A handful of lawmakers are pushing back against the Pentagon’s plans to realign the long-standing Office of Net Assessment under the undersecretary of defense for policy, proposing a bill to keep the office right where it is as independent and reporting directly to the defense secretary.
“The purpose of this bill is to leave it where it has been for 40 years,” Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said Friday about ONA. “I believe it is just essential to have an independent group of thinkers in the Pentagon that can look at the world the way it is and not have to follow the policy dictates of political appointees for the White House. I think it’s invaluable. This office has proven to be invaluable over its history, and to subordinate it to political appointees I think would be a real tragedy for the country regardless of the administration and regardless of the parties who occupy the White House. We just don’t need to mess this up.”
Thornberry said that lawmakers had been hearing rumors for a while that ONA could either be abolished altogether or moved around in the Pentagon’s organizational chart. Many lawmakers and former defense secretaries, among others, wrote to DoD to express their support for the office, but in December Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced a slew of changes to reduce overhead, one of them being to move the forward looking internal think tank under the purview of the undersecretary of defense for policy. Hagel said the move would allow ONA to better influence strategy across the entire Pentagon, Defense Daily reported on Dec. 5.
“Moving the office from one place to another has nothing to do with budgets,” Thornberry. “My fear is that what it has to do with is they don’t want people who think differently, and in of all places that we need that it is in the Department of Defense.”
Three senators – Mark Warner (D-Va.), Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and John Cornyn (R-Texas) – are pushing the same bill in the Senate and expressed similar sentiments in a Jan. 9 statement.
A Warner spokeswoman added Friday that “the Warner-Cornyn-Kaine bill is a bipartisan solution that mandates the Pentagon preserve the independence of the Office of Net Assessment and its ability to talk directly to the secretary, especially to insert a counter-view into the debate. The legislation pushes back on a Pentagon move to strip the office of its independent voice and place it under the supervision of the undersecretary for policy. We are spending a tremendous amount of money on the Pentagon and sending troops into harm’s way, so it’s important to have an office that is ‘red teaming,’ or proposing the alternate view from the overall Pentagon strategy.”
Thornberry said the issue was important enough for the military that he’d seek whatever opportunity he could to ensure the language is passed into law, be it as a standalone bill as it is currently filed or as part of the 2015 National Defense Authorization Act.
“It looks like kind of a boring, how does the organizational chart look kind of issue, but I really believe that the importance of independent research and thinking is so important that I’ll pursue it and look for any vehicle that can ensure this office is independent,” he said.
The three-page bill essentially sets up a congressionally mandated Office of Net Assessment with its own budget and a director who is a Senior Executive Service member appointed directly by the defense secretary. It adds that “the head of the Office of Net Assessment may communicate views on matters within the responsibility of the head directly to the secretary without obtaining the approval or concurrence of any other official within the Department of Defense.”