Jared Serbu: You already have the problem of DoD having the build a budget that they are not going to execute on for another two years almost. Don’t you exacerbate that problem by adding another year to that if you go to a two year budget cycle?
Arnold Punaro: Actually you give them a break. And you would have to reform the Planning-Programming-Budgeting-Execution system. By the way, Jack Reed and others are looking at that in the Congress. Bob Work looked at it when he was the Deputy Secretary of Defense. The PPBE is pretty much the same as it was when Robert McNamara and Charlie Hitch put it in place in 1961. The major force programs that they operate around are the same ones Charlie Hitch designed decades and decades ago and the threat has changed ten times since then.
So the PPBE needs to be fundamentally reformed and it ought to be adjusted from being predictable and compliance oriented, to basically — as you said it takes three years to get a new idea into the budget in the Pentagon. That’s ridiculous! When you change the processes in the Congress you also have to change the budget/resource allocation processes in the building.
That was Arnold Panuro on the On DoD podcast, Why the fighting force is ‘ever shrinking’ despite robust defense budgets. Here’s on what Panuro meant when he was talking about changing the process in Congress itself rather than just PPBE:
Now we know none of those processes work. They’re totally broken. Congress is doing the same thing — overlapping three times a year if they ever do it, we haven’t passed a budget resolution in a lot of years. They’re totally consumed and drowning in budget details. They don’t do for the most part serious oversight anymore. Congress ought to be focusing on the macro, not the micro.
To me, I would get rid of the budget committee, and I would collapse the authorization and appropriation committees into one committee, then I would have the chairman and ranking member of the authorization-appropriation committee be members of the budget committee. Then you would basically get rid of two major cumbersome processes in the Congress and maybe they would have the opportunity to focus on the big picture and not the little picture.
That’s a tall order.
I wonder what Panuro actually meant by PPBE reform, because there was no authorization process prior to PPBE. If budgets outlined portfolios of major capability sets or organizations — rather than specific weapons platforms — then a lot of the detail would be removed from the congressional enactment process and speed the whole thing up. It would shift focus from the micro to the macro.
Even if Congress was late to authorize and appropriate, with budget portfolios DoD would not be impeded from new starts, terminations, or ramping up promising technologies. Continuing resolutions would not constrain most decisions in the defense program.
PPBE reform is definitely a necessity. But I think people need to clearly articulate what is the problem with PPBE. The raison d’être of the PPBE revolves around programming the budget. Funding decisions are made about the total lifecycle of particular weapon systems before they are even developed! That’s how you get multi-decade programs that fail to deliver on their promises, design by committee of folks not responsible for execution. Predicting new technologies and concepts of operations on paper perfectly without trail-and-error learning is hard if not impossible.
The process of weapons choice cannot be solved through immaculate analysis, as was presumed by Hitch, McNamara, and the ‘whiz kids.’ This kind of predict-and-control mentality was at the very heart of PPBE. But if it actually worked, then why have commercial firms and international governments abandoned the program budget concept?
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