Earlier this week Dr. John Hillen, President & CEO of Sotera Defense Solutions (Sotera), spoke at the Greater Washington Board of Trade for the Sequestration: Scenario Planning event.
Dr. Hillen highlighted the bad governance sequestration emulates and predicted consequences for the private sector.
While acknowledging that tough choices must be made for reducing government spending, Dr. Hillen noted that sequestration budget cuts will not make a substantial contribution to the a long-term defense budget reduction.
“But the problem with applying Sequestration to national security in the name of affordability is that while the cuts will severely degrade our military capabilities, they will not make a recognizable difference in the long term budget picture.” Dr. Hillen went on to say, “The decline in real military capabilities is aggravated by the fact that many of the personnel accounts (the majority of the DoD budget) are off limits to Sequestration and so the cuts largely need to come from procurement, R&D, operations and maintenance and other accounts that produce real capability – today and for the future. And if we’ve learned anything from history, a peace dividend never delivers peace for long….but it always delivers unpreparedness. Every U.S. peace dividend in the past 100 years has been followed by a moment or period of strategic unpreparedness that has unnecessarily cost American lives.”
Dr. Hillen ended his remarks by calling on the business community to raise awareness among elected officials that the unpredictability of sequestration is not only affecting the ability for industry leaders to plan and grow the U.S. and global economy, but also that the changes are unwieldy for public sector customers. Lastly, Dr. Hillen encouraged business leaders to continue to plan for all scenarios.
Read Dr. Hillen’s complete speech here.
Earlier this year Dr. Hillen shared with WashingtonExec three pieces of advice for his children.
