Army facing budgetary triple whammy'.

The Army is preparing to fight high-end adversaries, but budget cuts and other investment decisions have put it in a unique modernization hole, a defense analyst said in a recent report.

During the acquisition drawdown between fiscal years 2008 and 2015, total obligation authority for Army modernization fell 74 percent in real terms, from $90 billion to $24 billion. Meanwhile, procurement dropped 78 percent and research, development, test and evaluation funding declined 52 percent, according to Rhys McCormick, a researcher with the defense-industrial initiatives group at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"This... modernization drawdown is a triple whammy for the Army," he said in the report, "The Army Modernization Challenge: A Historical Perspective," released in March.

Compared with the post-Vietnam and post-Cold War drawdowns, the Army's modernization funding authority has taken a larger percentage cut this time around, The decline in RDT&E money is also steeper. Faced with smaller budgets, the service has elected to prioritize funding for readiness and force structure at the expense of modernization, McCormick said.

The triple-headed problem is compounded by the "lost decade" in Army acquisition in the 2000s, when a number of major procurement programs were canceled, including Future Combat Systems, he said.

"While the Army did field new platforms such as the [mine-resistant ambush protected vehicle], Stryker and Gray Eagle, it did not complete the large-scale procurement of new weapon systems as in previous drawdowns," he said...