It's Time for a Fresh Look at Resourcing Defense.

• Date: 01 June 2021
• Author: Carlisle, Hawk
• Published date: 01 June 2021
• Author: Carlisle, Hawk

"What are DoD's priorities?"

This is a question all National Defense Industrial Association members ask, and one that every eight weeks Rachel McCaffrey, NDIA's vice president for membership and chapters, and Jon Etherton, NDIA's senior fellow emeritus for acquisition policy, try to address during an NDIA members-only webinar.

McCaffrey and Etherton hold this bimonthly forum to offer our members an overview of the Defense Department's planning, programming, budgeting and execution processes, also known as PPBE. The goal is to help them understand how these four processes drive capability development and sustainment and how resourcing, by default, defines DoD's priorities.

That said, the issue remains: Decoding the department's strategic priorities from its resourcing decisions is a challenge in the best of times.

That is why, in line with NDIA's objective to educate and promote budget stability, McCaffrey, Etherton and members of the Strategy and Policy team have begun work on a report to describe these resourcing processes as they stand today, with an eye for identifying stakeholders as well as the incentives and disincentives that drive resourcing decisions.

NDIA's support of budget stability rests on our belief that Defense Department planners, programmers and...