Pentagon Needs To Budget For Sustainment Of Iraq/Afghanistan War Systems

War is the real mother of invention. The Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts are notable for, among many things, promoting the development and deployment of a wide range of innovative military weapons systems, products and processes. Some of these are unique to the circumstances of our two current conflicts while others are likely to be relevant in any future engagement and even in the homeland. Best know of these is the MRAP and M-ATV armored vehicles, some 25,000 of which have been built. But there are a host of others with broader and more enduring application such as the CREW IED jammer, the Common Remotely Operated Weapons Station, the XM25 programmable grenade launcher, the aerostat-based Persistent Threat Detection System, and the Scan Eagle small unmanned aerial system.

The problem is that what has been invented in war will need to be sustained in peace. Many of the new and innovative systems were designed and procured with overseas contingency operations (OCO) funds. The OCO account has averaged over $150 billion a year for the past seven or eight years. Almost none of them are programs of record, meaning they have not been through the Pentagon’s review and budgeting process and are not line items in the Future Years Defense Program. The use of OCO funds allowed the Pentagon to bypass the lengthy and cumbersome acquisition system that often seeks perfection in the development of capabilities at the price of timeliness and relevance.

However, the Pentagon is required to have both long-term funding and sustainment plans for programs of record which define how they will be paid for, maintained and modernized over time. This is not the case for those procured with OCO funds. There are tens of thousands of platforms, radios, sensors, aircraft, weapons and unmanned air and land vehicles that are now part of the military’s inventory, employed in Iraq and Afghanistan today and worth tens of billions of dollars for which the Pentagon has no plan covering their postwar management and sustainment. What will happen to all those MRAPs built for the conditions of Southwest Asia?

There is a belief in Washington that the military would like nothing better than to park them in a desert somewhere and forget about them. What about the IED detectors and jammers if we no longer face such a threat? Then there is the Scan Eagle UAV that has flown more than half a million hours protecting Marines in the field. This is a unique capability that was actually not even bought by the military. Rather, the company that makes Scan Eagle, Insitu, provided flying hours to the military on a services contract, another unique development permitted only by the exigencies of war and the availability of OCO funding.

The defense department needs to develop a comprehensive plan to manage and sustain successful capabilities that the military undoubtedly will need in the future. In essence, the Pentagon needs to create programs of record for these innovative capabilities that would provide future funding and require development of a management plan. Obviously, the scale of such programs would be less than what was sustained by OCO funding during the wars. But as programs of record they would compete for money in the Pentagon’s base budget. DoD needs to take the initiative now to ensure that capabilities such as CREW, XM25 and Scan Eagle are not permitted to just disappear from the military, only to be reinvented when we have to fight the next war.