MAJOR CHANGES: Defense Secretary Mark Esper is promising the $740 billion Pentagon budget he will unveil next week will be the beginning of “whole wave of change” that will shed low priority programs, and instead invest heavily in cutting edge technologies, including artificial intelligence, 5G, hypersonics, and quantum physics.
“We will present the Congress our Fiscal Year 2021 request, which reflects our commitment to making and maintaining major changes that will implement the National Defense Strategy,” Esper said in a speech yesterday at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies that served as a preview of his upcoming budget testimony.
A NEW WAY TO FIGHT: “Ultimately readiness and lethality rely on more than just a new technology and organization changes. To harness the full potential of our efforts, we must also modernize how we fight,” Esper said. “Our budget request supports the development of a new joint war fighting concept, which includes all of the main operations.”
Esper outlined three pillars of the new doctrine:
- Dynamic force employment, which he called “is a new concept that keeps our military operationally unpredictable and therefore more lethal, flexible, adaptable.
- A robust network of like-minded allies, which he said “capitalizes on a strategic advantage that our adversaries do not possess.
- Reform that brings greater performance and accountability, which includes Esper’s “defense wide review,” which he called a historic step in freeing up time, money, and manpower to reinvest back into our top priorities.
$7 BILLION SQUEEZED FROM THE 4TH ESTATE: While to the press the term “fourth estate” has historically referred to the profession of journalism, at the Pentagon it’s used to describe the roughly 50 organizations in the Defense Department bureaucracy not directly related to warfighting that consume $99 billion of the departments annual budget.
So far Esper’s review has identified over $5 billion in savings, mostly from cuts in so-called “legacy activities” decreasing overhead. In addition, Esper has identified over $2 billion in activities to transfer to the military departments. “These savings will be invested in cutting edge innovation and war fighting requirements of our core missions,” he said.
Where will the money go?
- Nuclear weapons, rebuilding a strong and reliable nuclear deterrent
- Missile defense
- Hypersonics
- Artificial Intelligence
- Secure 5G technologies
- Space Force
- Responsive force readiness
REBALANCING THE FORCES: “I’ve also launched a review of combatant commands to identify opportunities to rebalance troops and resources in support of the NDS,” Esper said. “We have focused thus far on AFRICOM and SOUTHCOM and will continue our way through all of the combatant commands over the succeeding months to scrutinizing our missions, our tasks, our requirements, and our resources.”
WILL CONGRESS BUY IN? Esper has laid down a marker with that would secure his reputation as an ambitious reformer, but he will need Congress to go all in. “Can politicians go so far as to approve cuts to cherished priorities to support the long-term competition with China and Russia?” asks Mackenzie Eaglen, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
“Examples of impacted programs include health care, military schools and commissaries, Special Operations Command, missile defense and space development agencies, and the cutting-edge office known as DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency),” Eaglen writes in an analysis published yesterday, after Esper sent a “short report” to Capitol Hill ahead of the formal release of the 2021 budget.
“Whether or not Congress approves these changes, the Pentagon has signaled in this report even more aggressive reforms and cuts are ahead,” Eaglen says. “Nor does the secretary intend to take just one bite at this apple. The report states that there was ‘insufficient time for a more exhaustive examination.’ As such, all these same stakeholders are going to be put back under the microscope in the next 12 months, and ever more efficiency will be wringed out of them.”
THE CSIS TAKE: Over at the Center for Strategic and International Studies Todd Harrison and Seamus Daniels have released a new analysis of the current budget and in implications for the year ahead.
“In addition to analyzing the request for FY 2020, the report compares the request to the appropriations passed by Congress and assesses the Department of Defense’s projections for future defense spending by title and by military department,” the authors say.
