Pentagon Increasing Budget for Prototyping, Especially for Space and Cyber

The Pentagon official who oversees the defense industrial base told Wall Street investors this morning that the upcoming defense budget will include funding for weapons prototypes. And Elena Broitman, deputy assistant defense secretary for manufacturing and industrial base policy (DASD industrial base to most Pentagon wonks), cautioned that the absence of lawmakers with military experience and the public’s “war weariness” may emperil passage of robust defense budgets.

Broitman, told the annual Cowen aerospace and defense conference here that a recent meeting of the Deputies Management Action Group (the deputy defense secretary’s strategic group that makes the big budget decisions) approved moving money from large programs to several smaller prototyping efforts.

“We are doubling down on prototype programs,” Broitman told the audience of roughly 175 aerospace industry investors. Where did the money come from for this effort? “We need to put money from some big programs to smaller programs or we we’re going to have some holes,” she said after describing the top-level decision to put money into prototypes. She wouldn’t describe the specific winners and losers because of the impending release (March 4) of the defense budget. But she also noted that space and cyber security are “major, major concerns.” It wasn’t entirely clear if she was speaking broadly of the budget at that point or about prototyping.

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