Robert Peters, Wilson Beaver
Dear Incoming Defense Department Comptroller:
Congratulations on your new position! You are the second most powerful civilian in the Pentagon! Military service chiefs, Combat Support Agencies, Combatant Commands, and Defense contractors will cower before you, seek to understand your every utterance, and work slavishly to adhere to the deadlines you set for them, all while you build the department’s future years defense program (FYDP), which is the strategic budget document that oversees Pentagon spending.
But also, please accept our condolences! You now have the hardest job in the Pentagon: radically reforming the Defense Department’s budget; the Defense industrial base; and, ultimately, America’s ability to project combat power.
This will not be easy, but we have a plan to help you.
The Need for More Procurement Dollars
Over the past several years, the global security order has come under assault from America’s enemies. From the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan in 2021, to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine followed by near-monthly threats of the employment of nuclear weapons by Moscow against the West for its support to Ukraine,REF to Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, to Houthi attacks on global shipping, to Iran’s repeated missile attacks on Israel and its status as a near-nuclear state,REF to North Korea’s expanding nuclear arsenal and threats against the United States and its Japanese and Korean allies, and—most worryingly—to China’s increasing belligerency and unprecedented military buildup, the world’s security environment is the worst it has been since the 1930s.REF
While these developments threaten global stability, U.S. interests, and America’s allies, the primary threat to the United States is posed by China. In addition to having the world’s largest Navy,REF the largest missile force in the world,REF and a huge fleet of fifth-generation fighters that is larger than the American fifth-generation fleet in the Pacific,REF China is the fastest-growing nuclear power on the planet.REF It regularly threatens and exercises its military forces to retake Taiwan—a liberal, » Read More
https://www.heritage.org/defense/report/open-letter-the-next-defense-department-comptroller