US military told: find 5-yr savings of $50-$60 bln

WASHINGTON, July 28 (Reuters) - U.S. military services have been told to find savings of between $50 billion and $60 billion over five years in their current programs to fund new initiatives, a senior Pentagon official said on Tuesday.

David Ochmanek, deputy assistant secretary of defense for force transformation and resources, said the Pentagon had identified gaps in its capabilities and had told the services to fill them, while assuming no overall budget growth.

"It's now up to the components to figure out how best to make real those new capabilities and capacities and to find offsets within an assumption of zero real growth," Ochmanek told a group of defense reporters.

"So they're now busily looking for those bill-payers."

The new initiatives have been identified as part of the Pentagon's in-depth look at major programs and strategy known as the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), Ochmanek said.

"The order of magnitude of the enhancements that the QDR has called for... is on the order of 50 to 60 billion dollars (over five years)," he said.

The Obama administration has asked Congress for $663.8 billion for the Pentagon for the 2010 fiscal year that begins Oct. 1, including $130 billion in war funding, mainly for the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Ochmanek said analysts working on the QDR had been told to assume zero growth in the defense budget but this did not necessarily mean there would be no increases. (Reporting by Andrew Gray; Editing by Tim Dobbyn)