Pentagon’s 6-Year Spending Planning Giving Combat Commanders More Clout?

Inside Defense notes that Adm. Edmund Giambastiani, Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is distilling a shortlist of new, high-priority weapon system requirements along with the service Vice Chiefs. In a departure from usual approaches, the new batch of Joint Requirements Oversight Council (JROC) have been culled from shortfalls in capabilities articulated by combatant commanders, rather than being identified by service representatives in the Pentagon. This new process could result in combatant commanders having significantly more influence over the shape of the US Defense Department’s new six-year spending plan.

“DOD Making List of New, Key Weapons” discusses how this system evolved from Giambastiani’s frustrating experiences with the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System as a combatant commander, and explains some of the changes and their impacts. As Admiral Giambastiani put it:

“I spent three years trying to blast my way through the system as a combatant commander… I felt the process was much too bureaucratic; it was too labor intensive. And it didn’t discriminate in a way that made sense between something that, say, was worth $100,000 and something that was worth $100 million. It took the same amount of effort to get something through either one of those.”