A budget reconciliation bill is not the way to “juice” modernization across the services and overhaul Pentagon buying history and practices, a key member of the Senate Armed Services Committee said Tuesday.
Speaking at a daylong security forum at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) added, “we should have a regular order” through the budget process to align spending with current and future needs.
Kelly warned that the past has shown the United States has too often failed to predict where conflicts would happen and what they would look like.
He cited a recent visit to a Ukrainian underground drone factory as a lesson to the defense industry, the Pentagon and Congress. “They iterate on a very rapid cycle, days, weeks [not years like the United States.” The American acquisition system was first put in place in the 1960s and has changed little, he said.
Rep. Pat Ryan (D-N.Y.), co-chair of the House Defense Modernization Caucus, said his constituents ask “to what end” the soon-to-be $1 trillion Pentagon budget will be used. An Army veteran who worked for small tech firms before running for Congress, Ryan said he came to Washington “to be disruptive.”
“We really need to shake [the acquisition] process up,” Ryan said, but he didn’t disagree with Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll’s assessment that it could be a “success” if one prime [defense contractor] fails during the changeover.
Although he now has concerns about turnover in Pentagon civilian leadership, Ryan said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s call to reallocate 8 percent of the budget to more needed investments was a step in the right direction.
In looking at immediate priorities, Ryan said, “We need to get back to first principles – 155-mm ammunition” thousands of low-cost, attritable drones, not hundreds of more expensive unmanned systems.
Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), chair of the Armed Services emerging threat panel, said there could be commercial applications for the drones a small business might offer to sell to the Pentagon. Again using drones as an example, she said, “our farmers are using drones to apply herbicides to [specific areas in] their fields.”
The dual-use possibility reduces costs to the Defense Department and the farmer “and [pushes] small business forward,” she said.
So should the Pentagon invest in still-capable legacy systems such as B-52 strategic bombers and M1A1 Abrams main battle tanks, or in new technologies?
Ernst said the Pentagon could start with using artificial intelligence to root out waste, fraud and abuse in spending, because, she said, “DoD has never passed an audit.” Current data systems do not communicate with each other, she added.
“Our adversaries have already made the hard choices” on whether they will invest in denial or advance, Ryan added. Decision makers, he said, need to listen to the voices in the field about what they actually need, and Congress also has to play a more active role in these decisions.
All the SASC panel members said relying on continuing resolutions that essentially freeze spending at the previous year’s level was not an investment strategy.
Kelly, with his background as a Navy test pilot and an astronaut, said early spending should include funds for testing new systems, but testing “is typically starved of resources and now is facing cuts.”
Kelly said the military should example the impact on our allies and “enduring capabilities” that can be integrated with newer software when deciding to keep or scrap legacy systems. For example, he said that the Army’s decision to shut down production lines and convert AH-64D attack helicopters to E models is affecting Poland and other allies interested in buying the newer model.
