Strategy-Driven Processes Behind Budget Request, Official Says
By Jim Garamone DoD News, Defense Media Activity
WASHINGTON, March 7, 2016 – One of the most important processes in the Defense Department for getting military capabilities in the field hides behind an innocuous acronym -- the PPB.
It stands for planning, programming and budgeting, and the process is the nexus for connecting strategy to capabilities.
Along the way it connects all other aspects of the department, from day care to health care, from managing legacy systems to building new ones and from recruiting to retirement. The PPB process leads to the annual Defense Budget Request -- pegged at $583 billion for fiscal year 2017.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies examined the process during a discussion at their headquarters this morning.
Strategy-Driven
The budget request is a strategy-driven document, said Robert M. Scher, the assistant secretary of defense for strategy, plans and capabilities, as he described the FY 2017 process.
This is a new security environment, he said. Defense Secretary Ash Carter gave very clear guidance that, in this new era, the budget must enable the United States to deter adversaries, and, if that fails, to win the nation's wars, Scher said.
"He also was very clear about ensuring that we looked at five … evolving issues," he said. The era of great power rivalry has returned, Carter said, and the United States must focus on Russia and China, North Korea and Iran. And, terrorism is a global concern.
"We need to be able to say that we can do more than one thing and more than one thing at a time, and be able to address all of these challenges," Scher said. "[Carter] consciously didn't want to prioritize them."
In short, the military has to be prepared for full spectrum operations in all domains, including the new ones of space and cyber, he said.
Funding Capabilities
The budget has to fund capabilities for those going into harm's way, Scher said, but this budget "continues a trend, but continues it more directly and more consciously on understanding that we have to look at new things and new ways of doing things to deal with great power adversaries, and the security environment we have."
Innovation must be a part of that process because the American military cannot fight the same way it did 10 or 20 years ago the assistant secretary said.
Balance is key, Scher said. "We look at this balance in two different ways," he said. "One, is the balance in the mix of capability, capacity and readiness for each of the military services." The strategic guidance was to favor a bias towards modernization and recovering readiness rather than force structure.
"The second part is balance between resourcing today's fights and preparing for the future threats and conflicts," he said. "Key to this is we will not be able to prevail in a future conflict against a great power if we don't start thinking, planning about it now and today."
The most credible way to ensure deterrence is to not only know you can win, "but to know how you win, who you'll work with and how you'll get there," Scher said.
This is fine if you are faced with only one conflict, but the United States has to be able to do more than one thing at a time, the assistant secretary said. The U.S. military has to be able to deal with multiple conflicts at any one time.
This shows up in the budget. "Some of these key capabilities are very focused on anti-access and aerial denial threats, including investments our posture in Europe, modernizing fighter and air attack, lethality in the undersea force, research and development," he said.
Third Offset Strategy
But there is also the third offset strategy driving the process. "I think this budget reinforces the secretary's guidance to figuring out how we can offset some of the key capabilities that our adversaries and potential adversaries are building," Scher said.
Scher addressed each of the threats. Russia, he said, is doing what it can to shift the European security environment by undermining the sovereignty and territorial integrity of neighboring countries. "So, figuring out what we do to deal with Russia in the near-term and the long-term was a huge focus for us," he said.
Anything the United States does will be in concert with allies, "and we will continue to do that," Scher said.
The budget looks to increasing U.S. military presence in Europe and at making investments in infrastructure, especially air fields, to be able to account for rapid deployability, he said.
Countering China
China is an enigma -- not an enemy, he said, but its actions are unsettling a crucial part of the world. U.S. strategy "is also partly about dealing with the potential adversary that we could see in China based on their behavior and their capability and what they are building," Scher said.
China is trying to restrict access and freedom of movement in the South China Sea, he said. "So, we need to take a look … at where we have advantages and where we can do things, such as engaging targets at standoff range and emphasize our undersea capabilities, and make bets on future technology that will be useful," the assistant secretary said. "We are going to continue and have continued in this budget to move forward on posture issues in the Asia-Pacific region."
Iranian and North Korean actions compel the United States to continue to make investments to counter them, Scher said. Iran's malign influence in the Middle East, he added, continues to be a grave concern and North Korea's nuclear program and ballistic missile programs are disturbing.
"Finally, we did not forget about fighting global terrorism," he said. "It is an ongoing condition and is where we have forces still in harm's way, and where we must … place a priority focus."
He said fighting global terrorism will be a generational struggle and capabilities must be in place to deal with this threat.
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
