Quote Originally Posted by Courtney Massengale View Post
Just from my foxhole, it looks like a lot of this is targeted at incorporating things that were born in supplemental into the "regular" budget.

Obviously the writing is on the wall – we can't continue to fund transformation, expansions of Special Operations and good ideas for GWOT one supplement at a time.
I suspect that when one ties this in with the earlier fracas over the OMB position about calling what is happening in IZ/AF a species of overseas contingency operations, then the overall position becomes more clear. GWOT and supplemental budgets have been a license to steal for the operational forces, buying a lot of non-sustainable capability at tremendously inflated prices. Actually, the GWOT-funded COTS capability is sustainable, but the maintenance fee will also be grossly overpriced.

What the budget announcement from the SecDef seems to be saying is that we have to wean ourselves from the GWOT funding fix and get back to a realistically sustainable force that has a balance between the current fight and likely future contingencies. I'd love to be able to build Battlestar Galactica, but I don't think we really have to worry about Cylons attacking Earth any time in the next 50 years or so. A loose ICBM/MRBM from some of the more screwy leaders of middling (maybe that ought to be muddling or meddling?) nations in North and SW Asia or a conventional intervention in support of some treaty obligations seem much more likely (and closer to the small war type efforts in which we currently engage) as targets for our future force structure.

By the way, bringing more discipline to what is currently a "grab-and-go" approach to acquiring technology seems more likely to make our cyber problems a little easier to manage. At least we might all be using the same or very similar technology across the force so we won't have to devise as many different defenses for the smorgasbord of systems currently in use