Biden Nominates Two Women To Lead DoD Modernization

WASHINGTON: The White House nominated two longtime Pentagon and thinktank hands to run the Army and the DoD’s Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation office today. The two women — if confirmed — will play critical roles in deciding winners and losers in the Pentagon’s ambitious modernization plans.

Christine Wormuth would become the first woman to serve as Secretary of the Army, and is the first of three civilian service secretaries to be nominated by President Biden.

The other critical vacancy would be filled by Susanna Blume, nominated to head the Pentagon’s Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation (CAPE) office, which she is currently running in an acting capacity.

Like Wormuth, Blume would come to the administration with a long Pentagon pedigree, having served in the Obama administration as deputy chief of staff for programs and plans to the Deputy Defense Secretary, as well as stints in the offices of undersecretary of Defense for policy, and deputy assistant secretary for plans and posture. Much of her work focused on force planning, budgets, and military modernization.

After the Obama administration, Blume was director of the defense program at the Center for a New American Security, where she directed and produced a series of reports about military modernization, innovation, budget issues and management reform.

Both women would enter the Pentagon at a time when the armed forces are trying to push forward their own modernization programs in a time of flat budgets and increased competition from powers like China and Russia. 

Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Adam Smith, said: “the Biden-Harris administration has again confirmed their commitment to building a diverse, inclusive government with another historic nomination. Our armed forces face myriad challenges, and Christine Wormuth’s experience and service will be a boon to the Department of Defense.”

His Senate counterpart, Jack Reed, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, praised the nominees, saying, “they are well-qualified and once we get their official paperwork the committee will hold bipartisan confirmation hearings to carefully review each one. It is imperative that we have highly-skilled, experienced civilians leading the Department of Defense. I look forward to further nominations from the White House.”

The Biden administration has come under some criticism for the slow pace of nominations for top Pentagon positions, but the announcement today, which included the nomination of Gil Cisneros for Under Secretary of Defense, Personnel and Readiness, has spurred hope that there might be some movement on getting Senate-confirmed nominees into place as the 2022 budget battle begins to take shape.

The Army in particular will likely have to make hard choices in the next several years over how it will push forward on major initiatives like the Future Vertical Lift program and integrating new long-range precision fires into the force, while divesting of older, costly programs.

Blume would play a key role in those decisions, as CAPE will no doubt be tasked with studying the benefits and trade-offs involved in each hard call the Army will be faced with.

The next few years will almost certainly prove to be busy ones for CAPE, as each of the services will struggle to balance funding older ships, aircraft, and vehicles with funding new hypersonic weapons, lasers, precision strike and unmanned systems. 

The Air Force will have to weigh funding the F-35 or pumping more money into its sixth generation fighter program; while the Navy is running out of time to fund any new upgrades to its aging cruisers, while pushing tens of billions into its new Columbia-class submarines, Ford aircraft carriers, and inventing new generations of unmanned ships and aircraft.

Blume would be the second woman to lead the office, following Christine Fox who held the job from 2009 to 2013.

Wormuth would come to the Army with years of experience in the Pentagon, having served as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy during the Obama Administration, as well as the senior director for defense policy on the National Security Council, where she worked on the 2012 Defense Strategic Guidance.

She has also worked as a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and is currently director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at the RAND Corporation. She has been a part of the Biden team for months, running the Biden-Harris Defense Agency Review Team since January after Kathleen Hicks was nominated as Deputy Secretary of Defense.