An impending train wreck of procurement for the USMC? Read the slides.

This week someone brought to my attention a budgeting briefing from this past July that someone in the Navy Department seems to have inadvertently posted on the Internet. At least, briefings marked like this usually aren’t intended for public consumption:

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Pre-Decisional. This briefing contains Planning, Programming, and Budgeting/Execution System (PPBE) data and is not to be disclosed outside the United States Marine Corps and other governmental agencies directly involved in the resource planning and allocation process.

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But that was then—it’s in the public domain now, and it says so much about the Pentagon these days. The first item of note is found on page 12, where the text under the headline “QDR” starts simply with

• Bullet (Arial 24 font)

What exactly this says, I’m not sure. Either that’s all that the Marines think that they’re getting out of the QDR, or it simply confirms that format >> content. Either way, it’s just so entertaining.

Also entertaining is page 14, which shows just four programs—EFV, MPC, JLTV, and G/ATOR—eating more than the entire projected Marine Corps procurement budget by FY2018. That this made it onto a slide indicates that some general officer or political appointee has figured out that there’s a real problem here. This, in turn, suggests one of two things:

1. The Marines need a whole lot more money. Perhaps they’re unlikely to get it, but someone in the Corps could start making the case that the Marines should be allowed to steal some share of the US military budget from some set of the other services.
2. If not, then the EFV program is in deeper trouble than its seeming reprieve earlier this year would suggest. The Marines have other ways of getting to shore—hovercraft, helicopters, even displacement landing craft—even if these don’t involve charging through the surf in what’s effectively a tank.

Some of the people involved with this might want to consider Sir Earnest Rutherford’s words: “Gentlemen, we have run out of money. It is time to start thinking.”

And could someone please tell me what (page 10) a “Kusky Process” is? The briefing itself is literally the only link that pops up in a Google search.