WASHINGTON, July 15, 2011 – The Defense Department must
institute a “fast lane” that is more agile than traditional
requirements, acquisition and budgeting, the undersecretary
of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics said
here today.
Ashton B. Carter told an audience at the
Brookings Institution that supporting the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan calls for a rapidly fielded new capability,
agile logistics and careful contingency contracting.
“Going forward, we need to institutionalize a fast lane in
the department in some way,” Carter said. “It's not only
necessary for the wars we're in, it's really necessary for
the tempo of technological change and the way the world
changes.”
Today, the Pentagon's ad hoc fast lane is
formally called the Senior Integration Group, chaired by
Carter and Robert Neller, director of operations for the
Joint Staff, and created by former Defense Secretary Robert
M. Gates.
“That is the mechanism Secretary Gates set
up to overcome his frustration with the department's general
inability to be agile and quick, which is true,” Carter
said.
“The system we have is designed to be
deliberate and not to be quick,” he added. “That's a problem
all by itself, even in our normal programs, [and] it's
completely unacceptable when you're in the middle of a war.”
Carter, who just returned from Afghanistan, said the
focus of activity there now “is to ensure that the force in
Afghanistan, which President [Barack] Obama has directed be
reduced in size, nevertheless continues to grow in
capability.”
That objective can be achieved in
several ways, Carter said.
One is to continue to
provide more of what Carter calls enablers -- intelligence,
surveillance and reconnaissance, or ISR, technology and the
capability to detect roadside bombs.
“The second way
we can increase capability is by using fewer deployed
soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines to accomplish tasks
that don't require uniforms or physical presence in
Afghanistan,” he said. A long-standing example, Carter told
the group, is the way the United States flies remotely
controlled unmanned Predator and Reaper aerial vehicles from
Creech Air Force Base in Nevada.
Making the Afghan
security forces more capable in the years ahead is another
way to reduce the number of U.S. forces while maintaining
capability in Afghanistan, he said.
Describing
actions being pursued in the area of rapid and responsive
acquisition and fielding, Carter said a second surge of
equipment to Afghanistan that Gates began in January is now
delivering.
“You can see that everywhere in the
country,” he said.
The number of aerostats -- moored
balloons enabled with sensors for persistent ISR -- is
doubling, for example, he said. These, he explained, are
especially critical for use over outlying facilities and
roadways.
Unattended ground sensors are becoming
useful in Afghanistan now that more areas are being cleared
and held, Carter said, and the all-terrain, mine-resistant,
ambush-protected armored fighting vehicles in Afghanistan
are getting underbody improvement kits that increase their
resistance to bombs.
Clearing and holding areas in
solidifying security in Afghanistan also increases the
number of dismounted operations, he added, “and they require
somewhat different kinds of equipment and tactics than the
mounted operations that were the focus initially.”
Troops are learning and adjusting to a changing enemy and
from their own experience, he said, and training still is
critical.
“I'll be going out to training ranges in
the next couple of months to make sure that troops rotating
into Afghanistan have seen and had the experience of
training on the equipment before they fall in on it in
country,” Carter said.
In the area of logistics, “the
miracle of 2010” continues in Afghanistan, thanks to the
efforts of “Log Nation” -- the totality of military
commands, defense contractors, DOD civilians and commercial
contractors who support DOD logistics.
“It's amazing
what Log Nation is capable of doing and does every day
there,” he said.
The miracle, Carter said, refers to
getting tens of thousands of troops and their equipment into
“a land-locked country with very parsimonious internal lines
of communication” for the Afghanistan surge.
In the
area of contracting, he said, “we do a lot of contingency
contracting,” or direct contracting support to tactical and
operational forces, to ensure warfighters have what they
need.
“[We're] always trying there to balance
effectiveness and efficiency and make sure we have enough
contracting officers [and] contracting officer
representatives,” he added. “We still have work to do, but
we are making progress not using cash payments and otherwise
trying to minimize opportunities for fraud, corruption or
just a bad deal as we do our contingency contracting.”
Meanwhile, back at home, Carter said, there are wars of
a different kind -- budget wars.
Gates and his
successor, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta have made it
clear that the Defense Department is entering a new era in
defense spending that is going to require changing the way
it does business, Carter said. Obama and Congress have also
made it clear, he added, that the defense budget, which is
about 20 percent of the total federal budget, must be part
of the reduction in spending over the next 12 years.
“As we have assessed how to accomplish [this] task, first
Secretary Gates and now Secretary Panetta have undertaken a
comprehensive review of the impact of budget reductions on
force structure and capability and ultimately on missions
and America's role in the world,” Carter said.
Comprehensive, he added, means that everything must be on
the table.The comprehensive review is under way and
making progress, he said, but it already has revealed that:
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The new era will require a
different mind set for government and industry managers
and their congressional overseers
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It's important to proceed not by
subtraction alone but by a vision of the military needed
in the future
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However large the budget is,
every dollar must count.
“The president, the secretary and the taxpayers are going
to expect us to make every dollar we do get count,” Carter
said. “In short, they want better value for the defense
dollar,” he added. “It's what the country should expect, no
matter what size the budget is.”
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