The Pentagon announced a major cost-cutting initiative Friday, which it hopes will slash 100 billion dollars from its tight operating costs over the next five years, a senior US defense official said.
But with the world's most advanced military waging wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Defense Department said there was no intention of reducing force numbers in the US Army, Navy, or Air Force, and that the Pentagon's most expensive acquisition project ever — the F-35 fighter jet — would not be cut.
"Most of the savings are intended to be achieved by shaving overhead and tightening efficiency, with the billions saved there shifted to operational costs and force modernization," Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn told reporters.
"The total over five years will be just over 100 billion dollars" shared across the department, Lynn said.
The military is being told to save seven billion dollars in fiscal year 2012, 11 billion in 2013, 18.9 billion in 2014, 28 billion in 2015, and 37 billion dollars in fiscal year 2016, the Pentagon said.
In February, US President Barack Obama unveiled his defense budget proposal for fiscal year 2011, which includes 549 billion dollars as the base budget plus 159 billion dollars for "overseas contingency operations," mainly the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Lynn said the Pentagon was hoping to cut overhead in order to keep pace with the costs of maintaining military competence, which he said historically rise between two to three percent per year.
Over the next five years, the base budget is planned to increase by about one percent per year, he said.
"This is not about reducing the top line, this is about operating within a constrained top line and trying to get enough resources into that war-fighting in addition to developing that operating agility," Lynn said.
The savings would not come at the expense of troop numbers, he stressed.
"Our assessment is that we need the force structure that we have, and we have increased, particularly the ground forces, to meet the increases of the army end strength," Lynn said.
Pentagon officials meanwhile defended the program to build the F-35 joint strike fighter (JSF), even as its costs this year ballooned, triggering a congressional review.
Costs for the ultra-modern jet were estimated at 50 million dollars a piece when the program began a decade ago, but the latest cost estimate is now 92.4 million per plane, for a total price tag of well over 300 billion dollars.
"We're not changing the numbers that we're procuring — we need those jets," Christine Fox, director of DOD's cost assessment and program evaluation, told reporters.
"But to try to reduce the inefficiencies that we're looking for in the program… that will certainly apply to the JSF."
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