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HAPPENING TODAY: Defense Secretary Mark Esper welcomes Colombian Defense Minister Carlos Holmes Trujillo to the Pentagon at 11 a.m., followed by a joint news conference in the Pentagon Briefing Room, which should be streamed live at https://www.defense.gov
GOT HIM: President Trump has ended the confusion about whether the head of al Qaeda in Yemen was killed in a U.S. drone strike last week, but he didn’t say whether it was a U.S. military or a CIA operation.
“The United States conducted a counterterrorism operation in Yemen that successfully eliminated Qasim al-Rimi,” said a White House statement which identified al-Rimi as “a founder and the leader of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and a deputy to al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri.
“Under Rimi, AQAP committed unconscionable violence against civilians in Yemen and sought to conduct and inspire numerous attacks against the United States and our forces,” the statement said. “The United States, our interests, and our allies are safer as a result of his death. We will continue to protect the American people by tracking down and eliminating terrorists who seek to do us harm.”
300 MORE EVACUEES ARRIVE: The Pentagon has announced that another batch of evacuees from the coronavirus zone are arriving in the U.S. today, to begin their 14-day quarantine at a U.S. military base.
“The initial flights have departed China for the United States with approximately 300 passengers on board,” said the Pentagon in a statement. “One of the aircraft will refuel at Travis Air Force Base and continue on to Omaha, Nebraska via Lackland Air Force Base. The other aircraft is en route to Marine Corps Air Station Miramar via Vancouver, Canada.”
Yesterday approximately 350 Americans arrived on State Department chartered flights.
US PROTESTS KILLING OF IRAQI PROTESTORS: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says he is outraged by the killing and wounding of peaceful demonstrators in the Iraqi city of Najaf Wednesday.
We urge the Government of Iraq to take immediate steps to hold accountable the militias, thugs, and vigilante groups in Najaf and other cities for their attacks against Iraqis exercising their right to peaceful protest,” Pompeo said in a statement released last night. “The Government of Iraq should immediately address the protesters’ legitimate grievances by enacting reforms and tackling corruption.”
HOUSING OF SHAME: Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy met this week with private housing companies to discuss implementation of improvements for Army families who have been living in substandard housing on Army installations.
The companies involved include Balfour Beatty Communities, Clark Realty Capital, Corvias, Hunt Companies, Lendlease, Lincoln Military Housing and Michaels Military Housing.
“While the Army is making positive steps forward, we must continue to improve in order to provide quality housing to our soldiers and their families, including planning for future investments in Army housing,” McCarthy said in a statement released yesterday.
The Army says since the reports of deplorable conditions came to light last year, repairs have kicked into high gear with the hiring of more than 100 additional staff at installation housing offices, the creation of mobile apps as an additional way for residents to submit and track work orders, and the establishment a Housing Environmental Health Response Registry to address housing health or safety concerns.
ETHICAL AND APOLITICAL: With the presidential election season now in full swing, Defense Secretary Mark Esper has reissued ethics guidance to all military and civilian employees of the Defense Department in a Feb. 5 memo.
“Ethical conduct is fundamental to our Department’s ethos and to the success of our National Defense Strategy. Each of us must be unwavering in our personal commitment to exemplary ethics and living by core values grounded in duty and honor,” Esper writes. “As citizens, we exercise our right to vote and participate in government. However, as public servants who have taken an oath to defend these principles, we uphold DoD’s longstanding tradition of remaining apolitical as we carry out our official responsibilities.”
“Maintaining the hard-earned trust and confidence of the American people requires us to avoid any action that could imply endorsement of a political party, political candidate or campaign by any element of the Department.”
The Rundown
Washington Examiner: Is the US military pushing its ‘super troops’ too hard?
