Here’s former USD Comptroller Dov Zakheim on the status of a critical munitions fund at The Hill: Congress should reconsider Austin’s request to fund ‘critical munitions’
Perhaps it should come as no surprise that Senate appropriators shot down a Department of Defense (DOD) fiscal year 2023 budget request to create a $500 million Critical Munitions Acquisition Fund. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin had argued that the fund would give the DOD flexibility to increase weapons production to assist Ukraine and to respond to any urgent needs arising from future crises.
In response, the Senate Appropriations Committee’s report for FY 2023 stated that “the Critical Munitions Acquisition Fund is narrowly focused on procurement of small amounts of certain munitions to be decided in the year of execution. By design, this approach does not address the broader challenges of strategic investment and management of the DIB [defense industrial base] and the supply chain.”
Appropriators, and especially many of their staffers, long have been suspicious of any new fund that would afford the DOD “flexibility” without detailed congressional oversight.
Zakheim then goes into a discussion about abuse of the merged surpluses and M account, which you can read in more detail in the article. However, there have been several incidents, such as a 1961 reprogramming that created a new start on five Fleet Ballistic Missile submarines leading to stricter reprogramming rules. And again in 1970 when it came to light that deobligated funds from the FBM submarine were used to fund all sorts of other priorities. That one led to cancellation of “no year” monies. But at the top of appropriators minds must be the border wall transfers during the Trump administration.
One of the interesting parts is that DoD says it needs an unspecified munitions fund to meet emergent issues that it cannot precisely foresee. After all, DoD will be lucky to receive these critical munitions funds by the start of calendar year 2023, it was asked for in April after the Russia-Ukraine war started.
Senate appropriators suggested where the funding should go to to meet the committee’s goals: $240M to workforce training, $450M to “expand industrial capacity” across missile programs, $250M in ammunition facilities, $45M for diversification of munitions supply chain, and $50M for data integration pilots. Finally, the committee made recommended adds to specified line items for hypersonic weapons, Tomahawks, and SDB II.
When you look at the list, it actually looks pretty reasonable and sums up to way more than $500M. Of course a lot of details are lacking there. But it isn’t like the critical munitions fund would have been an unaccountable “slush fund.” There would have been audits and reports on the spending. Indeed, Congress could have helped DoD decide on how to allocate it in the year of execution rather than tying its own hands half-a-year or more in advance. The idea that senior leaders in DoD cannot responsibly allocate $500M and need to detail specified plans shows an incredible lack of trust. Here’s Zakheim on the bigger picture:
There is a widespread consensus that the DOD planning, programming, budgeting and execution system is seriously outdated and in urgent need of reform. To that end, Congress has authorized the creation of a commission to propose changes to the system. One of those changes could involve recognizing that the system is simply too slow and inflexible to meet urgent demands that might arise from an unanticipated crisis or conflict such as the war in Ukraine.
Leave a Reply