A Renewed Plea for Budget Stability.

• Author: Hallman, Wesley
• Position: NDIA Perspective

* As we go to print, the federal government is still without a budget for 2018, spending a third of the fiscal year under multiple continuing resolutions.

Like the previous eight, we've entered this fiscal year with a stopgap, putting the federal government and the Defense Department on autopilot executing funding as if it were fiscal year 2017 with little regard for changes and priorities in the recently signed National Defense Authorization Act for 2018.

Worryingly, an increasing number of pundits and defense insiders speak seriously about the resolutions extending through all of fiscal year 2018--an outcome placing strains on the warfighter, hindering recapitalization and modernization of the force and damaging the health of the defense industrial base.

The last defense appropriations bill passed and signed by the president on time was for 2009, leaving the services to endure nine consecutive years of kicking off the fiscal year with ambiguity, uncertainty and an inability to create momentum for new programs or enhance force readiness for contingencies.

That's more than 1,100 days--over three years--with significant uncertainty about the resources available to provide for the common defense. These delays and uncertainties have also led to inefficient spending, wasting billions that could have gone to modernization, recapitalization and warfighter readiness.

The Navy alone figures it has lost $4 billion in such inefficiencies since 2011. Now, with no firm budget for 2018, the department's detailed budget submission for 2019 may be delayed. Hopes are dimming for an on-time submission of the president's budget, further compressing the timeline Congress has to complete critical legislation.

Both the Obama and Trump administrations have highlighted the harm budget instability has caused to force readiness. The service chiefs and secretaries have continually pressed for stable budgets, even at lower levels, to allow the services to effectively conduct long-term planning and stem readiness declines. The defense committees in Congress have held hearings to spotlight readiness challenges and used recent aircraft and ship accidents to emphasize the dire life-and-death nature of the problem.

Lack of stability and certainty have rightly been characterized as a military readiness crisis akin to the "hollow force" years of the 1970s. The Reagan administration and Congress solved that crisis with the 1980s defense buildup. They relied on a robust...