Lessons Learned in Defense Budgeting

SecDef Gates says, and I agree, that the non-disclosure agreements that he required participants to sign made the process work better:

“[It] was critically important as we considered dramatic changes in the way we were going to procure things and programmatic changes to specific programs was that we be able to have those deliberations among the senior military and the senior civilians in the department without the newspapers printing, every single day, the results of our deliberations the preceding day,” Gates said last week, speaking at the Naval War College, Newport R.I.

Gates took the unusual step earlier this year of requiring everyone involved in the 2010 budget deliberations sign nondisclosure agreements. The 2010 defense budget had already become politically hot well before deliberations began in earnest when news got out that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had prepared a draft budget request of $584 billion (an 8 percent increase over 2009), putting the incoming Obama administration into the position of having to “cut” defense. The Obama administration’s 2010 defense budget request is $527 billion.

The military budget process has become so politicized and pork laden that it was the only way to get things done.