Pentagon fiscal chief Robert Hale: ‘I am nervous'
“Frankly, I am nervous,” says Robert Hale, the Pentagon’s comptroller. And with reason.
A month and half into the new fiscal year, Congress can’t seem to decide between what are three, wildly different scenarios for Hale’s world in 2014. The House endorsed most of President Barack Obama’s $527 billion request for the Defense Department in July. Last month’s stopgap CR went back to $496 billion. And DOD will drop by another $21 billion in mid-January if lawmakers do nothing to stop sequestration.
“We still don’t know what fiscal ’14 is, which is an extraordinary situation,” Hale told POLITICO. Making it worse, perhaps, is a growing acceptance—even callousness— in the Capitol toward the level of disorder sequestration brings.
The first round of cuts that began on March 1 already forced DOD to implement $37 billion in reductions in the space of six months. Why should another $21 billion –spread over more than eight months—be any harder?
Indeed, this equation is now fundamental to the politics of the House-Senate budget talks which resume Wednesday. A significant faction of Republicans have come to embrace the lower post-sequestration caps set under the Budget Control Act in 2011. And the real-life math for the military has become submerged in the tit-for-tat politics over Obama’s healthcare reforms.
The next two weeks running up to Thanksgiving are pivotal if Congress is to have any chance of restoring some order for the Pentagon and a broken appropriations process. But what’s most remarkable is how lawmakers seem to be backing into decisions without first having a full debate over what level of defense the U.S. needs going forward.
Phi Beta Iota: Number crunchers out of touch with ethics and reality. Lacking intelligence with integrity, they have no strategy, no policy, no acquisition, and no sustainable operational concepts based on ethical evidence-based decision support.
See Also:
2013 ON REVOLUTION — HelpngTransform the US Army Consistent with CSA Guidance
2013 Robert Steele Reflections on Alternative Command & Control (AltC2) — Five Questions and a Game Plan 1.1 [written for NATO ACT Innovation Hub]
2013 Robert Steele — Alternative Command & Control and Four Transformation Forcing Concepts [written for NATO ACT Innovation Hub]
2013 Robert Steele: Reflections on Reform 2.2 Numbers for 30% DoD Cut over 2-4 Years
2013 Story Board: Improving Decision-Support — Analytic Sources, Models, Tools, & Tradecraft
2010 Robert Steele: Reflections on Integrity UPDATED + Integrity RECAP
Del Spurlock: Call to Arms — The People’s Army
LtCol X: CSA Sends – Strategic Priorities for the Army – with Phi Beta Iota Comments
Marcus Aurelius: CSA Interview + AWC SSI Reminder — Answers from the 1990′s Long Ignored…