Washington Examiner: Star Wars? Not quite, Pentagon says, but Space Force vision includes weapons
Washington Examiner: ‘A threat to our allies’: Russia stalking US satellites, NATO general warns
Military Times: U.S. Troops Have Been Squaring Off With Russian Contractors In Syria Raising Worries Of Wider Conflict
AP: Iraq Considers Deepening Military Ties With Russia
Reuters: Syrian Army Enters Rebel-Held Northwestern Saraqeb Town In Latest Advance: State Media
Task & Purpose: Former Navy Diver Kidnapped in Afghanistan: Report
Yonhap: U.S. Flies Two Surveillance Aircraft On Apparent Mission To Monitor N. Korea
USNI News: Wicker Bill Prioritizes Funding to Reach 355-Ship Navy Fleet
Navy Times: Navy Issues New Rules On Foreign Military Students And Firearms
Military Times: Signs Of White Supremacy, Extremism Up Again In Poll Of Active-Duty Troops
WAVY-TV: USS Gerald R. Ford Completes, Passes Aircraft Compatibility Testing, Navy Says
AFP: France To Spell Out Post-Brexit Nuclear Weapons Strategy
New York Times: After Evacuation On Flights Arranged By Government, Headed For Quarantine
Washington Post: Quarantined on military bases, U.S. evacuees resort to Zumba, stairwell races, accounting classes
Washington Post: Marie Yovanovitch: These are turbulent times. But we will persist and prevail.
Calendar
FRIDAY | FEBRUARY 7
10 a.m. 1775 Massachusetts Ave. N.W. — Brookings Institution discussion on “The Air Force in 2020: A Strategy to Modernize,” with Thomas Ehrhard, vice president for defense strategy at the Long Term Strategy Group; Rebecca Grant, president of IRIS Independent Research; and Michael O’Hanlon, senior fellow at Brookings. https://www.brookings.edu/events
12:15 p.m. 1201 Pennsylvania Ave. N.W. — Hudson Institute a discussion on “NATO and the New Decade: Assessing the Transatlantic Alliance,” with NATO Deputy Secretary General Mircea Geoana; Peter Rough, senior fellow at Hudson; and Ken Weinstein, president and CEO of Hudson. https://www.hudson.org/events
8 p.m. 100 St. Anselm Dr., Manchester, N.H.— Democratic presidential primary debate at St. Anselm College to be aired on ABC.
TUESDAY | FEBRUARY 11
8 a.m. 2168 Rayburn — Amphibious Warship Industrial Base Coalition Congressional forum on the importance of the U.S. Navy’s amphibious warships, with Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger; Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wisc; Rep. Rob Wittman R-Va.; Rep. Gil Cisneros D-Calif.; Rep. Jack Bergman, R-Mich; moderated by retired Rear Adm. Sam Perez. https://amphibiouswarship.org/congressional-forum/
11 a.m. 1740 Massachusetts Ave. N.W. — Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies hosts SAIS Philip Merrill Center for Strategic Studies and Duke University’s Program in American Grand Strategy 2020 conference on civil-military relations, “Reflections on Civil-Military Relations: Crises, Comparisons, & Paradoxes.” https://www.eventbrite.com
WEDNESDAY | FEBRUARY 12
All Day Brussels, Belgium — Defense Secretary Mark Esper attends meeting of the North Atlantic Council at the level of Defense Ministers at the NATO Headquarters, chaired by the NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg https://www.nato.int
THURSDAY | FEBRUARY 13
All Day Brussels, Belgium — Day two of NATO Defense ministerial at NATO Headquarters, with U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. https://www.nato.int
FRIDAY | FEBRUARY 14
All Day, Munich, Germany — Defense Secretary Mark Esper attends the 56th Munich Security Conference will take place at Hotel Bayerischer Hof Friday through Saturday. https://securityconference.org/en/msc-2020/
WEDNESDAY | MARCH 4
9 a.m. 1300 Pennsylvania Ave. N.W. — McAleese Defense Programs Conference. Register at [email protected]
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“My focus is to implement the NDS. Let’s just get moving, I want to get to the point where we have, as I said irreversible momentum where just the whole wave of change sweeps over us and everybody comes along for the ride, and we get to that point where we’re facing the challenges we see in the future.”
Defense Secretary Mark Esper speaking at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies on his plans to shake up the Pentagon.
