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From Nextgov.com: Pentagon budget relies heavily on anticipated savings
Analyst says 2012 Defense spending plan is the beginning of an 'age of austerity' for the department.
When Robert Hale was a defense budget analyst at a think tank in 2002, he urged the Defense Department not to count on savings from efficiency efforts to pay for new weapons. Too often, he warned, the savings never materialized.
But Hale seems to have abandoned that counsel. Now the chief budget officer at the Pentagon facing grim fiscal circumstances, he's a key architect of the department's 2012 budget, which projects $154 billion in savings from efficiency efforts and banks on using $90 billion of that money to buy and upgrade weapons.