The Modern Defense Budgeting System

Imagine it’s 2030. In the aftermath of a failed defense of Taiwan, the U.S. defense establishment scrambled to implement much needed, but delayed, reforms to develop a Joint Force with the ability to defeat potential aggression by a peer adversary and restore deterrence credibility. Faced with the stark reality that DoD’s 64-year-old Planning Programming Budgeting, and Execution (PPBE) system is fundamentally broken, a series of reforms proposed years earlier by the PPBE Commission were rapidly implemented by DoD and the Congressional Authorization and Appropriation committees. This paper imagines what the MDBS—a mission and concept-driven system with adaptive budgeting processes, digitally enabled and culturally aligned to the 21st century goals for the U.S. military—would look like in execution with these recommendations (and likely others) fully implemented.