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Director Program Analysis & Evaluation Cambone Briefing on Phase II of the Budget Rollout Plan
Thursday, Nov. 21, 2002
(9:00 AM ET)
By Stephen A. Cambone, USD (Policy)

Persistent surveillance. This is the need to be able to constantly update and refresh our information about what's taking place in the area of regard, the battle space that we are interested in, because indeed people do move, circumstances do change, and if you're going to be precise in the application of your forces and bring about the desired effects, you have to be able to persistently surveil the environment in which you're operating. And that, in turn, then supports the ability to dominate the air, sea and ground portions of the fight. And maneuverability on the ground is especially important in being able to avoid obstacles and close with an adversary and defeat them in detail, if that's necessary. Holding at risk, commanding control and the chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear explosive devices remains terribly important. And in the end, what you want to have is the capacity, as I said earlier, to bring the fight to a close rather quickly again, because the longer a conflict continues, the more chances there are for untoward events to occur.

United States Department of Defense
u<>Cambone: Let me set the stage for you. And for some of you, I will end up repeating some things, and I'll try not to take more time on the front end than is necessary.

The services submitted their program objective memoranda, their POMs, on 22 August. We came down shortly after that to talk with you about the process that was going to unfold, and we said sometime toward the end of September we would have gotten through the process of reviewing their submissions and gone back to them, via discussions with the secretary and the other senior management of the department, on recommendations for adjustments or changes. Then, by the end of October, we would have sort of run those through and had a better sense of what kinds of choices and options were available to the secretary; that he, the secretary, then would take those options sometime in the early part of November, which is in fact where we are now, review those and then on the basis of his review be able, after proper consultations with the chairman and others in the department, make his proposals to the president then for inclusion in the budget.

And that's about where we are. That is to say we're at the point where we've compiled a range of recommendations and options. Those are now under review, and I would expect that sometime the early part of next month, he will make his proposals to the president. At that point, I lose -- we lose, the department does, sort of -- the control over the process, and it goes into the OMB process, and we end up with a budget message coming out sometime in the February time frame.

The way this has been done, that is the review, is we have had any number of teams that have looked at a large number of issues as a way of bringing the proposing organization, the Army, Navy, Air Force or Defense agency, into review, a program of interest, and to ask why they would have done it one way as opposed to another way; are there savings to be had, gains to be lost, you know, how do we balance what they had done within their program? And then, at a larger level, then look at how one set of program choices over/against another might be preferred.

As I say, that took place over the course of the entire period of time from August -- and it's still ongoing in a number of cases, by the way. And that has yielded the kinds of recommendations we have here. So the bottom line is that we have had a fairly -- a fairly -- a very open process in which the services and the agencies and OSD staff have interacted quite freely, and I think quite successfully in developing the proposals that were put forward.
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2002 © The United States Department of Defense.

Dan