Congress Must Protect Tech From DoD Bureaucracy, And Itself: Experts

UPDATED w/ Mahnken interview CAPITOL HILL: The US military is not ready for war against Russia or China, leading experts told the House Armed Services Committeethis morning. How can Congress help? Champion new technologies that would otherwise drown in the Pentagon bureaucracy, they said, the way it did with the Predator drone and Tomahawk missile in the past.

Admittedly, such long-term investments aren’t the most urgent task for Congress. That would be passing a proper budget instead of stopgap Continuing Resolutions.

“Budgeting through Continuing Resolution has been tremendously corrosive,” Thomas Mahnken, president of the Center for Strategic & Budgetary Assessments (CSBA), told the committee. In particular, because CRs set spending on autopilot at the previous year’s level, with no provision for starting, stopping, or adjusting programs, they essentially freeze any program that’s trying to ramp up. “B-21 (the Air Force’s next generation bomber) is a poster child for how Continuing Resolutions can just corrode a vitally important program.”

Read the full article here.