By Army Sgt. 1st Class Tyrone C. Marshall Jr.
American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON, Jan. 17, 2014 – The decline in research and
development brought on by budget cuts is contributing to the erosion of the
U.S. military’s technological superiority at an alarming rate, the
undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics said.
“Technological superiority is not assured,” Frank Kendall
told a conference yesterday sponsored by the Center for a New American Society.
“The United States came out of the Cold War, and demonstrated in the first
Persian Gulf War, a very significant superiority in military technology and the
application of those technologies. And we’ve sort of had an assumption [during]
the last 20-plus years that that {American] technological superiority would be
a fact of life in the world.”
The Defense Department has “a big part of sustaining the
levels of [research and development] investment that I think we need,” Kendall
added.
Despite the relief provided by a trillion dollar plus
spending bill approved by Congress for 2014, Kendall said the department still
faces heavy budget cuts.
“We’re still taking substantial cuts, and [2015] is much
worse than ’14 is,” he said. “And then we don’t know what will happen to us
after that.
“So with budgets heading in that direction,” he continued,
“and all the uncertainty we’re dealing with, the Department of Defense has a
very difficult planning problem.”
Part of that planning problem, according to Kendall, is the
uncertainty of how much force structure DOD will be able to retain.
“There’s always a tendency to hang onto force structure in
order to do to the things we need to do in the world,” he said. “But if we do
hang onto that force structure, the consequence of that is R&D has to be
cut,” in order to pay salaries and readiness.
“And that’s what you’re seeing even with the appropriations
bill the Senate just passed,” Kendall said. “And it gets much worse as we go
further out.”
Eventually, “if we know where the [budget] is going, we can
get our force structure down to where we can get in balance between those
different accounts that I mentioned,” he said.
The undersecretary laid out three points supporting his
concern for the erosion of U.S. technological superiority.
“[Research and development] is not a variable cost. There’s
a tendency in the Defense Department, when we cut budgets, to kind of cut
everything.
“But what drives R&D is the rate of modernization that
we desire,” Kendall continued. “[It] is really not dependent on the size of the
force structure.”
Kendall’s second point is time is not a recoverable asset.
R&D really buys that time in something of a race for technological
superiority, he said.
“I can buy back readiness, I can increase force structure,
but I don’t have any way to buy back the time it takes me to get a new
product,” Kendall said.
That timeline in the acquisitions business is relatively
long, Kendall said, noting how often he gets remarks about the length of an
acquisitions process which hasn’t changed much over the years.
Essentially, Kendall said, it takes about two years before
the department can get a budget to spend serious money on an idea.
“Then we have two or three years to four years of risk
reduction where we develop the technology to where we’re confident we can put
it into a product,” he said. “Then we have five or six years of development of
making the product ready for production.”
Combine that with the “few years of buying enough numbers to
make a difference militarily,” Kendall said, and the timeline easily becomes 10
or 15 years.
“So for that reason as well, I’m concerned,” he said. “I’m
trying to do a lot of things now to hedge against these [challenges] and make
people aware of these things and do more about them.”
Kendall reiterated how important he believes research and
development is to maintaining DOD’s edge in technological superiority.
“It’s critical to the department, it’s critical to our
future,” he said. “It is not ‘the wolf closest to the sled’ right now,
necessarily. But I think it is absolutely paramount that we keep our R&D
budgets funded.”
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