Congress established the Pacific Deterrence Initiative in last year’s National Defense Authorization Act to improve the posture and readiness of U.S. forces in the Indo-Pacific region. However, of the $5.1 billion tagged for PDI-related projects in the White House’s 2022 request, most is allocated to ships and aircraft. That’s a stark contrast with INDOPACOM’s PDI assessment earlier this year, which asked for zero additional platforms and instead requested $4.7 billion in 2022 to buy long-range weapons, missile defenses, and critical enablers such as logistics capabilities, training ranges, and support infrastructure. As several lawmakers argued in a recent letter, Congress should revise the PDI plan advanced by the Biden Administration to better address INDOPACOM’s needs.
That was from the excellent Dan Patt and Bryan Clark, Fix the Pacific Deterrence Fund—and the Deeper Problem It Reveals. They recommend a civilian advocate for the COCOMs in OSD to assure the program funding aligns with their needs.
The authors didn’t advocate this, but I think a lot of people have considered how to create a buyer/seller relationship between the Combatant Commands and the services. Shouldn’t the COCOMs have control over procurement budget as they are ultimately the “consumer” of those products and services? They could thus hold acquisition folks accountable for providing usable options, rather than having programs thrust upon them.
Of course Goldwater Nichols provided the COCOMs with more say in the budgeting process through the Integrated Priorities List. My understanding is that these requests only affect the very margins of a budget request.
If COCOMs were able to make procurement decisions based on their current needs, then that would throw all of acquisition management into a fit. GAO is struggling to understand how to oversee Middle Tier and Software programs that don’t have lifecycle cost estimates with pre-planned procurement quantities all the way out to sustainment. If COCOMs could use procurement to meet today’s demands, rather than predicted demands from years or decades ago, then acquisition baselines would be meaningless.
And that’s perhaps why more platforms get plugged into the Pacific Deterrence Fund — it helps make program procurement plans whole after cost growth and delays. Bigger programs have more organizational clout in their bid for resources.
Patt and Clark also mention that mission managers for the Pacific Deterrence Fund should also help manage other funds like the new Rapid Defense Experimentation Reserve – RDER, pronounced “Raider.” Here’s more on that from Breaking Defense:
“To compete for the RDER [funding], you’ve got to have multiple components involved, you’ve got to be tied in to where we’re heading on our joint concepts,” Hicks explained.
Not much information was given, including the size of the RDER fund and who will be responsible for allocating it. But I suspect it will be given to a high OSD official like USD R&E or USD A&S. And I suspect it will primarily support JADC2 efforts, with the stipulation that it must meet joint architecture requirements coming out of the J6.
I have my trepidations about the RDER fund. It would be good for it to focus on a couple high value efforts like for JADC2 rather than peanut butter spreading the dollars, but it will likely also add a lot of bureaucracy to petition for funds and meet demands on OSD leaders.
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