Gordon England, former SecNav and DepSecDef under the Bush administration, offers some sage advice on where and how to slice the Pentagon's budget salami, and warns against temptations which could lead to another Task Force Smith scenario.
Richard 
The Pentagon’s Financial Drawdown
OpEd, NYT, 14 Jul 2011
THE new secretary of defense, Leon E. Panetta, will soon face the challenge of significantly reducing the Pentagon’s budget. As directed by President Obama, he will have to find at least $400 billion of savings over the next 12 years, or $33 billion per year — about 5 percent of the current annual defense budget. His decisions will reshape our armed forces for decades to come and determine whether we live in a more or less dangerous world.
Having overseen the preparation and execution of the defense budget, I urge Mr. Panetta to resist the temptation to quickly kill procurement programs and research and development activities. Nor should he make proportional cuts to programs across the board. History shows that this would result in a hollowed-out force that will embolden our enemies. It’s the easiest way to go, but also the worst.
Instead, Mr. Panetta should first cut the department’s civilian workforce before reducing the size of the military force. The Pentagon rightly pressures industry to reduce overhead costs, but it is far more inefficient itself. Starting in 2003, the number of active military sailors was reduced by over 60,000, but efforts to cut the Navy’s civilian workforce failed due to onerous government and union rules and regulations. Mr. Panetta should seek blanket authority from Congress to shrink the Pentagon bureaucracy. Cutting 100,000 of 700,000 is a reasonable target. And there should be no additional outsourcing, thereby forcing the Pentagon to operate more efficiently.
Second, Washington must do more to encourage the sale of defense equipment to our friends and allies abroad, like the littoral combat ship, the mine-resistant ambush-protected armored vehicle and a host of other combat and combat-support equipment. Manufacturing equipment for the American and foreign militaries simultaneously saves Washington money because more units are produced and overhead costs are shared, and it creates thousands of American jobs. The savings generated by international sales are too big to ignore, yet in too many cases the Pentagon has been only lukewarm in supporting such sales.
Third, the Pentagon should put a moratorium on starting any new procurement programs. Instead, it should use the money to increase the rate of production on existing ones and complete them faster and for less. All too often, the Defense Department fails to control its appetite, with too few dollars chasing too many programs. The result is the formation of “procurement death spirals,” during which the Pentagon buys fewer and fewer units at higher and higher prices.
Fourth, the new secretary of defense should adjust the military’s “tooth-to-tail ratio” — the ratio of fighters to support personnel — which is increasingly out of balance. During my time at the Pentagon, a large number of Army soldiers never deployed to a combat zone, whereas many of those who did were sent multiple times. Mr. Panetta should concentrate on cutting administrative workers — not the fighting force, intelligence personnel and front-line maintenance troops. Such cuts would greatly increase efficiency.
Finally, the Pentagon should give the heads of the Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force and combatant commanders more say in decisions over buying equipment, including weapons. Right now, they identify their requirements at the beginning of the lengthy process for procuring equipment, but they do not have sufficient voice later on in the process — sometimes many years later — when there are opportunities to reduce costs. Too often, outdated specifications and contract language bind the government and the contractor to expensive purchases that have only marginal benefits. If service chiefs and combatant commanders were given the chance to modify unnecessarily complex or costly features, they could save time and money.
Mr. Panetta has served America admirably for decades, as a congressman, White House chief of staff and C.I.A. director, and he inherits the world’s finest military. But as he takes on his formidable new responsibility, I urge him to draw a lesson from the past. During the nearly five-year span between the end of World War II and America’s entrance into the Korean War in 1950, we let our armed forces deteriorate. As a result, America was woefully unprepared for the brutal fighting on the Korean Peninsula.
Budget decisions do have consequences, and making the right ones is crucial for our nation’s security.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/15/op...?_r=2&src=tptw
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