Part of Defense
Defense Priorities
Highlights
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A shrinking budget can’t be allowed to kill modernization
Commentary
For decades, the Pentagon, abetted by Congress, has behaved like a parent raiding a child’s college fund to pay monthly bills, rather than tightening its belt. Myopically robb...
By Chris Dougherty
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Dear Pentagon: It’s Not How Big Your Budget Is. It’s How You Use It.
Commentary
Over the past two months, unusually public negotiations between the White House and the U.S. Department of Defense on the 2020 defense budget request have bounced from $733 bi...
By Susanna V. Blume
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What to Expect When You’re Expecting a Defense Budget Masterpiece
Commentary
In December of 2017, before the Department of Defense released its 2019 budget request, then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan tried to manage expectations about it...
By Susanna V. Blume & Chris Dougherty
The 2014 Third Offset Strategy and the 2018 National Defense Strategy focused the Department on maintaining the Joint Force’s military edge over China and Russia. But these strategies come with price tags. Reshaping the joint force to address these threats today and in the future is a difficult and costly undertaking. Doing so will require tough choices about what to prioritize and where to accept risk.
Defense Priorities will link strategy to resources, assessing whether the Department’s spending priorities align with its strategic ambition, and make recommendations for how to resolve areas of divergence. It will identify obstacles to change within DoD’s core processes and make recommendations for how to overcome them.
