on program scope and spending, with supporting information on missions, objectives and alternatives.
The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2016 brought about a major shift in how these trades take place. Previously, the chief of staff delegated the verification of requirements to the deputy chief of staff, G-3 (operations and plans). With the passage of the legislation, Milley reinvigorated the approval process with the direct involvement of his office and the vice chief’s.
“Now you’ve got the deep dives by the chief of staff of the Army. And so the horse-trading is done by him,” said Passero, who shepherds the budgeting and executes spending for combat systems and Soldier equipment through the program objective memorandum cycle.
That was from an excellent article by Margaret C. Roth on the defense budget called “No mysteries, please.” Read the whole thing.
Programs that don’t do enough justification will be targets by those in the Army, OSD, and Congress — they will take funding away and provide it to programs which justified themselves better to those echelons. There’s always a slew of “unfunded requirements” where goodies can be handed out.
Horse trading at the highest level sounds good — the Chief of Staff has a “birds eye” view of the Army portfolio to make such tradeoffs. But there is also a knowledge problem. The decision maker relies on bits and pieces of information which filter through several layers of bureaucracy. Then there’s another problem. The Chief of Staff serves about 4 years. The horse trading happens about two-and-a-half years before the appropriation, which authorizes obligations and expenditures that will occur years later. In essence, the Chief of Staff will not be around to be held accountable for any of the budget decisions he has made.
Here is an important point that often goes overlooked. The R&D and procurement budgets are put under the finest of microscopes by all manner of bureaucracy. All requirements, activities, plans, costs, and so forth, must be justified. However, for operations and maintenance, as well as military personnel, the military services request at a higher level of detail:
In making decisions on the Army’s [acquisition] program funding requests… Congress dissects them down to “a very fine level of detail: which widgets, why, how many and with what parts: how many dollars on part A of the widget, how many on part B,” Miller explained. That is in contrast to the budgeting and distribution of operations and maintenance funds, whereby the Army organization requesting funds for operational training says more simply, “We’re doing training” and Congress assigns resources for training….
Estimates of the O&M budget going to each weapon system are not readily available in the Army’s justification books provided to Congress, but I’ve been told that O&M budget estimates are available the PPBE System database, the DOD Resources Data Warehouse (DRDW). It’s not clear to me where those figures come from and whether they are tracked, but they do not make it into the President’s budget request.
Much of this budget justification process, however, has been the same since Robert McNamara introduced it in 1961:
“Other than AFC’s [Army Futures Command’s] injection and some of the chief’s hand in the process, we’re really executing the same PPB&E [planning, programming, budget and execution] process we’ve executed for years,” Miller said.
Leave a Reply