Ryan McCarthy, secretary of the U.S. Army and a 2020 Wash100 Award winner, said the military branch is on its way to a “collision course” if it fails to get a topline growth of 3 to 5 percent in its future budgets, Defense News reported Wednesday.
“Choices will have to be made if we can’t increase the top line in ‘22 and ‘23, so will that mean will we have to flatten end-strength? Do we tier the weapon systems that we bring into the formations,” McCarthy said Wednesday at the McAleese Defense Programs Conference. “These are the choices that we are talking about, we are looking at and we are going to be prepared to make.”
The service branch has initiated another “night court” process for fiscal year 2022 as it seeks to free up funds for modernization priorities in support of the National Defense Strategy. The Army identified about 80 programs it plans to drop or scale back to find more money and reprogram it into those priorities in FY 2021.
The Army is spending $8.6 billion on modernization efforts in FY 2020 and a total of $57 billion as part of a five-year plan.
