Congress has made cutting Pentagon bureaucracy a goal of its attempts to reform the department, but experts on Nov. 17 told the Senate Armed Services Committee that it should consider more aggressive action.
Some of those suggestions—including another round of Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC), eliminating certain Defense Department positions and legislating an end strength on overhead personnel—are unlikely to be well received by all in the Pentagon and Capitol Hill, but are ultimately necessary to spur a change in the management and culture of the department, they said.
Defense Department employees have focused on national security at the expense of economy, efficiency, effectiveness and accountability, said former Pentagon Comptroller David Walker.
“They have thousands of non integrated legacy information systems that do not communicate with each other,” he said. “They do not have adequate internal controls …and they don’t have an adequate number of people within the Department of Defense that have the requisite knowledge and experience to know what needs to be done.”
Even though the Pentagon is spending more than it did during the peak of the Reagan buildup, the size of the fighting force is about half what it was during that period, said Arnold Punaro, a retired major general in the Marine Corps and a member of the Defense Business Board. Part of the problem is the growth of Defense Department overhead and infrastructure, which has increased from 5 percent to 20 percent of the overall defense budget. The Pentagon spends about $240 billion—about 40 percent of the department’s annual budget—just on overhead and infrastructure, he said.
The Pentagon should be directed to establish a baseline of headquarters organizations and activities, including a headcount of overhead personnel and the cost of employing them, he said. Then Congress should legislate end strengths for these positions, thus preventing department bureaucracy from being able to expand without approval from lawmakers.
“The department won’t like this. Maybe members of the committee won’t like this,” he said. “We don’t like to try and have to micromanage in this area, but to get control of it, I think we have to do it.”
Slashing funding will not do enough to make meaningful reductions to the Pentagon’s headcount, Punaro added. When former Defense Secretary Robert Gates eliminated the Joint Forces Command in 2011, the 2,000 military employees serving were added to the Joint Staff, while civilians were given jobs other places in the Defense Department enterprise. “The only thing we got rid of was the contractors,” he said.
Punaro also recommended reducing the number of undersecretaries, principal deputies, deputy assistants and deputy undersecretaries. The department should eliminate the position of undersecretary of management and information and instead create an assistant secretary for command, control, communications, computers and cyber, he said.
Walker also questioned the effectiveness of the undersecretary for management and information. He suggested creating a new position at the deputy secretary level who would focus on internal Defense Department management issues. The person named to the position should have both public and private sector experience and a track record of transforming agencies, he said.
Congress should start a new BRAC round to do away with excess infrastructure, said Richard Spencer, the former vice chairman of the Defense Business Board. “The DoD mission is to protect the citizens of the United States, not provide local employment.”
The role of maintenance depots should also be re-examined, he said. “Let those organizations having expertise in the systems provide the needed maintenance. The mission of the DoD is security, not repair.”
In order to entice ambitious, highly qualified professionals to the Pentagon, potential employees have to know that they will be able to make meaningful reforms, Punaro said. A more speedy vetting process for top officials would also be helpful.
“There are too many disincentives now,” he said.
In this year’s budget cycle, Congress has tried to chip away at Pentagon overhead through mandated reductions to headquarters staff. The 2016 defense authorization bill conference report directs the Pentagon to cut $10 billion in headquarters, administrative and support activities between fiscal year 2015 and 2019, as well as make a 25 percent reduction to headquarters activities.