WASHINGTON — Army Secretary Mark Esper said Thursday that he plans to cut some Army programs to fund a more lethal Army force that would include more drones, updating air defenses and missiles and increased cybersecurity technology.
Esper, speaking at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said he would create a Futures Command to lead the first Army reorganization effort since 1973 with the goal of cutting a number of the over 800 Army programs to finance modernization.
The Army can become a more effective fighting force by improving manned and unmanned vehicles, updating missiles and improving helicopter and air defenses, he said.
“We can’t continue to ramble along funding 800 programs when we have higher priority needs,” the secretary said. “That’s spreading the peanut butter, as we like to say, and I think the days of spreading peanut butter are over.”
Esper did not say which programs would be shut down but said that he will avoid arbitrary cuts.
He plans to headquarter the Futures Command in an urban area where the Army can more easily recruit a team of engineers and other industry experts who can help predict what the future threat environment will look like.
While he said he is not concerned for the 2018 and 2019 fiscal years, he wanted to start looking ahead to the 2020 and 2021 budgets that could finance new technologies like directed-energy weapons, hypersonics and cybersecurity.
Dan Grazier of the Project on Government Oversight said in a telephone interview that restructuring initiatives like the Futures Command are often a tactic used to cut existing programs to fund larger budgets for unnecessary equipment upgrades.
“I would hope everyone is careful about what they cut and they actually evaluate things not just on their age but on their effectiveness and contribution to the overall mission,” Grazier said.
Introducing new equipment can induce extra complexity, Grazier said.
“We actually spend more time fiddling with our own systems than facing outward, thinking about what we are trying to accomplish and what we are going to do with the enemy,” he said.
But Esper said that new technologies are necessary to advance military success against adversaries on the ground and increasing cybersecurity threats.
“We need to make the leap to the next generation of technologies,” he said. “That’s why we want to move things left in terms of prototyping and production.”
Jacob Cohn of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments agreed with Esper’s logic to cut programs for the benefit of the Futures Command.
“The choices might not be easy, but it’s necessary to fund the kind of transformation that the Army needs to make,” Cohn said.
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