Pentagon’s dated budget process too slow to beat China, new report says – By Joe Gould (Defense News) / Feb 25 2021
WASHINGTON ― A new report argues for a sweeping overhaul of the Pentagon’s 60-year-old defense budgeting and appropriations process, so it can match the fast-moving commercial sector and outpace China’s technological development.
The paper, set for release Thursday, argues that numerous acquisition policy reforms over the years have failed to get the best results because the Planning, Programming, Budget and Execution, or PPBE, process has eluded change. The authors, former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Industrial Policy Bill Greenwalt and the Hudson Institute’s Dan Patt, recommend the U.S. consider more agile defense budgeting.
“Specifically, the U.S. needs the ability to launch and terminate new development efforts more quickly, to pivot the direction of ongoing investments, and combine the outputs of multiple efforts at various levels of maturity in such a way as to force competitors to respond to U.S. initiative,” they write.
The paper, obtained by Defense News, comes as policymakers worry the Pentagon isn’t investing to develop the advanced technologies that are considered crucial to future warfare. The report is timely, as Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Jack Reed, D-R.I., said Tuesday at a hearing on emerging technologies that PPBE process is “one of those relics of days gone by,” and asked how it could be changed to provide better “organizational responsiveness.”
